100 Things Royals Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Matt Fulks

Author:Matt Fulks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2016-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

48. The Truman Sports Complex

There’s an artist’s rendering hanging in a back room of Chappell’s restaurant that shows a baseball stadium and a football stadium with a funny-looking half-moon structure between the two buildings. The caption reveals architect Charles Deaton’s idea for a rolling roof between what would become the Truman Sports Complex—Royals Stadium and Arrowhead.

Although the rolling roof never came to fruition, even the whole idea of two stadiums seemed preposterous. Throughout the 1960s in cities with Major League Baseball and NFL teams, multi-purpose or cookie-cutter stadiums were the rage. Stadiums were sought that could hold both baseball and football, and they were sprouting all over the country: New York (Shea Stadium), Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis to name a few.

In the late 1960s, the Chiefs and A’s were looking for funding for new stadiums. A’s owner Charlie Finley had threatened for years to leave if he didn’t get one. After going to the first Super Bowl, the Chiefs needed one, too. Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and team president Jack Steadman didn’t want a cookie-cutter stadium, fearing that Finley might move the A’s and they’d be stuck with a stadium that didn’t fit their needs. After much politicking Jackson County voters approved $102 million in general bonds, $43 million of which would be used for the Jackson County Sports Complex.

With the new Sports Complex being built, many of Kansas City’s signature buildings started sprouting. Kansas City International Airport was dedicated in 1972. Crown Center opened in 1973 as did Worlds of Fun. Construction of Kemper Arena began in 1973 for the NBA’s Kings and NHL’s Scouts, and Bartle Hall opened in 1976. “All of that boom in Kansas City came from the sports complex,” Steadman said. “From the point the funding was approved, everything started going crazy around here…all of a sudden, everything started moving in Kansas City in a big way.”

That wasn’t the only moving. After the bond issue passed in June 1967, Finley moved the A’s west. That opened the door for the Royals, of course, but also for the club to build its stadium the way it saw fit. With general manager Cedric Tallis’ experience helping to oversee the construction of Anaheim Stadium, which was a cousin of Dodger Stadium, Royals Stadium took bits and pieces of the design from each of those stadiums.

Owner Ewing Kauffman, who put in approximately $7 million initially, had two special additions to the stadium. A 12-story state-of-the-art crown scoreboard and a 322-foot-wide water spectacular, a beautiful feature for which the stadium is still known. The water idea was Muriel Kauffman’s. It featured 150 combinations of spray and color effects. Ewing Kauffman, who wasn’t a big fan of baseball when he bought the team, felt the fountains would be an added reason for people to go to games. “When the crowd yells, the water shoots up,” he said. “The louder they yell, the higher it will go. If they yell loud enough, five jet streams of water will go seven stories high.

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