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TUCSON

Already the White Sox have been hearing complaints. Not enough parking. A ballpark in one of the bleakest parts of town, where tank farms and body shops meet the high chaparral.

Perhaps the bloom leaves the desert rose even more quickly than the Sox picked up and left their old spring training camp in Sarasota, Fla. But despite a little carping here and there, the Old Pueblo (might as well get used to the town nickname) is overflowing with civic pride.

“Tucson is transformed from a 1-team outpost into a 3-team Mecca,” said a headline in the Arizona Daily Star. The Colorado Rockies’ facility, Hi Corbett Field in pleasant Reid Park, got an $8 million renovation. Starting in mid-February, they were joined in Tucson by the Arizona Diamondbacks (a Phoenix-based club) and the White Sox, who share brand-new, $37 million Tucson Electric Park and its adjoining practice facilities.

An outsider might suppose the park’s name reflects all the electric excitement the addition of two teams has brought. But no. Tucson Electric Power was one of the big cash contributors–along with taxpayers–to this civic improvement, hence the name. Taxpayer Park lacks a certain ring.

Tucson has thus become a travel destination for the sort of tourist who escapes the winter just like a major leaguer. That would be someone like Bob Cochran, a private investigator from Lockport, Ill., who came to one game disguised as an absolute White Sox fanatic. He wore the Sox cap and the Sox black jacket. He sat in a $12 seat near the Sox dugout while his son Sean, 9, went to grab some autographs and Bob Jr., 28, scouted out refreshments at one of the immaculate TEP concession stands.

The Cochrans were on their fourth spring training trip. This trip, of course, meant trading the sun and sand of Sarasota for the clean desert air and cactus of Tucson.

“I like this better,” Cochran said, shouting to be heard over the pregame vintage rock blaring from the public address system. “The baseball complex is definitely state of the art, very nice. It’s a little more expensive, but what’re you gonna do? The tickets and the prices of concessions are more here.

“The White Sox do seem to be a bit more open with the kids. It’s that fan-friendly thing. I noticed that.”

The Cochrans hadn’t gone exploring Tucson. They had tickets for a Cougars hockey game that night and plans to drive up to Mesa to catch the Cubs. “I’m strictly a Sox fan, but we might as well do that while we’re here.”

It soon became clear that Cactus League players and the most die-hard of their fans probably would not have a lot of advice for visitors looking for something to do besides watch baseball.

“A lot of our guys (ballplayers) have gone to the Pima Air and Space Museum,” said Scott Reifert, the White Sox director of public relations. “And then there’s the Biosphere not far from here. I think a few guys have gone to that. Otherwise, it’s a big city, so you have the usual restaurants, and so on.

“The schedule for the guys is rough, because they’re here at 8:30 in the morning, and then, when there’s a game, they get out of here about 5. So they grab dinner and go to a movie.

“Nogales (Mexico) is about an hour away, and I’ve heard some of the guys say they might go down there on our one day off. Some have gone over to the University of Arizona for a basketball game.” Reifert’s voice trailed off. He could think of nothing to add.

I missed the Biosphere 2, that intriguing re-creation of various ecosystems enclosed within a 3-acre structure, but even the locals regularly drive up into the Santa Catalina Mountains for the daily tours.

I did wander around the Air and Space museum, a glorious open-air parking lot for fighters, bombers, helicopters and transports. A few visitors lined up on the ramp leading into the interior of Air Force One, circa 1961-65. I joined them and learned from the guide at the head of the stairs that this was a “supplementary” plane. “Mostly, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used the Boeing 707,” he said.

Still there must have been days when the big bird was in the shop and the presidents had to make do with their little prop-driven Douglas VC118A. I saw a white dial telephone in one compartment, but no red one, and the galley stove looked incapable of broiling a Texas-size steak.

A guide at the exit door stopped us before we left and pointed at an immense complex of wires and pipes in an enclosure behind the cockpit. “This is the most fascinating part,” he said. “That little set of computer chips down there”–he pointed out a 6-inch box on display in a glass case–“does everything now that all that stuff did then.”

A word about guides. They turn up everywhere in Tucson. Some are volunteers. Others are paid. Almost every one is past the usual retirement age and full of information.

Jack Fern, a retiree from Chicago who arrived less than a year ago, derives a certain pleasure from visits to the hardware store or the golf-equipment shop–where the personnel, mostly elderly, take an interest in their work.

“You go into Ace to buy a screw, and the guy tells you how to build a house,” Fern observed. One day, Fern was considering a new golf club and the man who waited on him began explaining about the tensile strength and torsion limits of various shafts. “I get the feeling I’m talking to a mechanical engineer,” Fern said. “You are,” the sales clerk replied.

Tucson, with a population approaching 700,000 in the metropolitan area, does not particularly bill itself as a retirement community. It has some 35,000 students at the university, and the military population at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (another place visitors should see) also keeps down the average age. The outskirts of town are sprinkled with high-tech industrial parks.

Tourism brings in the money, too, which is one reason why the movers and shakers here entered into a spring-training bidding war with boosters from Las Vegas and Florida. There are hotel rooms and coffers to fill and a portion of the “snowbird” market had been missing till they lured the Rockies in ’93.

Those visitors can expect to find the sort of people who will happily explain more than you ever wanted to know about insect behavior at a little exhibition table in the wonderful Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Deserts raise a lot of questions in the minds of newcomers. Docents have all the answers.

Not many people in White Sox T-shirts are showing up at the museum just yet, but the knowledgable do flock there for a look at the meandering outdoor displays of desert flora and fauna, as well as many indoor exhibits dramatizing geological wonders.

The docents at the museum wear deserty, light tan uniforms and bright smiles. In fact, I believe it might be possible to spend several days in Tucson without encountering a sour expression or an indifferent member of the service industry.

Of course, there has to be pain as well. Tucson is a metropolis, and the local news has the same fascination with fires and car wrecks as in big cities anywhere else. Baseball brings controversy, because inevitably there are people who fail to see the benefits. Siphon tax money into a ballpark for teams owned by fat cats? Watch part of my electric bill go toward naming a ball park so as to promote a utility that has no competition? Bah. And humbug too.

But that negative response probably would seem mild compared to the reaction of some devoted White Sox spring training fans who had become attached to Sarasota during the club’s 38-year tenure there. “I’ve been going to Sarasota for 20 years, so it’s a change, and change is hard for human beings,” said Rob Gallas, the White Sox marketing and broadcasting vice president. “I’m sure some people are disappointed. Some bought condos down there.”

Gallas has an office in a building near the ballpark, a large but simple structure decorated on the outside only with the team logo. Inside, the place might easily be mistaken for the offices of particularly stern accountants.

Gallas looked at the bright side. “The facility is just great. The town has been very warm and open to all of us. I like the desert. My sinuses like the desert a lot. Every day is a good hair day. It’s a very restful place.”

Gallas said he was sure that those who make baseball the centerpiece of their winter getaways would make the switch. “We have the added benefit that a lot of people are closet . . . well, they follow the Cubs too. So they’ll be able to watch the Sox play the Cubs and even go up to Cub games in Mesa if they want.”

As he spoke, the White Sox were taking batting practice in preparation for the third game of a four-game losing streak. It would not be an auspicious Cactus League debut, but, hey, spring training is supposed to be a learning experience.

One thing people learn is that nearly a quarter of the Tucson population is Mexican-American, which enriches the cultural life and the culinary scene.

In small pockets of the downtown, visitors still can find traces of the old days. For example, La Casa Cordova, built in 1848, houses the fine little Mexican Heritage Museum. The rooms with their adobe walls demonstrate the way Mexican families lived in the days when that part of Tucson was a fortress called El Presidio. A few other adobe structures still stand–one housing the school of the nearby Tucson Museum of Art, another an arts and crafts market. Other houses in the vicinity–of slightly younger vintage–make for a pleasant walking tour past samples of handsome southwestern architecture and gardens blending prickly desert plants with tropical flowers.

Except for a few historic pockets, most of downtown has succumbed to the sort of glass and steel development of which Tucson Electric Park seems an extension.

But those who venture farther south eventually escape the clutches of real estate values and come upon historical gems. Only seven miles from downtown, one of the best, and most popular, is the exquisite Mission San Xavier, a beauty when it was built in the 1780s and ’90s and a beauty still. The white edifice stands dramatically in an open field. Inside little wooden shelters outside the grounds, women fried dough on open flames and sold the powder-sugared treats to visitors. Children ran among the sightseers, selling candy bars and raising money for the San Xavier Mission School.

The chapel interior dazzles with bright colors and elaborate carvings. Sculptured saints stand in niches everywhere, including St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.

In places like these, a chapel on the grounds of the Tohono O’odham Reservation, a world away from baseball and apple pie, the boundaries of the United States and Mexico seem to blur.

Southwest of the mission, at Old Tucson Studios, the American touch returns at a theme park that once served Hollywood as a backlot for Westerns. A fire in 1995 destroyed 40 percent of Old Tucson, and since it was rebuilt, filming has been limited to a couple of commercials.

Even so, the streets of a filmic cowboy town have been faithfully restored to look as they did during “Arizona,” “Gunfight at the OK Corral,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and dozens of other productions. Just as a reminder, movie background music plays constantly, heightening the tension of a stop at the “Three Amigos” taco stand.

Old Tucson stands on the main route of Kinney Road, making it hard to pass by, especially with kids in the car. But a little farther on is the aforementioned Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum–a must-see. And not far beyond that is the other-worldly Saguaro National Park with its forests of tall, fat saguaro cacti. Another portion of the park stands on the east side of town.

At a dinner party one night, I asked a group of residents where they like to go. Their answers took the rest of the evening: Tubec, the quaint Mexican village turned artist colony; Kitt Peak National Observatory, where visitors can peek at the sky through telescopes; the town of Tombstone and its Boot Hill; Organ Pipe National Monument for still more imposing cactus; the golf courses; the resorts up in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Just beyond the Santa Catalina foothills, the joggers and hikers and nature lovers of Tucson gather at Sabino Canyon. Trams carry passengers up the 3.8 miles to the end. Some visitors walk down, many ride.

I rode to the top with a tramload of people. We passed hikers with walking sticks and joggers dripping sweat. Strollers making the return trip waved. Recent heavy rains had inundated a couple of the bridges, forcing those on foot to wade or tightrope precariously along the rock-hewn bridge walls.

“This is the hot spot for Tucsonans,” said a man sitting behind me. “Everyone comes here.” It is a pretty little canyon, one that residents love to point out when strangers assume Arizona is nothing but desert. Sabino Canyon has those rushing creeks, flowers, rugged mountain features, saguaro cactus on the slopes down below and pine trees in the upper reaches. People by the hundreds were out there. They brought their children if they had them. They packed lunches. Most of them looked as if they were about to make a day of it.

None of them seemed to care that the Chicago White Sox would be playing the Arizona Diamondbacks at 1:05 p.m.

DETAILS ON TUCSON

Getting there: American and United Airlines offer non-stop flights into Tucson from O’Hare. However, Phoenix, about 90 miles north, has the busier airport of the two major Arizona cities. Bipartisan Chicago baseball fans might find it easier to catch a Phoenix-bound flight and drive to Tucson if they plan to watch both teams on their home fields.

Getting around: As in most big western cities, the automobile rules. Tucson streets form a grid pattern, which eases navigation. Major highways aren’t hard to find.

Lodging: I stayed at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, a high-ranking member of the Tucson resort scene for those who enjoy tennis, golf and swimming. Similar facilities abound, at rates usually starting well above $200 a night. The most famous include the historic Arizona Inn downtown (no golf), the Sheraton El Conquistador Resort and Country Club and the Westin La Paloma.

The brown-brick buildings housing Ventana Canyon’s 398 rooms, blend into the surrounding hills. Two golf courses, a spa, tennis courts, hiking trails and three restaurants complete the picture. For such a high-caliber facility, the rooms are rather ordinary with airy Southwestern decor that seems to come by the yard in this part of the country.

Those looking for something different than a regular hotel should check out the extensive bed-and-breakfast scene and the many guest ranches that turn city slickers into instant saddlehands.

Standard hotels, suite hotels and transient apartments can be found at several locations.

Dining: As fate would have it, the Ventana Room at the Ventana Canyon resort ranks high in travel magazine polls and gets an AAA 4-star rating for its contemporary American fare.

No one I spoke with could agree on the best Mexican restaurant in a town so full of them. It would be hard to go wrong in the South Tucson area, a Mexican-American enclave where a bad Mexican restaurant couldn’t possibly survive. El Charro claims to be the oldest family-owned restaurant in the U.S. and some residents tell me practice has made perfect.

Daniel’s, a sophisticated Italian restaurant in an elegant little foothills shopping mall, usually fulfills its high ambitions and is full of little surprises, such as ostrich filets. Janos, downtown, combines French and Southwest cuisines in a delightful way.

Most of the other major ethnic and national cuisines are represented, including, of course, the Principality of Steak with several representatives serving up ballplayer food.

Access: The new ballpark has some seating areas designed to be wheelchair accessible–with excellent sightlines. Most of the newer buildings and accommodations in Tucson make an effort to be accessible, although some of the old historic sites downtown present difficulties.

Information: Write or call the Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau, 130 S. Scott Ave., Tucson, Ariz. 85701; 800-638-8350, ext. 143, or 520-624-1817; fax 520-884-7804 (e-mail: mtcvb@azstarnet.com; Internet: arizonaguide.com/visittucson).

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Robert Cross’ e-mail address is bobccross@aol.com