Chris Dufresne : Cheers for the Free(dom) Enterprise System

Today, in the name of Freedom and its bowl, we rejoice. For played out this week in our humble little town of Anaheim was a homespun rendition of the Chrysler Corp.’s bailout by the United States government.

If Lee Iacocca were here, he’d throw a bear hug around the City of Anaheim, for sure. Picture tears welling in the eyes of Lady Liberty.

For the city and its visitors and convention bureau this week spared a dying soul when the Freedom Bowl came crawling up the steps of City Hall, its hand outstretched.

It seemed the Freedom Bowl, an annual college postseason football game at Anaheim Stadium for all of two years now, needed a little sum of $250,000 to pay off some old debts. You know how that goes when you forget to carry a number or misplace a decimal point.

The Freedom Bowl closed its eyes hard and wished and hoped for the money to appear, but it never did. And this week, on the verge of extinction, it brought its sad case to the city. If it didn’t get the money by June 30, the bowl and all its wonderment would disappear, depriving the city of all the joy it has brought.

This wasn’t just another game, remember, this was the Freedom Bowl. You get Washington against Colorado some years.

The City of Anaheim threw out its chest and stared down at the cowering Freedom Bowl but didn’t so much slap its wrists.

Its five-member City Council voted unanimously to help this poor sister and is in the process of drawing up a check for $250,000 of taxpayers’ money.

Interest rates? Heck no, that would be mean. The money is interest-free and doesn’t have to be paid back till 1994. Swell guys, those Anaheim folks. It’s enough to make you want to re-finance your car loan through the city and let it handle all the paper work.

And never mind about those two Anaheim City Council members who are either on the Freedom Bowl Board of Directors or the list of advisers. People are going to talk, sure, but we’ve been assured that their role in the game had nothing to do with their vote. They did not have to declare a conflict of interest because of the corporation’s non-profit status.

Of course, there are going to be some critics of the city’s move to bail out the Freedom Bowl. There are going to be some who say that a free enterprise system is nothing more than survival of the fittest, and that strong bowl games should be weeded from weak ones through a natural process. Let the Freedom Bowl die, they’ll say.

There are going to be some who claim that sports should not receive preferential treatment from a city just because a nation and its people happen to be obsessed by the business of athletics.

There are going to be people who say that there are enough bowl games to stomach as it is.

And then there will be the low-blowers, the ones who will pull skeletons like the Los Angeles Express from the closet. The Express, you’ll remember, was the United States Football League team that came into town and sucked a community dry before dropping off the face of the earth. The Express left with a debt of more than $1 million, much of the money being owed to local merchants and booster club members.

But who needs those kind of cynics?

We all know the Freedom Bowl is going to rise from the dust and make us all believers. We all know it takes time for a bowl game to get on its feet.

The Freedom Bowl has just been hit with a little bad luck, that’s all.

Look at the first game in 1984, when Texas and Iowa were forced to play in a torrential downpour. We all know that in Southern California it’s not even cool to own an umbrella, let alone use one. And what about the television company that covered the first game, MetroSports/TCS? How was the Freedom Bowl to know that those rats would up and declare bankruptcy and stiff our bowl out of $340,000?

No, the Freedom Bowl’s going to be just fine. You’ll see. Someday, it’ll even get some good teams to play in it.

One day, we’ll all sit back and laugh about this little loan thing. Eight years from now, newspaper photographers will smother a downtown press conference in Anaheim and snap away as Freedom Bowl President Kevin Forth proudly presents the mayor a certified check for $250,000.

Forth will laugh with the mayor and tell him how the Freedom Bowl took the money out of petty cash.

It’ll be great.