For Andersen, Freedom’s a Word for Publicity

Don Andersen, the man who promoted elephant races at Cal State Fullerton and that white elephant known as the World Football League, finds himself entrusted with another mammoth task.

Andersen’s new job is selling the Freedom Bowl to Orange County. Tom Starr wishes him well. Starr tried the same thing for six years and found it similar to selling snow to Eskimos, although you do get to dress better.

After resigning himself to the prospect that it wouldn’t get done in his lifetime as Freedom Bowl director, Starr resigned. Starr was a native Midwesterner with enough national contacts to book such Top 20 regulars as Iowa, Texas, BYU and Washington into his game, but he couldn’t find a way to come between Orange Countians and their post-Christmas Day shopping sales.

Starr left with some words of advice: Hire someone with local roots, someone with existing ties to the community.

The Orange County Sports Assn., the body that oversees the Freedom Bowl, took the ball and handed it to Andersen, a veteran sports publicist who can match roots with the best of them.

Andersen was the sports information director at Cal State Fullerton before there was a Cal State Fullerton. Back in 1961 and 1962, the school was known as Orange County State College--if a small cluster of Quonset huts can be called a college--and was known only for its basketball team.

For good reason.

“Basketball was the only sport they had in 1961,” says Andersen, then an undergraduate who’d just arrived from Santa Ana Junior College. “There was no sports information director then. They really didn’t need one. I guess I became it by default.”

Andersen did so by stapling together a fact book about the team and dispatching press releases to the local newspapers. It didn’t take much to make a mark. As the result of a class project, he became the school’s first play-by-play broadcaster--raising the money for the air time and negotiating a 10-game contract with radio station KFIL-FM himself.

As the result of a conversation with a few students, he became involved in the first event that landed the Titans inside the pages of Sports Illustrated--the legendary elephant races at Dumbo Downs.

“A couple of fraternity guys were looking for something to do that would give us some recognition that spring,” Andersen says. “In those days, college kids were into Volkswagen-stuffing and goldfish-swallowing and seeing how many people you could get into a phone booth.

“So one fraternity guy says, ‘Let’s do something weird. Let’s put on an elephant race.’ ”

So Andersen put it on.

“We held it on this big open field where the administration building is now,” Andersen says, “and we dubbed it Dumbo Downs. The Fullerton police estimated a crowd of 10,000, all of them lined up like on a football sideline.

“I think we invited 18 schools and had 20 elephants run. Caltech had an elephant entered. Nevada Reno had one. One of the Ivy League schools--I think it was Harvard--came out and rented one from Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, which used to provide animals for movies in Hollywood.

“The race was about 100, 150 yards and we did it by division--size of school, size of elephant. We had the Baby Elephant Walk, we had the heavyweight division.”

Best of all, Andersen says, showing the colors of a PR man, he had publicity.

“We got a double-page spread in Sports Illustrated and all the L.A. TV stations covered the races,” he says with a touch of pride.

After graduation, Andersen served as the first public relations director for the Southern Section and spent seven years as sports information director at USC.

“And then,” he says, lowering his voice like Edward R. Murrow, “Gary Davidson and the World Football League came along.”

For a few months, anyway. Andersen lasted only as long as the league did--1 1/2 seasons--and was surprised it went that well.

“When I went down to Birmingham (Ala.) for the first and only World Bowl, I went on a one-way ticket,” Andersen says. “They didn’t have the money for round trip. I got back home on my credit card.”

Andersen also purchased the World Bowl trophy, given to the league’s champion, in a Birmingham hardware store. Two days before the World Bowl.

Nice selection. So, sir, will that be the one with the skeet shooter or the one with the woman bowler?

“No, we ended up with a nice trophy,” Andersen says with a laugh, “but it certainly wasn’t the Lombardi Trophy.”

The most humbling experience was the World Bowl itself. Through a deal with a local dairy, Andersen arranged for a $10,000 award to be given to the league’s most valuable player, to be presented at halftime of the World Bowl.

“All the writers voted,” Andersen says, “and there was a three-way tie for the thing. In those days, people wouldn’t believe a WFL check was good for anything, so we had to pay them in cash.

“So there we were, with a Brinks truck at midfield on national television, paying our three MVPs $3,300 apiece. In cash.”

The WFL breathed its last breath in the fall of 1975, but to Andersen’s good fortune, the NFL was about to expand and the new Seattle franchise needed a PR director. Andersen spent the next eight years with the Seahawks, promoted golf tournaments for several years after that and, most recently, resurfaced in Orange County as associate athletic director at Chapman College.

Now, he’s executive director of the OCSA, with the Freedom Bowl fully plopped into his lap. It was Starr’s orphan since 1984 and it’s Andersen’s baby now.

He’s had easier assignments, but he’s had tougher ones, too. The Freedom Bowl already has its own trophy and the contestants come from major universities, not the local zoo.