THE ROSE BOWL : ARIZONA STATE 22, MICHIGAN 15 : For Schembechler, It’s the Thorn Bowl

If Bo Schembechler ever makes it to Pasadena to coach another Rose Bowl team, there’s one adjustment he should make.

You know that headset he wears on the sidelines while coaching his Michigan Wolverines? Next time, Bo should adjust the big cups so they cover his eyes instead of his ears.

How much punishment should one man--or one conference, for that matter--be made to endure?

Thursday, in the middle of a gulch in Pasadena, a Pac-10 team beat a Big Ten team.

In other startling news flashes of the day, the Rose Parade proceeded from West to East along Colorado Boulevard, and during the telecast of the Rose Bowl game, Dick Enberg was heard to exclaim, “Oh, my!”

Ah, Bo.

Eight trips to the Rose Bowl, seven defeats.

Thursday evening, Bo was the last Michigan man out of the Rose Bowl locker room. The players, coaches, ballboys, everybody else, was waiting on the buses. Bo sent word out of the locker room, via a team PR man, that the postgame press conference would have to do; he wasn’t going to do any more interviews.

One TV crew tried anyway. Bo emerged from the locker room, walking briskly, head down, carrying an attache case in his left hand and a smoldering cigar stub in his right.

As the TV crew dogged Bo along the cold, dark and narrow Rose Bowl tunnel, they pressed too close, and Bo angrily shoved the TV sound man on the shoulder. When the man persisted, holding his boom mike in front of Schembechler as he walked, Bo cursed and tried to twist the mike off its stick. Then he climbed onto a bus and was gone.

Hey, Bo had tried to be nice. For two weeks, he had been affable and had made his players accessible to the media. His gruff image was taking a beating.

In Thursday’s postgame press conference, Bo gritted his teeth and did his best. Had this been Woody Hayes after a seventh Rose Bowl loss, security personnel would have been standing by with tranquilizer dart guns and butterfly nets.

“I hope we can make this real quick,” Schembechler said, sitting down behind the microphone and proceeding to wring his hands nervously.

He answered several questions with several cliches, saying things like, “We just didn’t play a good second half.”

What about ASU running back Darryl Harris, someone asked Bo. Harris gained 109 yards.

“Nice back,” Bo said crisply, with a hint of a smile. Next question.

What happened?

“We never had the ball (in the second half),” Schembechler said, rambling somewhat, “and then when we got it the first couple times, we didn’t do anything with it.” And so on.

When someone asked him about the noise made by ASU rooters, noise that may have caused Michigan to mess up a play late in the first half, Bo said acidly: “Maybe some day we’ll get as many tickets as they (Pac-10 fans) do. That would be nice if the Rose Bowl was to do that.”

Bo said his offensive line was “lousy,” that it would be “stupid” to blame Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh for the second-half collapse. Bo said Arizona State was the quickest team his Wolverines had faced.

Then someone asked the inevitable-- and unanswerable--question: Why the heck does the Big Ten have such a horrible Rose Bowl record, 12 losses in the last 13 games? Bo wrung his hands some more and said:

“You’ll have to judge that for yourselves, and you’ll all have fun doing it.”

Don’t be so sure, Bo.

It’s hard work, not fun, trying to come up with fresh ways to describe the same train wreck every New Year’s Day.

These games tend to blur together in one’s memory. Every year Coach Woodbo Hayesbechler brings his Midwest U Buckarines to Southern California, gets beat and departs in a huff.

This time, it was supposed to be different. This time, instead of a team of rugged L.A. beach boys or hardy Northwest lumberjacks, the opponent was a team from the desert, a team as unfamiliar with Disneyland and the West Coast and the Rose Bowl as were Bo’s boys.

But as Gertrude Stein would have written had she been a football scribe instead of a reporter on the nature beat, “A Rose Bowl is a Rose Bowl is a Rose Bowl.”

And if Robert Frost had written the official Big Ten poem, something for the visitors to recite as they leave the Rose Bowl with stiff upper lips, he would have included something about “ . . . and miles to go before I weep.”

Schembechler wasn’t crying after the game. He was keeping most of his frustration and anguish inside, but you know it had to be killing him.

Bo is a future Hall of Fame coach, a Midwest institution loved by many and respected by even more. But, except for a lone Rose Bowl win in 1981, Bo is the Gene Mauch of college football.

Immediately after the game, Bo addressed his team briefly, behind closed doors.

“He said he felt bad we didn’t play as well as we could have and should have,” quarterback Harbaugh said.

“He didn’t yell,” said running back Jamie Morris, a tough kid who at 5-7 is so small he has to hurdle caterpillars. “He told us the better team won today. If we had played them yesterday, or tomorrow. . . . “

Did Bo say anything about next year? Any vows to return?

“Bo said nothing about next year,” Morris said.

What could Bo say? Wait till next year? This is next year.