San Diego Stadium: From Jack Murphy to Qualcomm to Rubble
Near La Jolla, California
The open ground in Mission Valley here is where San Diego's great multi-purpose stadium stood for more than fifty years, wearing several names and hosting two professional sports franchises, three Super Bowls, and some of the largest concerts ever staged in Southern California. It opened in August of nineteen sixty-seven as San Diego Stadium, built at a cost of about twenty-eight million dollars with an original capacity of around fifty thousand seats.
The Chargers played their first game here on August twentieth, nineteen sixty-seven, and the Padres moved in when Major League Baseball placed an expansion franchise in San Diego in nineteen sixty-nine. For more than three decades the stadium was the shared home of both franchises, an arrangement that became increasingly awkward as modern sports economics pulled baseball and football toward purpose-built venues.
In nineteen eighty-one the city renamed it Jack Murphy Stadium, honoring the longtime San Diego Union sportswriter who had spent decades lobbying for the Padres and the Chargers to come to the city. It hosted Super Bowl XXII in nineteen eighty-eight and Super Bowl XXXII in nineteen ninety-eight, when John Elway won his first championship. Qualcomm Corporation purchased the naming rights in nineteen ninety-seven, and the stadium became Qualcomm Stadium, though San Diegans never stopped calling it the Q or, affectionately, the Murph.
The Padres left in two thousand three when Petco Park opened downtown. The Chargers played their last game in the stadium in January two thousand seventeen before relocating to Los Angeles. With both tenants gone and the building aging rapidly, the city voted not to fund a replacement. Demolition of San Diego Stadium began in August twenty twenty. By March of twenty twenty-one the last section of grandstands had been felled, and the city began planning a mixed-use development on the site. What remains now is a memory, and the knowledge that San Diego once had something most cities would have kept.
