The Silverdome

The Pontiac Silverdome did not look in that bad of shape yesterday for the girls' indoor practice. When the lights turned on at dusk  there was no audible crackling of frayed wiring. Perhaps it can be booked in advance for the spring. Last year's "record-setting" rainfall is probably the new norm and one should adjust to it.

People adjust to new norms rather quickly. Only in Detroit could the once largest NFL stadium  be taken over by a single soccer club  because of a rain day on a Monday afternoon -- and no one really thought twice about it. Down the south ramp we all went to the field as if the U12 girls owned the place. We were like Billy Sims and his posse -- although I don't think #20 had a posse. No security, no nothing.

The stadium was built in the mid-1970s by Pontiac native and football star Don Davidson for some 55 million. It sold in 2010 for 500,000.

It thus should be the icon for the collapse of Detroit that began in the mid-sixties. But because the giant stadium sits in the "suburbs" it has not taken on this iconic status in the increasingly popular, even global, game of look at the "ruins"  in Detroit (click on link http://www.detroityes.com/industry/11piq3.htm -- even Detroit "ruins" are, hyper-perversely, in ruins as many are criticizing the strange fetish of looking over and over again at such desolation).

Those  that charged that the Fords and Lions were abandoning the city in the 70s with the building of the Pontiac Silverdome  must take some satisfaction that "Detroit" -- here a metaphor for architectural ruin -- has caught up with the Silverdome.The name already sounds, in the context of contemporary corporate stadiums, goofy, sci-fi seventies, something made up, like Mad Max's Thunderdome.

I am reminded of my old high school haunts: East Detroit. East Detroit is an east side inner ring suburb bordering Detroit's famous 8 mile. A tiny group of residents worked for years to change the name to Eastpointe so that the area could be associated with the snazzier Grosse Pointes, rather than the crumbling east side of Detroit, a saga itself chronicled so ably in Paul Clemens' South of Eight Mile: a Memoir. Based on this book, Clemens, a Wayne Stater, won a Guggenheim. By the time the political name change took place and East Detroit  became Eastpointe the suburb was further away, culturally and economically, from Grosse Pointe than ever.

Now all that seems moot as Grosse Pointe itself is pretty far away from "Grosse Pointe."

The point(e)? Detroit happens and has happened to the Silverdome. The American flag left hanging from the rafters begs anti-American, Euro-type parody: Is that some strange sense of patriotism or does nobody have the money and skill to get it down?

At the parent end of the field yesterday evening, in what was once the "south" endzone, the U10 or U11 boys teams spent most of the practice working on taking headers from corner kicks in front of the net. Whenever a ball, fired by a coach, hit the ground, the boys did push-ups or sit-ups. A "successful" round often concluded with a young man rubbing his head or crying softly. Brave little dudes. If I had the 70s boombox that used to sit on my dresser and made it with me all the way to graduate school I would have played "Another one bites the dust." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy_97CcJ28E