Yost's Fieldhouse Built to Last
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January 16, 2009
Last week the University of Michigan cancelled a hockey game against Miami of Ohio. It wasn't because the ice was mushy, Miami's bus was stuck, or Bernie Madoff made off with the refs' money.
No, the problem was, a miniature glacier of ice slid down the roof at Yost Fieldhouse, hit the parapet, and bumped a few bricks just a little off line. At first the engineers were afraid this might be the beginning of the end for the old building - but they soon discovered the old barn's bones were as healthy as the day the Fieldhouse was born in 1923.
I admit, I breathed a sigh of relief. Having grown up playing hockey at Yost, some of my best memories are inside those walls. Of course, given my checkered “career,” some of my worst memories are there too. But thanks to years of therapy and light medication, I'm doing much better.
I should have known better than to worry. ou see, Fielding Yost built that Fieldhouse, and he built to last.
When Yost became Michigan's athletic director in 1921, Michigan's athletic complex wasn't a complex at all, just a football field with rickety bleachers, and a two-bit ball park. The Wolverines didn't have much, and they didn't know they needed more until Yost convinced them. The trick was raising the money. Yost struck upon a novel solution: Every dollar they got at the gates, they kept - and that's how Yost created the first financially independent athletic department.
Cash in hand, Yost went to work building what he called a Field House - the first of its kind on any college campus. Yost claimed he designed it for basketball, track and wrestling, but he really built it so his football team could practice indoors. That's why the ceiling is so absurdly high: not to accommodate shot puts or basketballs, but footballs kicked by punters. Yost was such a perfectionist, he drove down to the Ohio factory that made the bricks to inspect them himself.
But he did made one mistake. The Fieldhouse was supposed to cost a quarter million dollars - but it cost twice that. Instead of calling it a failure, Yost turned it into a reason to build The Big House, arguing that the revenues would pay for the Fieldhouse, and then some.
But when they started digging the hole for the stadium, natural springs kept spouting up, driving the workers crazy. Yost said, "Don't let that bother you -- we can use that water for our golf course.” The workers looked at each other and shook their heads -- there was no golf course -- so Yost had one built by the same architect who made Augusta National, and Pebble Beach.
When critics argued Yost was catering to the elite, he responded by building a new ballpark, tennis courts, and the nation's biggest intramural building, which is still used today by hundreds of students who've never heard of him.
As for the Fieldhouse, it was made for everything but hockey - yet today sportswriters say it's one of the rinks around. The manager told me the only problems they ever have are in the remodeled sections, never the original.
In today's era of taxpayer-funded disposable stadiums, where nothing is built to last, I can't help but be impressed, even moved, that Fielding Yost, almost a century ago, gave us buildings he knew would outlive him, his peers, and us too -- including a Fieldhouse built to withstand the ice, both inside and out.
When the Fieldhouse was finished in 1923, one reporter called it, “the finest plant of its kind in the world."
It still is.
Copyright © 2009, Michigan Radio
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