Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Michigan Stadium, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and whatever Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum is called these days are among the most venerable venues in sports. Making these and other sports facilities venerable are three traits: advanced age, hosting of historic moments and, most importantly, trough urinals in the men's bathrooms.

On a farm, a trough is a long, rectangular dumping ground for slop, used by a large, unruly group of hogs. In a men's bathroom, a trough serves a similar purpose. Except no one, hopefully, is eating out of the trough in the men's bathroom, even if it contains not-really-delicious urinal cakes.

Instead, men gather at the trough, usually at the quarter breaks, in a mass ceremony of peeing. If you're a man who's never seen a trough — or a woman whose bathroom experience is limited to those pretty little restrooms with duvets and flowers — the trough experience is akin to about 20 men arriving at once to pee in your tub.

Troughs are not only at sporting venues. They can be found in nightclubs, bars, work camps or anywhere else where it is assumed that men don't want — or don't deserve — a dignified experience in relieving themselves. (This game can give you a virtual idea of the trough experience.)

Federal and state regulations for migrant farmworkers, summer camps and the like require at least two feet of space per man for a trough. If only men themselves followed that rule. The worst thing about troughs is men's constant violation of the written, and the many unwritten, rules of trough etiquette.

Most of these violations have to do with men forgetting, or being too drunk to remember, that they're sharing a very intimate moment. First, too many men are willing to stand way too close to you, putting you at risk of getting hit by their spray, as well as bringing out any latent tendencies for paruresis, better known as pee-shyness. Second, too many men decide they can hock up a big loogie, risking spray of a different kind. Third, smokers decide they still can light up, risking burnination during your urination and making you wish for errant spray.

Also, if someone pukes or dislodges some other unapproved fluid into a trough, you have to deal with it. At least if that happens with a urinal, you can just avoid using that particular potty. Recognizing this, few sporting venues built in the last 25 years include troughs.

For some reason, Minneapolis, with its troughs in the Metrodome (opened in 1982) and the Target Center (built in 1990), is an exception. Perhaps the architects figured Minnesotans already pee in deer-camp outhouses, or in buckets on bass boats or in ice-fishing shanties, so the state's men had long abandoned a demand for privacy in the privy.

However, troughs have their advantages. They can move men in and out of the loo quickly. Given that many men using public urinals just pee and leave, troughs don't have a flushing mechanism. They either have a running stream of water, or they have a huge pile of ice for absorbing urination, allowing men the fun of playing "Melt the Ice with Your Pee."

While at venerable Notre Dame Stadium for a game this fall, I learned the advantage of troughs as the bathroom line at halftime moved swiftly and surely, an extremely important development given that I had spent the first half drinking two mega-souvenir cups of hot chocolate and a bottle of water. Of course, for any stadium that sells beer (colleges don't), the need for a quick line is exponentially increased. "You know, you never really buy the beer — you only rent it," Green Bay Packers season-ticket holder Dennis Oberer sagely told the local Press-Gazette.

Oberer's comments came in November 2002, when the not-so-venerable Lambeau Field expanded its seating, but had not yet expanded its restroom facilities. At one game, police arrested 11 men, and stadium security threw out 47 more, for urinating in sinks, corners and stairwells.

Since men would appear to pee just anywhere, not even sniffing like a dog for the right spot, it seems amazing Lambeau never installed troughs. Stadium personnel claim they were disallowed in Wisconsin building codes.

Wait, don't Wisconsinites also pee in deer-camp outhouses, and in buckets on bass boats and in ice-fishing shanties? Maybe the state could declare Lambeau Field, with its many cheesehead-wearing fans, a dairy farmers' migrant work area, and supersede the state laws with the federal migrant-worker regulations.

At the least, the Kansas City Chiefs officials studying Lambeau Field to determine how to expand and renovate 32-year-old Arrowhead Stadium might decide male football fans only need, or deserve, troughs, thereby keeping the stadium venerable.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.