When Team A left Oakland, Calif., Toma joined the Royals, an expansion group. He worked for the captains after they moved to Kansas City from Dallas in 1963 and prepared pitches for the Olympic Games, World Cup, and NFL games abroad. He was called in to repair damaged fields at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and Soldiers Field in Chicago. When the New Orleans Saints competed at Louisiana State University after Hurricane Katrina, Toma brought in jet boats and used their large propellers to dry the paint in the end areas.
However, the Super Bowl is his biggest challenge because of its high visibility. At the 1990 Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., Toma and his team planted the seeds to repair the field after a bad college game. The grass started to fill up, but was then torn apart by the Giants and Bills, who had been training there the day before the game. So Toma took grass from a training ground at the University of Tampa, planted and painted it overnight.
Ed Mangan, Toma’s successor as Super Bowl head, said: “He’s an energetic bunny. “I mean, he never stops, he goes all the time.”
At the Super Bowl for the 1978 season at the Orange Bowl in Miami, a 120-yard tarp was pulled across the field just before halftime. But it was launched unevenly and one end protruded beyond the goal post. Toma asked if anyone had a knife so he could cut a portion of the canvas to fit. Some of their volunteer fans.
The next season, for the Super Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., Toma and his team had to remove 800 gallons of paint that had been swept onto the field for the Rose Bowl. They dig up the back yard areas, the sides and most of the midfield and sow new seeds. Unfortunately, heavy rain the week before the game prevented grass from growing, leaving piles of seeds in the back yard areas.
If you spend eight decades of hard work creating the perfect lawn, eventually time forces you to delegate the responsibility to someone else. But that doesn’t mean you stop caring.
Nearly every Sunday, when Kansas City field keeper Travis Hogan watches the game from the west section of Arrowhead Stadium, his phone will ring and he’ll see Toma’s name. showing up.
