COMMENTARY : Arizona’s Bowls Fall Short on King Tribute

If authorities at Arizona’s two bowl games ever seriously meant to honor slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the games as a token of compensation for the Arizona electorate’s failure to approve a King birthday holiday, they badly muffed the job.

I attended both the Copper Bowl at Tucson on Monday and the Fiesta Bowl here on New Year’s Day. The Fiesta Bowl organizers certainly must win a prize of sorts for their persistence in using virtually every television timeout to mention on the stadium public address system their own many commercial sponsors.

But the tribute to King they had promised--after a post-election furor kept some teams from considering participation in the game--was so enveloped in a larger halftime show that it lost the point of being a tribute to King. In fact, forgetting the earlier pledge, the announcer said it was actually a tribute to America.

After quotes from Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, there was an excerpt from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech shown on the stadium’s video board. But it was extremely brief and did not contain the dramatic “Free at last!” conclusion to the passage.

About that time, the halftime show arrangers fired off so many daytime fireworks, accompanied by a particularly acrid smoke, that thousands of spectators found themselves wheezing.

At the Copper Bowl, where the King furor was not as great and where University of California players defied calls against competing, organizers called faintly on the public address system at the end of the third quarter for a moment’s silence for King.

Apparently not hearing the call, first the Cal band and then the Wyoming band played on through the timeout between the quarters. Not a further word was heard about King.

At neither game was the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” played.

Nonetheless, particularly at the Fiesta Bowl, King--or more accurately, the memory of him--was a powerful force. The site of two recent de facto national championship games, the Fiesta Bowl found itself this time with neither of its competitors, Louisville and Alabama, ranked in the top 15.

The result was very poor ticket sales. To avoid a television blackout in the Phoenix area, one of the vaunted sponsors, America West Airlines, bought the last 12,000 tickets, but the price the airline paid for the $36 tickets was not announced.

Scalping is legal outside Arizona stadiums, and two years ago, scalpers got as much as $200 a ticket for the Notre Dame-West Virginia national championship game.

But as game time approached this year, the scalpers were having a truly terrible time. Arriving an hour before the kickoff, I was quickly offered a ticket for a fairly good seat for $5, less than one-seventh its face value. Then just before game time, I saw a man selling excellent 40-yard-line seats for $10 apiece.

Putting down $10, I turned around to try to dispose of my first ticket, only to find that many tickets were now being marketed for $1 or $2. Not wanting to come away dry, I quickly sold my other ticket for the best price I could quickly obtain--10 cents.

That, to me, was the Fiesta Bowl’s real tribute to the great civil rights leader: a $36 ticket reduced in price to 10 cents, as an indirect result of the insult Arizona voters had paid to his memory.