EARTHY PLEASURES : 36 Million Pounds of Dirt Make a Big Mess in Stadium

If you’re a 6-year-old boy who wanders into San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium any time during the next few weeks, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.

Either that, or you’ll think they are filming the world’s biggest detergent commercial. (“Has your kid ever gotten really dirty ... ?”)

It is every youngster’s dream--and it comes true at some point for most--to frolic in the dirt. Get knee deep in it. Maybe head deep, if you can hold your breath.

Throw a little mud in there for good measure, and you’ve had yourself quite an afternoon.

That’s why the stadium would be a great place to be. Right now, there is dirt as far as the eye can see. Waist-deep dirt. And mud. Lots of it.

The reason for this mess--Whatever happened to the 50-yard line?--is Saturday night’s U.S. Hot Rod Motorsports Championship Series.

If you thought the Pittsburgh Steelers, Denver Broncos and San Francisco 49ers had some behemoths, wait until you get a load of this:

-Monster trucks and tanks, high-powered machines with names such as “Mechanic’s Nightmare,” “Big Foot,” “Prosecutor” and “Exterminator.”

-Flame-throwing Funny Cars.

-And one car that transforms from a 35-foot long racer to a two-story, talking robot.

Fun? Excitement? Well, it all depends on how you look at it.

But one thing’s for sure. Only a very large backyard could handle this much wild activity. And that’s where the dirt comes in.

Lots and lots of dirt. By the time the Mickey Thompson Off-Road event takes place in the stadium in a couple of weeks, more than 12,000 yards of dirt will have been hauled in to cover the turf.

Because each yard weighs a little more than 1 1/2 tons, that’s means at least 36 million pounds of dirt will be piled upon the field.

“That’s enough to give you nightmares,” said Steve Wittman, the stadium’s head groundskeeper.

And there’s more. Before the dirt is brought in, workers place about 2,600 square yards of plastic sheets and 7,800 sheets of plywood on the turf.

“The whole idea is to make sure nothing happens to the field itself,” said E.A. Rosa, the superintendent for dirt contractor James Kitchens. “We do everything we can to make sure the field stays in good condition.”

But, Wittman says, there’s no way it can remain in “good” condition after it takes this kind of abuse.

“We’ll be re-sodding the entire field after the off-road events are over,” Wittman said. “We have to.”

Wittman used to work as the head groundskeeper at Mile High Stadium in Denver, and he has been through this before. This weekend’s event will be the first since the field at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium has been in his care.

“All I can say is, ‘Thank goodness I’ve been through it before,’ ” Wittman said. “That way, I won’t have a heart attack.”

Kitchens just finished with an event at Anaheim Stadium. And the company has helped create the dirt tracks for most of the off-road events in Southern California for the past 15 years.

In San Diego, Kitchens gets its dirt from the A-1 Soil Company in Mission Valley.

“This is as good a dirt as we get to use,” Rosa said. “In New Oreans, for instance, we can only use silt, which is dirt that comes straight out of the (Mississippi) River. That stuff is a lot harder to work with.

“The stuff we get down here is easier. When we’re done with it, we just give it back. We use most of the same dirt every year.”

Rosa said it takes about 2 days for the company to transform Jack Murphy Stadium from a football field to a rather large sandbox.

Trucks transport the dirt in and tractors help the contractors create the right configurations.

For Saturday’s mud-racing competition, Rosa’s crew will have to build a pit 150 feet long, 15 feet wide and 30 inches deep in some parts. The pit will be built with dirt and filled with mud.

And adults will be playing around in it instead of kids.