COLLEGE FOOTBALL: THE BOWL GAMES : It Has Been Quite a Reign for Duke : Big Ten Commissioner Will Retire When a Replacement Is Chosen

One of Wayne Duke’s most prized possessions is the clipping from Sports Illustrated that pictures him with John Wayne at the Rose parade. John Wayne sent him the clipping and signed it, “To Wayne Duke from Duke Wayne.”

Wayne Duke, commissioner of the Big Ten, smiles when he tells about that now-fading momento.

So you see, Duke does have some fond memories of the annual trip he has made to California for the Rose Bowl every year for the past 18 years. But ask him about the highlights and lowlights of his New Year’s Day ritual and he gives that familiar Wayne Duke grimace.

He had been in town less than 3 hours Wednesday and he had already been asked why the Big Ten can’t win the Rose Bowl.

Since announcing his retirement last summer, a retirement that will become effective in the upcoming year when a successor is chosen, Duke has had plenty of opportunities to review his tenure as leader of the Big Ten.

The conference boasts the largest football and basketball attendance in the country, and that comes from winning a lot of games.

Duke was chairman of the NCAA basketball tournament committee that expanded the field to 64 teams and upped the TV rights so that the tournament now brings in about $55 million.

Duke was on the committee that put together a $103 million TV package between the Big Ten and the Rose Bowl that will run through 1997.

The Rose Bowl game is truly dear to his heart. Duke has always been able to refer to the game as “the granddaddy of them all” without cracking a smile at the corny sound. He believes it.

It’s a traditional matchup, and Duke believes that college football should be more traditional, should match schools and school spirits for the pride and the memories and the glory, not an abstract No. 1 and No. 2 for a mythical title.

“You can have a ‘national championship’ game in Phoenix this year, or, from time to time, in Miami, but this game will be sold out year after year after year,” Duke said.

The Rose Bowl is his kind of college football.

Walter Byers, the longtime executive director of the NCAA, now retired, who strongly influenced Duke during his early years in the NCAA office, told the Chicago Tribune: “We both came from the romantic era in sports. Emphasis was placed on values to be learned from the game. You competed because you enjoyed it.”

While he can get quite philosophical about the over-emphasis on winning and losing, even at the level of eighth-grade soccer his grandson plays, Duke cannot deny the impact it has on him to have to see his teams lose.

“I go in the dressing rooms,” Duke said. “I try to go to our team’s dressing room after any game I see in the conference. I always go down after the Rose Bowl game. And there’s a disappointment in there after a loss. People who are critical of our bowl record, or even people who are critical of the team’s performance that day, don’t have to see, first hand, the terrible disappointment that is felt by the players and the coaches who have put so much into the game.

“The guy up in the stands who has been tailgating all day and who thinks he has all the answers, doesn’t have to see what losing does to the players and the coaches.”

Or what it does to Duke, who has come back up to the pressbox looking so distressed that writers have joked about keeping an eye on him so he doesn’t jump from the roof.

Duke tries to keep smiling. “Tom Hansen (commissioner of the Pacific 10) tells me I’m a very good loser,” Duke said. “I tell him, that’s because I’ve had a lot of practice.”

But it doesn’t get easier.

As he flipped through the pages of his memories, Duke could not seem to separate good times and bad times in Southern California from the wins and the losses.

“I’ll tell you the contrast,” Duke said. “The first year we were here and something that happened just last year make a good contrast.”

The first year Duke and his wife, Martha, came out for the Rose Bowl game, Stanford beat Michigan. It was after the 1971 season.

For the Duke family, it was an emotional time, anyway. He had become Big Ten commissioner on Sept. 1, 1971, after 8 years as commissioner of the Big Eight and 11 years of service in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. office. They had just sold their home of 19 years to make the move to Chicago.

After all those years of going to Miami every holiday season for the Orange Bowl, they were in Southern California--where it was raining.

The Michigan team was having to practice in Bakersfield.

Nothing was looking too rosy.

And then, the all-important game. In the final minutes of the game, Michigan got a safety to go ahead of Stanford, 12-10. But Don Bunce, the Stanford quarterback, took Stanford down the field and Rod Garcia kicked a field goal to beat the Wolverines.

“Martha and I had been talking about how the final standings would go if Michigan lost, and we knew that Big Eight teams were going to be 1-2-3,” Duke said. “We’d been talking about that for days.

“Well, Lawrence Welk was grand marshal of the parade that year, and he was at the Tournament House that night for the party. He stood up there and said, ‘A-1 and a-2 and a-3,’ and Martha burst into tears.”

Not a happy memory.

The Dukes decided in subsequent years to skip the party at the Tournament House. It was a celebration. Often the Big Ten contingent didn’t feel like celebrating. The Dukes would go back to the presidential suite at the Pasadena Hilton to spend the evening with Big Ten guests.

Last season, when Michigan State beat USC, they again skipped the Tournament House celebration. It wouldn’t look right to show up only after a victory.

So the Dukes were back in their suite that evening, savoring a victory that, admittedly, was a “blue collar win . . . a game we won after USC fumbled, but we’d lost a lot of games that way” when there was a knock at the door.

“All the Rose Bowl officers--Harriman Cronk and all the rest--came to bring me my Rose Bowl watch,” Duke said. “That was a highlight. They left their celebration to bring that to me, and I appreciated that.”

There were some points in their long relationship when some of the Rose Bowl folks were not too happy with Duke, when he sided with the movement to exclude the exclusivity clause from the Rose Bowl contract.

Some feared that allowing Big Ten and Pac-10 teams to compete in other bowls, also, would dilute the impact of the Rose Bowl. Duke believed that the Rose Bowl, matching the champions of the conferences, would remain as strong as ever while letting more teams compete would be of benefit to both conferences.

He was right, as usual.

Over the last few years, Big Ten and Pac-10 schools have claimed an average of 40% of the total bowl pot of about $50 million.

Duke points out that opening opportunities was good for parity in his conference, good for attendance, good for recruiting.

“When I had just been named commissioner of the Big Eight, and I was only 34 years old at the time, one of the first things I faced was the news that the Orange Bowl was terminating our exclusive contract,” Duke said. “They wanted to be able to invite the top teams, to have a ‘national championship’ game.

“Sports Illustrated wrote that the loss of that contract would be the death knoll of the Big Eight. Actually, it turned out to be a boon to the Big Eight. It opened up vistas for other bowls. We went to the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl. It was great for our conference.”

Since the Rose Bowl changed its policy, and the Big Ten started to compete in other bowls in 1976, Big Ten schools have taken 56 bowl berths.

Duke and his wife have been at a bowl game on New Year’s Day for the last 26 years. They might attend a bowl game just for fun next year. Or they might not.

If he’s not at the Rose Bowl next year, he says he’ll miss it.

“I’ve been to most of the bowl games at one time or another,” Duke said. “I’ve been to all the major bowls--Orange, Cotton, Sugar. . . . And this is not to degrade any of the others. But I think the Rose Bowl is special.”