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The view from Harvard Stadium. Al Bello/Getty Images My Favorite Venues   Football Latrobe Stadium, By Peter King Clemens Stadium, By Austin Murphy The Louisiana Superdome, By Lee Jenkins Baseball Fenway Park, By Tom Verducci Shea Stadium, By Phil Taylor Dodger Stadium, By Kelli Anderson Eddy D. Field Stadium, By G. Dorhmann Basketball Boston Garden, By Ian Thomsen Pauley Pavilion, By Damon Hack Allen Fieldhouse, By Jack McCallum Additional Sports The Montreal Forum, By Michael Farber Grand Olympic Auditorium, By R. Hoffer Daytona Speedway, By Selena Roberts Churchill Downs, By Tim Layden L'Alpe d'Huez, By Alexander Wolff La Bombonera, By Grant Wahl The Old Course, By Michael Bamberger Best of the Rest | Our Least Favorites Your Turn React: What is your favorite stadium?

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