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 A dream come true First female groundskeeper ends rookie season
Posted: Wednesday September 29, 1999 02:45 PM
DETROIT (AP) -- To Heather Nabozny, Tiger Stadium was more than home to big-league baseball for 87 years before ending its run. It was her own field of dreams come true. Fifteen years after sitting as a teen-ager in the upper deck, wide-eyed over the field's lush greenness, Nabozny was closing out her rookie season as major-league baseball's first female head groundskeeper. She expected that Tiger Stadium's swan song would be "weird, it'll be sad." "I don't think it's really gonna hit me until after I'm done [Monday night], can sit down and relax when the stadium's empty," the Tigers' top turf technician said over the weekend as she orchestrated her crew to get the stadium gussied up for its final homestand. "But all of the memories are in my head, and I'll always have those." She thinks of famed Tigers like Cobb and Kaline, Gehringer and Greenberg who -- some of them decades before her birth -- circled the basepaths she later would groom. And of the enclosed ballpark's echoes and the smell she wouldn't describe as musty, just "used." And of tending to the baselines by realizing a dream born of being a lawn-care businessman's daughter who recognized her calling in large measure after the 1984 visit with her dad to the famed stadium. "It was just awesome to look at the field, and never in a million years did I think I'd get into athletic turf management and be managing the grounds here," said Nabozny, who'll move with the Tigers and her crew to the team's new digs, Comerica Park, in time for next season. She understands that not all might recognize her crew's work: the new sod around the pitcher's mound, the narrow strip carved out of the grass from there to home plate solely as a nostalgic touch to the stadium's older well-wishers. Clad in a nylon Tigers pullover, she tooled around the infield two days before the final game on a small tractor pulling a dirt-smoothing attachment. She grabbed a garden rake for finishing touches, then used it on the pitcher's mound while occasionally guiding her crew as it mowed the outfield or poured and raked in chalky powder along the baselines. "There's a whole lot more than people actually know," she said, "and it's hard to explain until you do it." She fell in love with grass in youth and "just enjoyed being outside," even as a 10-year-old mowing her family's lawn with an old tractor. She got a Michigan State University degree in turf management, then worked for the Toronto Blue Jays' spring training camp in Florida -- a job that left her wishing for her own big-league ballpark. "That always has been a dream in the back of my mind," she said. "But people generally work through the ranks, kind of like the umpires and players." Nabozny's minors were five years as head groundskeeper for the West Michigan Whitecaps -- the Tigers' minor league affiliate in Grand Rapids -- before she got her break when the Tigers' brass came calling. Now, she's the field general for a crew of six during the day, as many as 18 during games -- and a woman who cherished time she could spend alone with Tiger Stadium. "What I enjoy the most is when the crew has the day off and I come in and do some work myself," she said. "It gives you time to reflect, like a gardener."
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