Granddad Getting Bowled Over

The way life measures up in matters postseason, Michigan or Ohio State or Illinois will be matched against USC in the Rose Bowl.

ABC, which produces an inordinate amount of cash to televise the game, exhales deeply.

“Thank you, heaven,” it says. “But for this blessing, it could have been Washington State and Indiana.”

When it comes to cutthroat New Year’s Day football, now featuring seven games, the network doing the Rose Bowl is made to perspire, no longer sitting atop an automatic hit.

Faded elegance, the Rose Bowl rarely offers the prime game, meaning those who promote it, or televise it, must hope, at least, for principals with wide followings.

On the West Coast, that would be USC and UCLA. In the Big Ten, it would be Michigan and Ohio State.

But competition in the leagues has so deteriorated that the Rose Bowl, locked in with the two, is beginning to lose the carbonation that has given fizz to its match for so long.

Normally today, you write off half the teams, or more, in each conference at the start of the season. And, by the end, you are looking pretty much at the same colors, mostly belonging to USC and UCLA on one side and Michigan and Ohio State on the other.

On Jan. 1, USC will have graced the scene three years in a row. And an audit discloses that over the last 20 years, the visiting force has been Michigan or Ohio State 16 times.

The monotony suggests a period in Texas in which all the bit shooters drove Cadillacs. You never asked a man what kind of car he bought. You merely inquired, “What color?”

The Rose Bowl bills itself as the Granddaddy of Them All, a tribute more to its age than its impact. It sells out, almost unfailingly, and its financial health is good.

But all too often on the New Year’s card, it is the tap dancer supplementing the headline act. In vaudeville, Fink’s Mules warmed up audiences as the Rose Bowl does today.

Little old ladies in Pasadena don’t like it. Over gin the other day, one was heard to grumble: “We are being upstaged by something called the Federal Express Orange Bowl. What the hell is the Federal Express Orange Bowl?”

“Are you sure it isn’t pony express?” another asked.

“Pony express may be sponsoring a game in Fresno.”

Operating the only major postseason game that is totally committed to two conferences, the Rose Bowl shuts itself off from teams that may be interesting that particular season.

“But we don’t have to enter the dogfight,” the Rose Bowl explains.

Indeed, it doesn’t. And, sidestepping the dogfight, it has wound up in the water closet, with TV ratings that have slipped and with such contempt developed by competitors for the Granddaddy of Them All that they have dared take it on, head to head, on the air.

In the past, who would have been so audacious, so consummately brassy as to overlap the Rose Bowl? Would some hillbilly try to win a singing contest from Pavarotti?

“Look,” you say gingerly to Pasadena. “Maybe the time has come to forget the lock-in and start thinking about the dogfight. Rose Bowl money can lick a lot of dogs.”

“We cherish our relationship with the Big Ten and Pacific 10,” Pasadena lashes back. “It has stood since 1947.”

“A newspaper we remember stood since 1903,” Pasadena is reminded. “It isn’t with us anymore.”

“But our two conferences have stature and they have character,” Pasadena responds. “They embody everything that is good in institutions of learning.”

“Are you selling learning or football?” you reply. “This is show business. And the same teams coming in every year are getting to be a yawn. Do you know what killed the six-day bike race? Its act never changed. And the same thing one day will kill Old Faithful at Yellowstone.”

Pasadena used to be more inventive. Offering its first bowl game in 1902, it shut it down as bad theater when Michigan creamed Stanford, 49-0.

Do you know what Pasadena came up with the next year? A polo match. That seemed a good idea, inasmuch as no team, up to that point, had lost 49-0 in polo.

Pasadena then tried an ostrich race, followed by a race between a camel and an elephant. It also came on with a tug of war, which, today, might be called the John Hancock Tug of War. And, by 1916, it was ready again for football.

In postseason play, the Rose Bowl is sitting in on a high-stakes poker game. To succeed, folks there must produce more than a fund of happy recollections on how the pot used to be theirs.