Jack Kidwell watches his six-man crew lay the strips of sod that will cover the field for M&T Bank Stadium's first soccer game next week with the peaceful air of a farmer who knows his land has been well-tilled.
"I've been doing this for 50 years," says Kidwell, 76, a native of tiny Boydton, Va., in a drawl as gentle as a Tidewater breeze. "You learn a few things in that time. One of them is it takes time to do this and do it right."
Kidwell is founder, president and co-owner of Duraturf Service Corp., the Richmond-based sod company that is laying 457 strips of sod, each 1 1/2 inches thick and weighing 2,400 pounds, atop the artificial Sportexe field on which the Ravens play. The process will take three days.
AC Milan and Chelsea will play there Friday as part of the World Football Challenge, a six-city barnstorming tour of the United States. They would commit only if they could play on a natural-grass field.
The Ravens are paying $100,000 to $200,000 for the temporary makeover, Kidwell says. (The soccer clubs will reimburse them.) The game, a sellout, is expected to be a $20 million boon to the region's economy.
Kidwell's crew started at 7 a.m. Friday, when supervisor Donald Patillo rumbled out in a John Deere 4x4 forklift, a roll of turf on its extended arms.
Kidwell didn't have to tell them much. A former Marine who fought in the Korean War, he farmed for a time, then became the first Virginian to enter the sod business back in the 1950s.
"In the early days, we did everything - home lawns, commercial work, government buildings," he says.
He grew sod on his 1,000-acre farm, harvested it, hauled it to the sites and laid it. Along the way, he saw a lot of history.
Shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Kidwell supplied the sod around the memorial that marks the grave. He pulled up the sod and replaced it once a week for 15 years.
"There was a lot of foot traffic through there, with all the tourists," he says. "Eventually, it just got to be too expensive. [Arlington Cemetery] paved it over."
He has sodded most of the monument sites in Washington. Duraturf sodded the National Mall after a farmers rally in the 1980s, when protesters ran roughshod over the grass with their tractors.
"That was 25 acres of mess," he says. "And man, were those farmers mad at me. They were angry at the government, and they said, 'How can you help those people out like that?' But that was a lot of sod."
