Best of the rest

We asked some additional writers to weigh in with their favorite venues:

Harvard Stadium
Boy and man, undergrad and ancient grad, I've been attending games at Harvard Stadium since 1959. In typically Harvardian fashion (Class of '73), let me be overweeningly prideful about the place: It is no less than hallowed ground. Foremost, it is, like so much connected with the school, the first -- the nation's oldest stadium, built in 1903. It is also important. In 1906, when football was in danger of being abolished because of its fatal violence, Yale's Walter Camp proposed widening the field to open up play. But the stands at Stadium were immovable, so the forward pass was introduced instead. (So, you can blame Harvard Stadium for Terry Bradshaw.)
More than that, though, in its current incarnation -- a modest 30,898 seats, filled (if then) only biennially for The Game with Yale -- Harvard Stadium is football on a perfect scale. With the stands snug to the field, every seat is a good one --right on top of the play. On a clear October day, with the sun glinting off Harvard Square across the nearby Charles River, the setting makes the decline of Ivy League football inconsequential. If the game isn't up to your standards, you can always close your eyes and imagine legendary coach Percy Haughton stalking the sideline. Open them, and he might even be there, still treading football's most sacred turf. -- Dick Friedman

Rose Garden, Portland, Ore.
Probably because the Trail Blazers teams that played inside were -- at least until lately -- so sensationally unlikable, the Rose Garden has never gotten its full due. The joint is now more than a decade old, middle aged in the dog years of sports venues, and a lot of the trappings that seemed cool at first -- huge locker rooms festooned with flat-screen televisions!, a micropub on the premises! -- are now almost passé. Still, the Rose Garden is what all arenas should aspire to be: It's spacious but retains charm. The sightlines are great. It's close to downtown, accessible by public transportation. It's filled with quirks, including an apartment above the court. At a time when sibling arenas have sold their names to airlines and banks and brokerage firms, and in the case of the Utah Jazz, a nuclear waste disposal outfit, The Rose Garden has retained its nominal dignity. Perhaps above all, the arena was financed by the team's wealthy owner and not by extorted taxpayers.
Sure, management made a few blunders along the way. After afflicting the local citizenry with the "Jail Blazers," and falling on hard economic times, ownership tried to put the Rose Garden in bankruptcy. But that got settled. And now that Portland's only pro team is an endearing (and winning) outfit again, the Rose Garden is selling out, feeling like the closest thing the NBA has to Lambeau Field. By next season, the Rose Garden might yield to economic temptation and become known as Soldmysoul.com Arena, or some such. Of course by then, it will also be the only place in the Pacific Northwest to watch an NBA game. -- Jon Wertheim

Roman Arena in Arles, Provence, south of France
You want old school? The Roman Arena in Arles was completed in about 1 B.C. It hosted gladiator battles, real ones, to the death, and without Hulk Hogan. In later times, the arena held more than 100 houses and a couple of churches within its perimeter -- an inner city of sorts. You think a LeRoy Nieman portrait means you've arrived? A scene at the Arles arena was painted by Van Gogh
These days, it's the site of some of the most fanciful bloodless bullfighting you'll see. You sit among thousands of spectators on the ancient stone benches in the terraced amphitheater as the evening sun gelds the arena's upper archways. Before you, some mildly courageous, infinitely foolhardy and, yes, well-trained young men try to pluck a ribbon from between an angry bull's horns. The event unfolds like a dance, the tension deepening (who'll get the ribbon? who'll get snared by a horn?) as the men and the mighty bull begin to tire. The crowd shouts a lot in French. Now and then something truly wild happens such as the bull jumping over the fence that surrounds the performance space and running through the crowd. People scatter, people yelp, people howl in frenzied laughter. An impromptu running of the bulls.

I was there in the early 1990s and the same recalcitrant bull kept getting rounded back into the center, then jumping into the crowd again and again. How thrilled we all were, how genuinely surprised. In the end the men gave up. The bull won. We were delighted and the Arles arena -- I can still smell the stony dust underfoot and the trace of sweat on the leathery old man beside me -- had won a place in my pantheon. -- Kostya Kennedy

Chicago Stadium
It is my all-time favorite venue and not just because two friezes from the old building, demolished in 1995, now adorn part of the gym at my alma mater, St. Ignatius, a couple miles away.

No, the reason I loved the old Chicago Stadium was because it had a history and feel like no other arena. Built in 1929 for the then princely sum of $9.5 million, it was at the time the largest indoor arena in the world. It would go on to host Democratic and Republican conventions, the NBA Finals, The Stanley Cup, NBA and NHL All-Star Games, even Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam.

But what really set the stadium apart was its atmosphere; the boxy design, with three tiers that went straight up to a wooden roof, and put fans right over the action. There were the blood red seats with black railings that matched the colors of the Bulls and Blackhawks.

And there was "Remember the Roar." That was the fitting motto the Bulls and Blackhawks used in '94, the final year of the Stadium. No sports arena ever rocked like the Madhouse on Madison. Former Blazers star Maurice Lucas told me recently that during a Bulls-Blazers playoff game in '77, it was so loud he literally could not hear the ball bouncing on the floor. I believe him. I was in the SRO crowd of 18,000 that night, an 11-year-old kid dangling my legs over a railing in the second balcony, gazing in wonder through the miasma of cigar smoke at the magical figures below. Remember the roar? How can we forget when our ears are still ringing? --Marty Burns

U.S. Cellular Field, Chicago
Like deep-dish pizza and imitation pilsner, U.S. Cellular Field is an acquired taste. An upper-deck ticket not only buys entry into the Midwestern version of gastronomic paradise -- with most finding nirvana in a single bite of funnel cake -- but panoramic views of one of the country's most breathtaking urban vistas. Thanks to 2003 renovations that took the edge off sightlines so steep that watching pitchers often felt like staring into the Grand Canyon, tracking the action on the field no longer leaves you feeling as if a stiff wind might send you tumbling onto the backstop netting. What the place lacks in sunburned lushes and watering holes, it more than makes up for in quality baseball (kiss the ring, Cub fans) and a colorful manager, Ozzie Guillen, who's always game for going 12 rounds with the umps. If you're the kind of fan who goes to the ballpark as much for shelled peanuts as shelled pitchers (the visitors, of course), then I'll see you at The Cell. If your not, Yuppie Disneyland is four more miles up the highway in Wrigleyville. -- Andrew Lawrence

Cameron Indoor Stadium
Ask Georgia Tech's Luke Schenscher about the Ronald McDonald references, or North Carolina coach Roy Williams about his Wizard of Oz greeting. And definitely ask former Tar Heel Sean May about the Big Mac boxes dangling from fishing poles. The hostility of the Cameron Crazies make Duke's gyms perhaps the toughest place to play. No other college basketball venue is as feared by its opponents. With about 9,300 seats and a sell-out streak of 274 games, dating back to Nov. 16, 1990, Cameron remains one of the smallest college arenas in the nation, resulting in a mass of tent parties appearing prior to game days. While a student journalist at rival North Carolina, I came to appreciate the sweat and drool of rabid Crazies dripping all over me while I worked.