Orderly Super Bowl Throng Is a Routine Challenge for Pasadena

A festive Super Bowl crowd of 101,063 was remarkably well-mannered and produced few problems or arrests, police agencies supervising the big sporting event reported Sunday.

“It’s been a good crowd,” said Mary Schander, assistant to the Pasadena police chief. “To the best of my knowledge, there were no violent crimes, no serious injuries--just some bee stings.”

In all, she said as the throng filed out of the stadium into the comfortably cool night after the New York Giants’ 39-20 trouncing of the Denver Broncos, there were 67 arrests.

Pasadena police reported 36 arrests for grand theft offenses such as purse snatching and pocket picking; 22 for public drunkenness; three for narcotics violations; three for trespassing; and one each for auto burglary, ticket scalping and illegal vending.

The arrest statistics, she said, were “fairly comparable” to Rose Bowl crowds.

Additionally, Schander said, dozens of cars had to be towed from Pasadena streets before the game to open up roads leading to the stadium.

Although the game ended at about 6:40 p.m., police reported that some of the big crowd was late leaving the Rose Bowl area because of many post-game tailgate and corporate tent parties that were going on.

As a result, police said that traffic leaving Pasadena on Sunday night got out of town in a more staggered, orderly fashion than the gridlock that began to develop a couple of hours before the game’s kickoff shortly after 3 p.m.

The Pasadena Police Department, with its annual Rose Bowl crowd-control experience, was in charge of coordinating the traffic flow while receiving backup help from the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In all, about 150 officers and two police helicopters were assigned to control and watch over the crowd attending the game.

Police had advised sports fans to arrive extra early to avoid the inevitable traffic jams that eventually developed late Sunday morning, triggering traffic alerts on freeways and surface streets feeding into the Rose Bowl area. And apparently many in the crowd took that advice.

Cars and vans began arriving as early as 6 a.m., police said, and by 1 p.m. most of the parking spaces around the Rose Bowl were filled.

Meanwhile, souvenir and program vendors appeared to be doing a booming business with both Giants and Broncos items selling fast. After the game, souvenir hunters once again descended on vendors, many of whom were soon stripped of much of their merchandise.

Included in the heavy traffic that filled up parking areas were nearly 1,000 public and private buses shuttling thousands of fans from as far away as Orange County hotels 40 miles away. Many other individuals took advantage of a park-and-ride service from downtown Pasadena to the Rose Bowl provided by the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

Even though many fans stayed long after the game for more partying, most of the toasting of the teams was done before the kickoff, as the daytime temperature climbed into the mid-70s.

Punctuating the festive pregame atmosphere were the tailgate parties, while on nearby Brookside Golf Course dozens of white hospitality tents marked the sites of parties thrown by some of the country’s biggest corporations for their executives and customers.

The biggest pregame blast, however, was held across from the golf course at the Rosemont Recreational Center, where the Sheraton Hotel Corp. sponsored a party for the hundreds of bus and limousine drivers who, it was estimated by police, shuttled perhaps half the crowd to the game. They were fed chili, hamburgers, hot dogs, soft drinks and coffee while they watched the game on large-screen television sets.

As the crowd swarmed through the narrow streets leading to the stadium, many asked for tickets or held up “tickets wanted” signs. But there were few to be had at any price.

Some enterprising individuals, however, got a coveted view of the game anyway. One 38-year-old Orange County man said he bribed a gate attendant with a $100 bill to let him climb 25 feet of Rose Bowl scaffolding so that he could peer over the stadium’s wall.

Then, he said, he gave a second $100 bill to an attendant so that his father, visiting from Chicago, could do likewise.

But the father declined to play acrobat and ended up watching the game on television--outside the stadium.

Times staff writer Karen Roebuck contributed to this article.