For a final resting place, the best seat in the house (2024)

"Oh yeah, it has happened fairly often, including a couple of bettors who were very well known," Kelly says. "They figured they'd spread their money around there; may as well spread their ashes."

While Doyle's choice of Pimlico's finish line as his final resting place is among the more colorful episodes in horseracing lore, it's hardly unique. From baseball parks to football stadiums to golf courses, sporting venues regularly field requests to scatter a loved one's cremated remains at the pitcher's mound, under a goal post or on a fairway overlooking the sea -- anywhere a sports hero has trod and triumphed.

Some venues honor such requests, such as NASCAR's Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, where Wayne Estes has adopted the informal role of "scattering counselor," gently proposing trackside locations with more permanence than the start-finish line family members invariably request. That might mean one of the gardens tucked beside the asphalt oval's high-banked turns or, for fans of the late Dale Earnhardt, the landscaped border beneath the grandstand that bears the seven-time champion's name.

"If this place means that much to somebody, it's the least we can do," says Estes, vice president of events at the fan-friendly track.

Big-time college football programs -- Ohio State, Notre Dame and Florida, to name a few -- flatly refuse, citing everything from sanitation to sheer volume.

"We just haven't been in the business of accommodating that because I don't know that we're in a position of encouraging that," says Notre Dame spokesman John Heisler, adding that Roman Catholic Church policy holds that scattering isn't the proper way to honor the dead.

Still, an untold number of fans find ways of sprinkling a bit of Dad or Granddad at his favorite sporting ground.

Only the truly bold attempt it on national TV, as did 44-year-old Christopher Noteboom during a 2005 Philadelphia Eagles-Green Bay Packers game. After considering a random toss onto the field when no one was looking, Noteboom threw caution (and a bit of his mother, a lifelong Eagles fan) to the wind and charged toward midfield, kneeled at the 30-yard line, let spill the contents of his plastic bag and blurted out, "This is for you, Mom!"

He was promptly escorted off and charged with defiant trespass.

A popular choice

While records of sports-related scattering incidents are hard to come by, cremation itself is increasingly popular in the United States. In 1985, roughly 15 percent of Americans chose to be cremated, according to the Cremation Association of North America. By 2006, the figure had jumped to 34 percent. It's projected to top 50 percent around 2020.

The reasons are many, according to Michael Nicodemus, the organization's vice president. Cremations cost roughly one-third what traditional burials do. They're deemed more environmentally correct. They offer more flexibility in scheduling subsequent memorial services.

At the same time, the family cemetery is a fading concept given Americans' increasingly mobility. And as ties to home towns fray, allegiances to other institutions, whether alma maters or sports teams, serve as surrogate communities.

Views about the proper disposition of cremated remains (the term "ashes" is frowned upon) are also shifting. Today, not everyone opts for the traditional route of storage in an urn, whether kept at home, buried or interred in a columbarium.

As cremations operations manager for Hollomon-Brown Funeral Home in Virginia Beach, Nicodemus confers with families about various options -- arranging biodegradable urns for dispersal at sea, for example, or explaining the policies of public golf courses, a common request in the Tidewater area, he adds.

Yet it's hardly an exclusively American impulse.

In Argentina, the tradition of scattering ashes on the wildly popular Boca Juniors soccer team's pitch each time a goal was scored got so out of hand that the club opened a cemetery in 2007 expressly for fans, in part out of concern for the health of the playing surface.

A soccer club in Hamburg followed suit in 2008, overrun with scattering requests.

Even Wimbledon receives periodic inquiries, but the All England Lawn and Tennis Club, host of the grass-court classic, politely declines. English tennis great Fred Perry's are the only known ashes officially entrusted to the club for safekeeping.

Inspired in part by the fracas that followed Noteboom's unauthorized incursion at the Eagles game, hospice worker Kelly Murtaugh founded the International Scattering Society (known as the "travel agency for the deceased") to help people distribute remains legally and safely.

In recent years, Murtaugh's company has arranged scatterings on such hallowed ground as the Grand Canyon, Normandy Beach, the Swiss Alps and even Stonehenge. But she couldn't get to first base with Major League Baseball, which rejected a proposal to do the same at Fenway Park, Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Busch Stadium.

"They had some concerns about superstitious players," Murtaugh said. And there were other worries: Would it trigger on onslaught of requests among fans or howls of protest?

Replacement setting

After running into a similar roadblock with the Chicago Cubs, lifelong fan Dennis Mascari bought a tract of land in a nearby cemetery and erected a brick replica of Wrigley Field's center field wall to house as many as 288 urns in niches he markets as "eternal luxury skyboxes for fans."

Since its April 9 opening, the complex has had 10 urns placed in the wall, Mascari says. Several others have been sold (at $2,900 for a single niche; roughly $5,000 for a double) for future use. To create a ballpark-like setting, Mascari has imported a patch of authentic Wrigley Field sod and four seats.

"The whole idea is to make the burial process easier to handle," says Mascari, the self-described "Walt Disney of the afterlife."

For an extra $800, fans can also buy an officially licensed Cubs urn to hold the ashes. The urns -- as well as a line of baseball-themed caskets -- were the brainchild of Michigan native Clint Mytych, 28, who was struck one day by the fact that the funeral industry was the last un-branded frontier.

So he quit the limousine business and founded Eternal Image in 2007.

"The general motto here is to celebrate the life of a person, not just affirm that someone has died," says Mytych, whose publicly traded company also produces a "Star Trek"-branded line of urns and caskets and is pursuing other sports properties.

Adds Mascari, 61: "My grandfather was a Cubs fan. My father was a Cubs fan. I'm a Cubs fan. It's your heritage. It becomes part of your life."