Steve Miller's WSJ obits (Turf guy/Jeans guy)
Hyfler/Rosner
By Stephen Miller
1419 words
28 July 2007
The Wall Street Journal
A6
English
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
John Gilman (1942-2007)
Artificial-Grass Crusader Campaigned
To Stomp Out AstroTurf and 'Turf Toe'
John Gilman was fond of saying that he wanted his headstone to read,
"Here lies the guy who buried AstroTurf." With his artificial-turf
product FieldTurf, he went a long way toward doing just that.
Mr. Gilman took a product originally invented for golf tees and
challenged the dominant AstroTurf, selling FieldTurf to colleges,
then
pro stadiums across the country. By 2005, with AstroTurf's parent
company in bankruptcy court, Mr. Gilman put his company's share at
50%
of the North American market -- what AstroTurf once had.
Joe DiGeronimo, an athletic-facilities consultant who worked with Mr.
Gilman on various turf installations, recalls an early victory, when
retired University of Nebraska Cornhuskers coach Tom Osborne "walked
across a field and asked 'Where's the turf?' And Gilman said, 'You're
walking on it.'" On Monday, Mr. Gilman died at his Montreal Home at
the
age of 65.
FieldTurf technology was based on patents filed by Freddie Haas Jr.,
a
golfer best remembered for ending Byron Nelson's 11-game winning
streak
in 1945. Mr. Haas invented a kind of artificial turf to use at golf
tees. In the 1980s, Canadian tennis pro Jean Prevost licensed it to
build grass tennis courts.
A Canadian who played and coached football in the early 1960s for the
Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League, Mr. Gilman later
spent two decades in the luggage business. In 1995, he joined Mr.
Prevost at what was then SynTenniCo Inc., taking the chief-executive
post, and began developing FieldTurf.
Mr. Gilman wanted a product that would respond to complaints by some
athletes of rug burns, "turf toe" and other injuries from playing on
AstroTurf. He once called AstroTurf "a terrible piece of carpet." (An
AstroTurf spokeswoman said that AstroTurf had had a reputation for
causing burns and other injuries and said the company is trying to
overturn "years of bad publicity." The company had no comment on
FieldTurf's market-share claims.)
FieldTurf developers increased turf padding, then added a substrate
of
sand and rubber that gave way when a runner made a cut, much like
real
dirt. "That's the third dimension, the ability to make a divot," says
John N. Rogers III, a professor in the crop and soil science
department
at Michigan State University, of FieldTurf's properties.
Propylene grass blades helped cut down on the rug burn, too. Mr.
Gilman
liked to demonstrate how different FieldTurf was at product expos by
taking off his shirt and doing a sliding belly-flop.
Mr. Gilman set out to find a high-profile client who would showcase
the
product. In 1998, he persuaded Mr. Osborne, and a year later
FieldTurf
was installed at Nebraska's Memorial Stadium. Mr. DiGeronimo says he
installed a FieldTurf putting green at former President George H.W.
Bush's home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
After the Nebraska install, sales took off, especially at college
football stadiums and practice fields. In 2001, a group of National
Football League quarterbacks including Jim Kelly of the Buffalo
Bills,
Boomer Easiason, John Elway and Dan Marino, in association with
AIG-Horizon Partners LLC, committed millions of dollars in venture
capital to the firm.
FieldTurf is "not a cure-all," says Mr. Rogers, the Michigan State
professor, citing the high cost. A typical football field might run
between $500,000 and $1 million -- not much when compared with
professional athlete salaries, but a bundle at a public high school.
He
adds, "It has made people like me come up with even better solutions
for
high schools to put in natural fields."
Mr. Gilman oversaw the installation of artificial grass at thousands
of
athletic fields and stadiums, including eight NFL stadiums and three
Major League Baseball stadiums, the company says.
FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, approved FieldTurf
for
international matches, and professional fields across Europe have
installed it. In 2005, French company Tarkett of Nanterre, a
floor-covering concern, bought FieldTurf, and Mr. Gilman continued as
a
high marketing executive of the combined company. FieldTurf lays
claim
to half the North American artificial-turf market, with annual
revenue
of $250 million.
John Planek, athletic director at Loyola University Chicago, says he
likes how the FieldTurf soccer and softball field the university
installed in 2005 cuts down on maintenance, not just lawn work, but
also
the messy process of painting on boundary lines.
Meanwhile, AstroTurf has come back. General Sports Venue LLC of
Raleigh,
N.C., has licensed the iconic brand and is using it to create
artificial
turf fields it claims are even more like real grass than FieldTurf's.
Daniel E. Koshland Jr. (1920-2007)
Levis Heir Chose Genes Over Jeans,
As Pathbreaking Scientist and Educator
In science, Daniel E. Koshland Jr. was a triple threat: He
experimented,
he edited America's flagship journal of science, and he shook up a
major
institution's teaching of biology.
"In a way the magazine I'm editing now is Dan's magazine," says
Donald
Kennedy, editor in chief of Science, which Mr. Koshland edited from
1985
to 1995. "It's pretty even now between Science and Nature," the
leading
British science journal. Mr. Kennedy credits Mr. Koshland with
broadening Science's coverage "from astronomy to zoology" and giving
it
new influence in policy circles. Mr. Koshland died Monday in Walnut
Creek, Calif., at age 87.
An heir to part of the Levi-Strauss & Co. fortune, Mr. Koshland
appeared
for many years on lists of the wealthiest Americans. But he was more
interested in genes than jeans, and as a young scientist was already
making his mark in basic research.
He challenged a century-old consensus on enzymes, compounds that act
as
catalysts in biochemical reactions. As a researcher with a joint
appointment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and
the
Rockefeller University in New York, he proposed that enzymes could
change shape to start the reactions, a process he compared to a hand
fitting into a glove.
The young scientist came under old-guard fire: One reviewer said the
established "Fischer Key-Lock theory has lasted 100 years and will
not
be overturned by speculation from an embryonic scientist." But Mr.
Koshland's "induced fit" model became the new orthodoxy.
By the 1970s, he'd turned to studying how bacteria orient themselves
in
relation to their environment and showed that they can have
rudimentary
memories that can affect their behavior.
Another kind of behavior -- the professorial sort -- became Mr.
Koshland's next focus. After becoming chairman of the biochemistry
department of the University of California at Berkeley, he spearheaded
a
reorganization of the entire study of biology that saw 11 departments
shrunk to three. He consolidated into departments of molecular and
cell
biology, integrative biology (devoted to whole organisms) and plant
and
microbial biology, reflecting advances in genetics and other
life-science studies.
"I think no one else could have pulled it off," says Robert Tjian, UC
Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. Mr. Tjian said the
reorganization made graduate-student applications "shoot through the
roof" and influenced changes at other institutions. Mr. Koshland
called
the reorganization "one of the high points of my life."
Named editor of Science in 1985, Mr. Koshland placed a strong stamp
on
the journal. He strengthened its news and features departments and
redesigned the book to make it more colorful. Mr. Koshland's whimsy
came
out in his monthly editorials, which often featured a colloquy with a
certain Dr. Noitall, "inventor of the chain letter and insider
trading,"
who inevitably represented the stodgiest side of science.
The Navy rejected Mr. Koshland during World War II for
nearsightedness,
but his Berkeley chemistry professor recruited him to work on the
Manhattan Project, and Mr. Koshland spent most of the war purifying
plutonium in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
He received a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of
Chicago in 1949. Mr. Koshland endowed the Marian Koshland Science
Museum
of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., named for
his
wife, an immunologist who died in 1997.
Even while reorganizing Berkeley and editing Science, Mr. Koshland
continued to work as a researcher. He published more than 400 papers,
and his awards included a National Medal of Science in 1990.
In recent years, Mr. Koshland became interested in finding ways to
use
blue-green algae to produce methane as biofuel.
Bill Schenley
> FieldTurf is "not a cure-all," says Mr. Rogers, the
> Michigan State professor, citing the high cost.
> A typical football field might run between $500,000
> and $1 million -- not much when compared with
> professional athlete salaries, but a bundle at a public
> high school.
It cost a million-plus to cover Veteran's Memorial Stadium, a high school
field, with FieldTurf, in Northwest PA seven years ago ... and $400,000 to
*re*cover it four years later. Pretty freakin' expensive. But if you play
on it ... it's worth it.
My nephew works for FieldTurf in Detroit.
> Meanwhile, AstroTurf has come back. General Sports
> Venue LLC of Raleigh, N.C., has licensed the iconic
> brand and is using it to create artificial turf fields it claims
> are even more like real grass than FieldTurf's.
It has to be better than the old Astro Turf ... because nothing could be
worse ... although I've never seen an artificial surface better than
FieldTurf.