Posted: 06.10.2010

When John Stier watches World Cup soccer or any other match,  
he generally keeps one eye on the game and the other on the grass.  
It's what you'd expect from a lifelong fan who also leads one of the  
nation's top turfgrass research programs.

But in 1993, in the biggest game of his life, he didn't care about the  
score. What mattered was the reaction of officials from the Fédération  
Internationale de Football Association, the governing body of world  
soccer. They had come to Detroit's Pontiac Silverdome to inspect the  
world's first portable soccer field, which Stier and a colleague at  
Michigan State University had spent two years developing.

The stakes were high. If the grass did well, Detroit would win its bid  
to be a host city for the 1994 World Cup, the biggest event in the  
world's most popular sport. If not, the Motor City could kiss the  
World Cup goodbye.

"We joked to ourselves that if the field failed, we'd have to go  
overseas and hide," recalls Stier, now a University of Wisconsin- 
Madison professor of horticulture.

They had faced two big obstacles. One was learning how to grow grass  
indoors under low light. The other was making the field portable, to  
accommodate other events scheduled between the soccer matches.

The latter part raised eyebrows on the FIFA team. They arrived at the  
Silverdome expecting to see the field, but instead saw the stage for a  
Paul McCartney concert. The "field" was sitting outside: 1,900  
hexagonal aluminum trays, each containing about 50 square feet of grass.

"They were shocked," Stier recalls. "But we moved the field into the  
stadium on flatbed trucks, and it worked great." That summer the field  
stood up to a grueling match between England and Germany for the 1993  
U.S. Cup, as well as to play by the U.S. women's soccer team and  
others. The next year, the U.S. played Switzerland there in the first  
indoor game in World Cup history. Three more World Cup games followed.

The field's moments of glory were fleeting. At the end of the summer,  
it was dismantled. The metal was sold for scrap, while the grass was  
used to sod a soccer field in the Detroit area. But its legacy lives  
on. Today, a number of arenas around the world use portable fields.  
Some employ the modular technology that Stier helped design. Others  
move in one piece - like the Arizona Cardinals football field, which  
rolls on tracks.

The Silverdome field also helped propel Stier into a career in  
turfgrass research and education. He frequently fields questions from  
athletic field managers from around the world, and usually the answers  
are close at hand. In 1993, he recalls, that wasn't the case.

"Nothing about that project was obvious," he says. "We poured blood,  
sweat and tears into that project for two years. We were flying by the  
seat of our pants."

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