Future of Bowl Not so Rosy

It was sad, but this was our last Rose Bowl as we know it. Next year (and presumably ever after) it goes to join some cockamamie bowl system to which college football is ill-suited.

Oh, well, they call it “progress.” But that’s what they said about telephone answering machines too.

Remember the Rose Bowl? The Four Horsemen ran here. Roy Riegels ran the wrong way here. Doyle Nave threw here. It’s part of Americana.

You see, it used to be the Rose Committee could invite whom they wished. It was an American tribal rite like the Kentucky Derby, the Indianapolis 500, the Masters, the World Series.

It began back on New Year’s Day, 1902, when the host committee was brave enough (or uninformed enough) to invite a Michigan team coached by the mythical Fielding H. (or “Hurry Up”) Yost and known as the “Point-a-Minute Team.” Big mistake. Kind of like the old cartoon in which a fighter looks in horror at his opponent, who looks like something they found in a Neanderthal’s cave and his manager says, “My boy says he don’t fight till he finds out exactly why they call it the ‘Bushwick Assassin.’ ”

Stanford should have refused to field its team till it found out exactly why they called it the “Point-a-Minute” team. Stanford found out. Michigan 49, Stanford 0.

They got the message out here. They began to invite Ivy League schools instead. Harvard, no less. Brown. They got Navy out here one year.

Then, the University of Southern California Trojans hired their own Point-a-Minute coach, Howard Jones.

The Rose Bowl was his bailiwick. They brought Pittsburgh out here one year, unbeaten and thought to be unbeatable. Jones’ Trojans beat them, 47-14. But that was nothing. The Trojans had won one game that year 66-0, another 64-0. They beat Idaho, 72-0. And they beat UCLA by--get this!--76-0!

The Trojans beat another Pitt team, 35-0, in the Rose Bowl.

The Rose Bowl, meanwhile, was seeping into the nation’s consciousness. Who cannot remember shivering back East in front of the radio listening to Graham McNamee tell you of a game being played in bright sunshine, amid blossoming oranges and flowering roses?

In January yet! Did the Rose Bowl inspire the Bing Crosby song “It’s June in January”? Possibly.

Of course, color television was the death knell. California was inundated with immigrants. All over the Snowbelt, they were piling their mattresses atop the family station wagon and heading west once they saw people sitting in their shirt sleeves in January, sipping iced orange juice. The country almost tipped over. Some of us begged for Jan. 1 to come up rainy, muddy, soggy miserable. A bad advertisement. It never did. It hasn’t rained on the Rose Bowl game in 43 years.

One year, 1934, it did rain. And it was the last time an Ivy League team was invited--Columbia. They were supposed to be typical preppies and roll over against a Stanford team that was 8-1-1. Columbia had been beaten by Princeton, 20-0, that year whereas Stanford had a lineup of All-Americans.

But when the game was over, every schoolboy in the country knew the name Al Barabas and the fact he had run a trick play to score the game’s only touchdown for the Ivy League’s second triumph in the Rose Bowl (Harvard beat Oregon, 7-6, in 1920).

In 1946, taking note of the fact the West Coast had largely been settled by people from the Midwest and it had constituencies here, the bowl committee signed a pact with the Big Ten.

The Pacific Coast was shocked. Humiliated. The first year, in the 1947 game, Illinois beat UCLA, 45-14. The second year was worse, Michigan 49, USC 0.

West Coasters staggered out of the bowl, hollow-eyed with disbelief. Mortified. Rooters were all but perched on Pasadena’s famous Suicide Bridge.

In 1902, with eight minutes left to play, the Stanford team captain had leaned over the line of scrimmage to the Michigan captain and murmured, “If you are willing, we are ready to quit.” They did.

By 1959, the league was ready to carry the white flag for the conference. The Big Ten won 12 of the first 13 games of the pact before Washington’s Purple gang under Coach Jim Owens dismembered Wisconsin, 44-8, in 1960. Things evened up after that till even Stanford was winning two bowls in a row.

Carefree days. Faded memories. Where have you gone, Al Barabas? What are the Four Horsemen, Daddy? What’s a Doyle Nave? Is the Rose Bowl as we know it as long gone as leather helmets and dropkicks and passing allowed only five yards behind the line of scrimmage and penalties for two incomplete passes in a row?

Is the Rose Bowl to become just an artifact? Don’t we want Trojans and Bruins, and, yes, Cougars and Huskies, Golden Bears and Beavers duking it out with teams from the heartland? Don’t we want tourists with their cameras and potato salad coming to catch a glimpse of Bob Hope or maybe George Clooney or Jay Leno? What do we need with some sterile game between Colorado State and Auburn?

What are you guys, Communists? Go back to your call waiting and Internets and at-the-tone-push-the-pound-key existence and leave us a little bit of yesterday. What was wrong with that Rose Bowl game Thursday? What was wrong with Four Horsemen and Knute Rockne and Howard Jones and Doyle Nave coming in to throw a winning touchdown against a team that hadn’t been scored on? What was wrong with having Woody Hayes stomping around?

Change the Rose Bowl? Next thing you know these guys will want to go back and level Niagara Falls for a parking lot.