By the time Ray Kinsella is urged to sell his farm in “Field of Dreams,” the baseball diamond he built has already cost him almost everything.
Terence Mann, a reclusive author, pleads with him not to give up. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” the character played by James Earl Jones tells Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner. “It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.”
But baseball, Mann says, has marked the time.
“People will come,” he tells him.
For the past 53 years in Iowa, RAGBRAI has marked the time, too.
It has rolled across the state like its own army of steamrollers — a bright, clattering force of wheels and chains.
This year, as the nation marks its 250th birthday, thousands joining the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa will come to the movie’s original site in Dyersville for the first time in its 38-year history.
“RAGBRAI is a rolling, moving tribute to Iowa and to rural America,” said Keith Rahe, 67, president and CEO of Travel Dubuque. “When you get here to the Field of Dreams Movie Site, this is really the epitome of it. This is pure Americana; this is rural America at its finest.”
RAGBRAI has passed through Dyersville before, most recently in 2007. The movie site itself, though, has been beyond its reach, at the end of a gravel road that was a poor fit for the road bikes that carry most of the riders across the state.
That changed when Major League Baseball came to town in 2021. To stage the first regular-season MLB game ever played in Iowa, organizers built a professional ballpark beside the movie site and added paved access roads to ease the pain of moving vehicles into the farm field.
On July 25, the movie site will become the final breakfast stop of the seven-day ride, before cyclists continue toward Dubuque and cap off their more than 409-mile journey with a traditional tire dip in the Mississippi River.
“I think when you look at Iowa, and you ask people about Iowa, RAGBRAI pops up, and the ‘Field of Dreams’ pops up,” RAGBRAI Ride Director Matt Phippen said. “A lot of people have seen this movie; they love this movie, so to be able to put two of them together during America 250 and celebrate all that is awesome in Iowa is gonna be pretty cool.”
‘What the hell did we just do?’
RAGBRAI got its start in August 1973, when Des Moines Register columnists John Karras and Donald Kaul rode across Iowa, from Sioux City to Davenport, and invited readers to join them.
About 300 people took them up on their offer, with 114 finishing the full route. Among them was the ride’s first unlikely star: Clarence Pickard, an 83-year-old retired farmer on a used ladies’ Schwinn who wore a long-sleeve shirt over a wool sweater and a silver pith helmet.
An estimated 2,700 people joined the ride in the second year, when it was known as the Second Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. By the third year, it had become the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.
In 1989, RAGBRAI was in its 17th year. That summer’s route began July 22 in Glenwood and ended 479 miles later in Bellevue. Dyersville made the route for the first time.
In April of that year, “Field of Dreams” opened in theaters.
The film started on 22 screens. Word of mouth pushed it past 1,000 screens within a month. It stayed there for six weeks, earning more than $84 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, and cementing itself as a cultural phenomenon that transcended sports.
Dyersville, long known as the Farm Toy Capital of the World, had a new calling card.
Rahe was farming nearby when the movie was discreetly filmed on the Lansing family farm in 1988.
“1988 was actually one of the hottest, driest summers here ever,” Rahe said.
The corn grew so tall, Rahe said, “that they couldn’t see Costner in it, so they had to build a platform down the middle of the rows for him to stand on.”
Hank Lucas, 77, a local man who appeared in the movie, portrayed one of the ghost baseball players, the old-time figures who come out of the corn to play on Kinsella’s diamond.
“It was very, very hot,” Lucas said. “Sometimes we had a night shoot, we’d be here at 5 o’clock, and we’d have to go get our costumes, and those could stand by themselves from the sweat.”
Steve Olberding, 70, another Ghost Player, said Hollywood continuity rules threw them another curveball.
“We couldn’t wash the uniforms because if you had a grass stain, that had to stay in the shot,” Olberding said.
Lucas said he never expected the movie to become a nationwide classic.
“We thought it was going to be the other way around,” Lucas said. “We went to the movie theater. We came out, we just shook our heads: ‘What the hell did we just do?’”
If you build it
The movie ends with headlights streaming toward the farm, proof Mann’s promise of “people will come” was realized. On set, about 1,500 cars from the local community helped out and lined the roads leading to the field for the final shot.
After the film’s release, visitors began turning down Lansing Road to play catch on the diamond.
Reminiscing in 2022, Don Lansing, whose family owned part of the site, told the Register about 7,000 people came that first year. The next year, 15,000 came.
“It grew fast and I didn’t really have any idea of what else it should be except for being a big tourist attraction,” Lansing said.
Lansing nailed a Folgers coffee can to a bench for donations. He left out bats and balls.
Rahe, Lucas and other local baseball players who once faced each other on competing teams took to the field together each Sunday to give visitors a show.
They dressed like the old-time players from the film, walked out of the corn and pitched to tourists.
“We came out one Sunday back in 1989, kind of as a lark,” Rahe said. “And a little girl happened to see us and shout, ‘look, Mom, it’s the Ghost Players!’”
A local reporter captured the moment, Rahe said, under the headline: “Ghost Players appear magically from the corn.”
The next Sunday, Rahe said, “The owners called me and said, ‘Hey, are you guys coming back? There’s a lot of people waiting for you.’”
So the Ghost Players were born.
Since then, the group has taken the routine far beyond Iowa, performing in far-flung places from Camp Red Cloud near the Korean Demilitarized Zone to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific.
“’You have no idea what that meant to us back at that time, because we were so homesick,’” Rahe recalled a woman once telling him after the Ghost Players visited Lakenheath Air Base in England in 1998. “’You guys just bringing a part of America there made the difference to us.’”
Marv Maiers, 75, another Ghost Player, said the attention sometimes felt strange for men who often still had farm work waiting.
“If those people knew I was going to go home and shovel manure the rest of the day, they wouldn’t be asking me for an autograph,” he said.
They will come
The Ghost Players say they’re ready for people from around the world to come to them during this year’s RAGBRAI. The ride has drawn more than 10,000 registrants from all 50 states and at least eight countries, from Canada to Denmark to China.
The route begins July 19 in Onawa. It ends July 25 in Dubuque, Iowa’s oldest city. Dyersville is the final overnight town.
The America 250 theme will be clearest on the ride into the aptly named town of Independence. Organizers are encouraging riders to dress in red, white and blue. A bike-borne flag crew that built flagpoles at veterans’ homes in 2025 is expected to expand that work along the route this year.
Phippen said the 2026 route was built around smaller communities. The ride will come close to larger cities, like Ames and Waterloo-Cedar Falls, but it will stay out of both.
“If riders want to experience small-town Iowa, this is the year to do it,” Phippen said. “Every town on the route is a small town.”
Phippen said the updated roads helped make the stop work this year.
“The roads are in great shape,” Phippen said. “The last two days probably have the best roads of the entire week, flat and fast, and it gives riders the ability to come and experience Field of Dreams.”
The roads are part of the site’s newest inning.
Costner walked out of the corn before the first pitch in 2021, when the Chicago White Sox played the New York Yankees in the first regular-season MLB game ever held in Iowa. Nearly 6 million people watched on television.
MLB returned in 2022 for a game between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds. The Cubs won 4-2.
Both of those games were on temporary fields.
The league is scheduled back in Iowa on Aug. 13, when the Minnesota Twins play the Philadelphia Phillies at the Field of Dreams site on a permanent, professional park. RAGBRAI gets there less than three weeks earlier.
“Having the brand-new MLB stadium, which they have games coming up, go to the movie site, it’s something that riders are going to experience and absolutely love,” Phippen said.
The site around the original diamond has changed as quickly as a farm field can. Its 297 acres are now stewarded by an Iowa nonprofit led by an all-volunteer board. A $120 million expansion plan includes youth baseball and softball fields. It also includes a permanent professional ballpark that will replace the temporary stadium used for past MLB games.
Rahe said the movie site keeps working because people can attach their own lives to it.
“This movie and place is about moments,” Rahe said. “We go through our lives, and it’s all about moments that we create, moments that we remember. And that’s what this place is.”
Phippen said RAGBRAI runs on a similar fuel.
“It’s all about memories,” Phippen said. “RAGBRAI is all about creating memories, finding someone new that you’ll be able to pedal around with and learn where they’re from and what they’re all about.”
For Rahe, RAGBRAI’s stop will help put the movie site back in play.
“You can go anywhere in the world, and they ask you where you’re from, and you can say Iowa, and they’re going to look at you like, ‘OK, is that Ohio, Idaho, where they grow potatoes?’,” Rahe said. “But you tell them, ‘Have you ever seen the movie Field of Dreams?’ Oh my Lord, yes.”
He has watched the farm become one of the state’s shorthand images.
“Here we are, 2026, and look at what we’ve done with it,” Rahe said. “The Field of Dreams has become the Mount Rushmore of the state of Iowa.”
What is RAGBRAI?
The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa is the world’s largest, longest and oldest annual noncompetitive bicycle tour. It’s been held on endlessly varied west-to-east routes from the Missouri River valley to the Mississippi every year since 1973, canceled only once, in 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tens of thousands of people on everything from road bikes to roller skates participate in the seven-day journey, coming from all 50 states and as far away as Australia. This year’s 53rd edition will begin July 19 in Onawa and end July 25 in Dubuque.
What is the Field of Dreams Movie Site?
The Field of Dreams Movie Site is one of the top tourist attractions in Iowa. Just outside Dyersville in northeast Iowa, the original baseball diamond next to a vintage farmhouse was built in 1988 for the filming of the movie “Field of Dreams.” Released the following year with a cast including Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Amy Madigan, Ray Liotta and Burt Lancaster, it became a classic. Expanded over the years, the original movie site hosted a 2021 Major League Baseball game between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox on a specially built temporary field. A second game, between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds, followed in 2022. This year, the Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies will play at a new, permanent, professional ballpark Aug. 13. A museum and event center also are planned.
Nick El Hajj is a reporter at the Register. He can be reached at nelhajj@gannett.com. Follow him on X at @nick_el_hajj.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: In Iowa, RAGBRAI goes the distance to the Field of Dreams
Reporting by Nick El Hajj, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Nick El Hajj, Des Moines Register | USA TODAY Network
