"I'm the quarterback because they give me the ball and I get it where it's supposed to go," Wain Davis said while perched 110 feet above Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City.
But in this case, the ball weighs five tons, the playing field is 24 stories tall and Davis' teammates wear hard hats and flannel shirts.Davis is tower crane operator for Jacobson Construction, contractor on the Boyer Co.'s Block 57 office tower, under construction at 201 S. Main. It's his job to help turn hundreds of tons of steel into the city's newest high-rise.
Davis, from Brigham City, and other workers have maintained a good pace - placing steel beams, welding and bolting them into place and erecting more than a floor per week on the structure.
"It's just like an erector set: piece by piece," Davis said.
From his high-altitude quarters inside the cockpit of a Comansa crane tower, Davis reads hand signals from workers to negotiate steel girders into place, keeping watch on his colleagues below balanced on 12-inch-wide beams.
"You've got men hanging on columns, and their lives depend on it; that's what makes it so spooky," he said, "I slip and they've got no place to go," he said.
His deft hands adjust controls inside the tower cockpit as Davis peers below and lowers a bundle of beams onto the second floor of the partially constructed building. A worker moves to adjust a load, seeing an apparent flaw in the delivery.
"Have faith in your operator," Davis shouts, turning the load with a flick of the wrist at the controls and easing the bundle onto a platform in the construction worker's equivalent of a three-point landing.
"He's the best there is," said Davis' boss, foreman Kevin Brown.
Davis has the experience to be one of the best in the business. He got "broken in" as crane operator in 1964 during construction of the McKay-Dee Hospital Center in Ogden.
Twenty-six years ago, moving steel with a giant crane was heady stuff.
"When we was young bucks, we was on top of the world, we was above everyone else," Davis said.
But the job brought with it some close calls, such as the time in the early 1970s when he was crane operator on the Regent Street parking structure in downtown Salt Lake City.
Davis was lifting a bundle of 60-foot-long rebar sections when two sections slipped loose, rocketed through a couple of lower floors "like two arrows" and trimmed the trousers of the project's foreman.
"That rebar went right down the seam of his pants, but it never put a scratch on him," Davis recalled.
For Davis, the job's exhilaration has subsided. "It used to be fun; now it's just a job," he said.
Lately, tower crane operators have had a tough time finding work. The late 1980s were lean years in Utah for construction workers like Davis who specialize in high-rise work. Office towers just weren't being built.
"We were starving to death. The last four or five years have been terrible for operators," Davis said.
The recent swell of office towers under construction is good news for Davis and other crane operators. The Boyer project, and others in Salt Lake City, means work.
Boyer's $45 million, 400,000-square-foot office tower is slated for completion in June, 1991, when Utah Power & Light Co. and other major tenants are expected to move in.
The tower, on the northwest corner of Block 57, bordered by State, Main, 200 South and 300 South streets, is touted as the cornerstone of the ailing block's redevelopment.