Harbor Park’s ‘Sodfather’: How groundskeeper Kenny Magner helped downtown jewel rise from trash to treasure

NORFOLK — A few Septembers ago, after an underground pipe burst beneath the playing surface at Harbor Park, Kenny Magner noticed members of a construction crew starting to dig near the first base dugout in search of the problem.

Magner, the Norfolk Tides’ longtime head groundskeeper, asked why the men were digging there. They produced the ballpark’s blueprint and pointed to where it mapped the hidden pipe.

“No, no, no,” Magner said, pointing to the third base side of the field. “It’s actually over here, not over there where you guys are.”

Never mind what the blueprint said. Magner, who’s been on the job for the Tides in some capacity since he was a teenager in the early 1970s, argued with it and won.

It’s perhaps debatable whether Magner knows more about Harbor Park than anyone on the planet. But there is definitively no one who possesses more knowledge of the ballpark’s playing surface and what goes on beneath it.

Magner, who plans to retire after this season, is Norfolk’s Sodfather.

With Harbor Park about 75% constructed in 1992, the team’s new ownership group looked at Magner and said, essentially, “Here’s a ballpark. Now make us a field.”

With Magner calling the shots, a contracted construction crew began to assemble the sand-based surface, with special attention to drainage and flood prevention.

The result, after much trial and error, was a field that glowed emerald green under the lights when the highly anticipated $15 million ballpark opened to a sellout crowd on April 14, 1993.

It was a far cry from the first time Magner, now 65, laid eyes on the place.

“Absolute mud hole,” he said, adding that the area was strewn with railroad ties. “I mean, literally, a mud hole.

“You wouldn’t imagine we’d have what we have now then.”

Tides president Ken Young remembers the blank canvas similarly.

“My biggest recollection is that it was a big bowl of mud,” Young said, laughing. “I have a few reollections, but that mud is one of the big ones.”

Just like the game of baseball itself, there is much more going on than meets the eye with Harbor Park’s field.

Below the pristine surface is a series of pipes, wires, sprinklers and drains. And that’s just the beginning of the unseen.

Most fans likely look at the surface, allow themselves a moment to be impressed with its green hue and uncanny symmetry and never give it another thought — oblivious that there’s a whole world going on under that grass.

A foot below the sod is a 4-inch layer of pea gravel, which drains naturally. A cobweb of perforated pipes, known as a French drain system, runs through the pea gravel.

A 12-inch layer of sand sits on top of the gravel, above which sit the sod and the immaculately tended Tifway 419 Bermuda.

Magner and the contractors had to build it all from scratch, turning that “absolute mud hole” into a major league-caliber field in a matter of months, in time for opening day 30 years ago.

Magner, while still tending to the surface at old Met Park before it was demolished, trained on the job.

“I learned it by the ‘don’t-do-that-again’ school of thought,” said Magner, an energetic and plain-talking native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who spent his adolescence near Norfolk’s Lake Taylor High. “I don’t have a degree or nothing in turf management. I do know baseball from the early days, when it wasn’t about the aesthetics. It wasn’t about all of that. It was just about the game.”

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Racing the clock

As 1993’s opening day fast approached, Magner and the crew worked around a giant crane that lifted, piece-by-piece, sections of Harbor Park’s concrete seating bowl from near what became home plate.

A few days before the ballpark’s debut, some newly placed rolls of grass weren’t yet green. The workers had to scramble to beat the clock.

Young, a Philadelphia native who had made his bones in the food service industry, had just led a group that bought the Tides from their parent New York Mets.

Young stood near one of the main entrances to the seating bowl on opening night, listening to fans’ initial reactions to the now emerald surface.

“Look at that field,” one said.

“Look at that!” replied another.

“That’s really cool to hear when you’re standing there,” Young said.

“It’s a feeling of awe when you see it because that’s what makes the facility. You can have the seats in and the padding and everything else, but when the field’s dirt, it doesn’t look like a baseball stadium particularly. And then when that sod finally goes in and you see it for the first time that way, oh man, that is an exhilarating feeling.”

Never mind that the announced crowd of 12,113 had filed in past welders putting finishing touches on the stadium, as well as tarp-covered pieces of equipment that hadn’t yet been put into place.

“It’s a hit!” proclaimed a large front-page headline above a massive aerial photo the next day in The Virginian-Pilot, which had stories and opinion pieces on everything from pre- and postgame traffic flow and Young keeping an eye on brisk souvenir sales to how happily fans paid $1.50 for a bag of Virginia peanuts and $4 for a 24-ounce Budweiser.

“Rough on the outside, Harbor Park was nearly picture perfect on the inside,” The Pilot’s Carl Fincke wrote in a short front-page piece, a reference to the ballpark’s unfinished external business. “The park’s work-in-progress state did not detract from the enjoyment of the game.”

Columnist Janet Shadden wrote about the quaintness of the new venue.

“A stadium is where you go to watch a game,” Shadden wrote. “A ballpark is a place where you relax with your kids. Norfolk has built a ballpark.”

And Magner, learning as he went, had somehow spearheaded the building of a world-class playing surface with a budget ranging between $200,000-$300,000.

“The field was absolutely green and gorgeous on opening day,” said Paul Fraim, who as a city councilman at the time was instrumental in striking a deal with the Mets and getting the badly needed ballpark built.

Fraim fought resistance from citizens who were dubious of putting the facility next to the Elizabeth River because of concerns over potential tidal flooding. The way the field’s bones were put together from the start, it’s never been a major concern.

“What was done by Kenny was absolutely a work of art,” said Fraim, who once got thrown out of the stadium’s construction site after wandering in on a preseason Sunday to check out the progress.

“It was just gorgeous.”

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An early start

There is an oft-told story about how Magner came into his job when, in the spring of 1977, Tides GM Dave Rosenfield fired Magner’s boss and said to Magner, “You’re the head groundskeeper. Go out there and get the field ready.”

But his groundskeeping origin story runs a little deeper.

When Magner’s father, Gaylord, was sent to Hampton Roads by the Navy, the family moved across the street from Met Park, which was off Military Highway. Magner was in his early teens.

One of his father’s friends encouraged Magner to go stand outside the ballpark and try to catch foul balls. He and a friend chased stray balls for a while until the ballpark’s head groundskeeper, Smokey Olsen, handed him a rake and asked him to help with the infield. It evolved into an internship of sorts.

“He let me in the ballpark free, gave me a free RC Cola,” Magner said. “I was down in the bullpen sitting with the players down there by the fence. I thought I was the coolest guy in the world.”

Magner started working at Met Park full-time in 1975, electing to stay in the area even after his family was shuffled off to Annapolis, Maryland, where his father worked at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The way Magner worked his way into the top job was simple: He’d come to work early and have the field ready before Olsen arrived. That was enough for Rosenfield.

“All I thought about was the baseball field,” said Magner, who still carries that trait to this day. “And if there’s something wrong, I lose sleep and worry about it. That’s what made me stick to it: ‘I can figure this out. I can figure this out.’ I ain’t no educated guy. I ain’t no ‘smart’ man. I just look at myself as a guy who got up and went to work every day and got the job done.”

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Next in line

When Magner retires in February — he’ll stick around long enough to help install another new playing surface at Harbor Park for the first time since 2014 — longtime assistant Justin Hall will become the head man.

It’s not lost on Hall that he’s taking over for a man who knows more about the playing surface than its own blueprint.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It means a lot,” Hall said. “I’m pretty thankful that I got to learn from him for 10 years now. I’ve just been trying these last couple of years to just absorb as much as I can. He’s one of the legends, I think. I think most people around the league would say that. Not many people do it for that long — or do anything for that long. Yeah, it’s (a) privilege to learn underneath him.”

Magner’s ongoing obsession with the field is a necessary part of the job. Major league grounds crews typically have four to five times the manpower of Norfolk’s two, who get help from interns and, on rainy occasions, front office staffers.

A few years ago, a snowstorm shortly before the home opener left Harbor Park’s playing surface discolored in spots. Magner barely slept a wink.

It’s why the field in Norfolk looks and plays like those in the big leagues.

“I would put it up against anybody,” Tides General Manager Joe Gregory said. “Especially in the unique weather we have here — the amount of rain, hurricanes, seemingly four seasons in a day. Kenny’s done a great job with it.

“He’s done it also with a pretty small budget and minimal help over the years.”

Young, who owns a handful of other minor league franchises around the nation, has dealt with countless groundskeepers over the decades. He knows Magner’s type.

“Like any good groundskeeper, the field, the grass, all of that is his baby,” Young said. “And an excellent groundskeeper just wants that field to look immaculate. And when something happens … that’s really out of your control, oh man, that depresses him and those like him.”

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Keeping in touch

Magner, who lives in Virginia Beach, plans to relax, hunt and fish in retirement. He even threatened to come to the ballpark and heckle Hall, the way some fans bust his chops by yelling, “Hey, you missed a spot!” when he appears on the field.

But he’ll be available to share his unique institutional knowledge with Hall and his assistant, whether it’s a question about mowing or dragging the field or locating a wayward underground pipe.

Fraim, who served as Norfolk’s Mayor from 1994-2016, keeps a framed copy of the “It’s a hit” edition of The Pilot on the wall outside his downtown law office.

Even 30 years on, Fraim continues to marvel at what Magner pulled off.

“The facility drained as well as any facility, I would say, in baseball,” Fraim said. “For the concerns everybody had, even with heavy rains, the field would be playable later that day or the next morning or the next mid-afternoon. The field itself is one of the great things about the stadium.”

Magner, incidentally, has no plans to amend the inaccurate blueprint. Never mind what almost happened the day he had to correct it.

“They would’ve dug the place up looking,” Magner said, laughing.

“I’m going to leave it be. They’ll be calling me regular.”