But It’s Not the Coliseum or Rose Bowl : Shriners Finally Find Field for Charity Game

Since its debut in 1952, the Shrine all-star high school football game in Southern California has raised millions of dollars for charity while featuring such stars-to-be as Jim Plunkett (now with the Raiders), John Elway (Denver) and Vince Ferragamo (Buffalo).

But in the last couple of years, the game has taken some bad bounces.

Twelve days before last year’s event, scheduled for the Rose Bowl, Pasadena officials informed the sponsoring Al Malaikah Shrine Temple that the field was too damaged to be used.

The Shriners, who had already finished printing the tickets and programs, said they couldn’t find another field on such short notice and canceled the game. They later filed a breach-of-contract suit against Pasadena, which owns the Rose Bowl.

Then, this year, negotiations to hold the game in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum broke down. Instead, the Shrine game will be played Saturday night at East Los Angeles College, whose Weingart Stadium has a capacity of 21,500, less than one-fourth that of the Coliseum or Rose Bowl.

The 1983 game drew 32,535 fans to the Rose Bowl.

“It’s a little discouraging,” said Gil Chesterton, the Shrine game publicist. “Here we’re talking about a game filled with stars of the future--we’ve had 45 players who’ve gone on to be All-Americans--and it’s for charity besides, and we have trouble finding a field.”

The game, played for the benefit of the Shrine Hospital for Crippled Children in Los Angeles, pits a team from the South against a team from the North, the dividing line being the Santa Monica and Pomona freeways.

Among the stars performing this year is the North’s Aaron Emanuel of Quartz Hill High in Palmdale, a 6-foot-3, 215-pound running back who was one of the most sought-after high school players in the nation. He will attend USC this fall.

The Shriners say the cancellation of last year’s game cost them $80,000. Some of the players also complained at the time that they had hoped to use the all-star event as a showcase to obtain a major football scholarship.

Shrine officials suspect that Pasadena’s intention may have been to save the field for the Olympics, pointing out that less than two months after the cancellation, the Rose Bowl was used as the site of 11 Olympic soccer matches.

The City of Pasadena, in its response to the lawsuit, contends that the Shrine game couldn’t go on because of “the destruction of a large portion of the turf,” caused by “unseasonably hot weather” and by a motorcycle competition held at the Rose Bowl a few weeks earlier. The city says the closing of the field was “a reasonable and legal exercise of discretion regarding the administration of the Rose Bowl.”

Coliseum Falls Through

As for this year, the Shriners say they thought they had a tentative date at the Coliseum, only to find out later that the field had been taken that night for an off-road vehicle race.

However, Coliseum General Manager Jim Hardy said, “When they (the Shriners) asked for a date, they never sent us a non-refundable deposit--something we get from every tenant. I think they were trying to keep us hanging while they waited to see if they could get back into the Rose Bowl.”

Field problems aside, it isn’t easy to sell a high school all-star football game--especially one taking place in July--in an area with as many spectator sports as Southern California.

Publicist Chesterton takes a philosophical view:

“I guess we don’t get that much attention from the media because we don’t have anyone on drugs or threatening to go on strike. Our players include two student body presidents, a class president, 12 scholar-athletes, a Sunday school teacher, a worker for the Junior Blind, an announcer for the Special Olympics and a kid who wants to be an astronaut.”