Like a Rock : Where Boulders Once Were Strewn, the Rose Bowl Stands as a Monument to Football

It sits there, decade after decade.

The Rose Bowl.

It is a lovable old concrete hulk, harboring memories and dreams of generations of football fans who have passed through its cold, dark tunnels.

It is college football’s past and future.

Old, storied stadiums across America are either coming down or are long gone: John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, old Comiskey Park in Chicago, New York’s Polo Grounds, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field, Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

But the Rose Bowl, despite some serious problems, lives on.

Now 70 years old, it will be the site of another big game Sunday, the Super Bowl.

Right, big deal. Hey, this is the Old Gray Lady’s fifth Super Bowl. And every Rose Bowl game but one since 1923 has been played in the old Pasadena saucer. One World War II game, in 1942, was played at Durham, N.C.

In a sense, it is football’s anchor, a link to the sport’s origin. The Four Horsemen played there. Knute Rockne coached there. It’s where Roy Riegels of California ran 64 yards--the wrong way--in 1929, and where USC’s Doyle Nave completed a pass to Al Krueger to beat Duke, 7-3, in one of college football’s greatest finishes, in 1939.

Johnny Mack Brown played in the Rose Bowl. So did Brick Muller, Don Hutson, Bear Bryant, Ernie Nevers, Bob Waterfield, Jim Plunkett, O.J. Simpson and Warren Moon.

The Army-Navy game was played there in 1983. And in 1994, the rest of the world’s biggest sporting event, the World Cup soccer final, will come to the Rose Bowl.

But for all its history, the old stadium in the Arroyo Seco is facing an uncertain future. One fundamental problem is that one of America’s largest stadiums is owned and operated by a relatively small city, Pasadena.

Pasadena has run a deficit operating the Rose Bowl for three of the last four years. It turns a profit in years it gets the Super Bowl, but goes in the red in years it doesn’t. There is talk of leasing the facility to a private management group.

Rock concerts--there was one there last fall--could put the Rose Bowl in the black, but area residents object to the noise.

Here’s a suggestion: How about chariot racing?

You laugh?

Chariot racing used to be big in Pasadena, on New Year’s Day. Bigger than football.

Before there was a Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, there was a Tournament of Roses game. And before that, chariot racing.

In 1902, the Tournament of Roses New Year’s Day parade was a dozen years old when Pasadena officials decided to combine the parade with a college football game.

And so, on a field called Tournament Park, at what is today Caltech, at the corner of California and Wilson streets, the American tradition of New Year’s Day football began--and just as quickly fizzled.

Tournament officials invited Stanford to play Michigan’s famed point-a-minute team.

Fears that the game would be one-sided were right on the money. Michigan beat Stanford, 49-0, and tournament officials decided to forget about football--even though the game, seen by about 8,000 spectators, turned a $3,000 profit.

After a year of polo, enter chariot racing. From 1904 to 1915, specially trained four-horse teams whisked manned chariots around a track at Tournament Park. At the final chariot races, in 1915, the crowd was estimated at 25,000.

But the prize money, $1,000 to the winner, wasn’t enough to offset the $5,000 cost of year-round training of the horses, and tournament officials turned to football again.

This time, football stuck.

When Washington State beat Brown, 14-0, in the 1916 game, confidence in western football soared. By 1921, when California beat Ohio State, 28-0, it became clear that the city needed a major stadium.

The wobbly wooden bleachers at Tournament Park had been expanded over the years to a capacity of 41,000 by 1921.

William L. Leishman, the Tournament of Roses president, decided that a stadium should be built in the Arroyo Seco, and that it should be designed after one in his hometown, the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Conn.

Completed in 1914, the Yale Bowl was a wonder in its time. Still in use, it seats 70,896. The city of Pasadena retained architect Myron Hunt, whose design closely resembled the Yale Bowl’s.

In 1922, when construction began, the Arroyo Seco was a far different place. There was no golf course, no jogging trails, no grass, no softball or soccer fields, no swimming complex.

The Arroyo was a dump, visited largely by trash collectors, rats and raccoons. Everywhere, there were boulders, rolled there by centuries of flash floods down from the San Gabriel Mountains.

And everywhere, too, were trash piles.

Still, the arroyo had been the setting for sports events long before its stadium was built. In California’s Spanish and Mexican periods, bullfights and cockfights had been held there.

But in 1922, it was a most unlikely setting for what would become one of America’s most famous stadiums, a place to fire the dreams of generations of young American boys.

Construction began early in 1922. The Arroyo’s boulders were used as foundation material. Mule-drawn wagons moved dirt around, forming embankments for the spectator sections. The first concrete poured formed the stadium’s tunnels.

The stadium was completed in less than a year, and the construction cost came in under budget--at $272,198.26. By way of comparison, Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, completed in 1987, cost roughly $115 million.

Some of the Rose Bowl’s innards date to 1902. Buried deep in cold concrete is much of the lumber that had been the wooden bleachers at Tournament Park. Workmen used it for framing material for the tunnels.

The finished stadium was horseshoe-shaped and had 57,000 seats available for its first football game, Oct. 28, 1922, when Cal beat USC, 12-0.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how many saw that inaugural game. The Times had two reporters there. One reported attendance at 20,000, the other at 40,000.

The first Rose Bowl game there, the following Jan. 1, matched USC and Penn State, and the game fell just shy of a sellout.

Over the years, more sections of seats were added, bringing Rose Bowl capacity to as high as 106,000. Official seating capacity for Sunday’s Super Bowl game will be 102,083.

Rose Bowl seating capacity changes yearly, but three Rose Bowl games have exceeded 106,000.

The capacity may eventually dip below 100,000, though. Safety engineers would like to take out enough rows of seats to build a concourse all around the stadium.

The latest improvement is the three-story, goal line-to-goal line press box, which can accommodate 1,100 suite subscribers and media representatives. Construction cost $10.6 million, or roughly 40 times that of the entire original stadium.

Harlan Hall, a Pasadena Star-News police reporter, is believed to have been the first to call the stadium the Rose Bowl, just about the time the stadium was completed.

But in 1938, the Rose Bowl was almost called gone.

During a series of spring storms that year, the Arroyo Seco was ripped by a succession of flash floods. In those days, there was no concrete-lined storm channel running through the arroyo.

On the stormy evening of March 4, 1938, floodwaters behind nearby Devil’s Gate Dam roared over the spillway at the rate of 10,000 cubic feet of water per second.

Soon, floodwaters poured into the stadium’s north tunnels and the Rose Bowl’s first four rows of seats were quickly under water.

At 11 p.m., stadium manager Bill Nicholas ordered his staff of workmen off the site, to the safety of high ground. They had been frantically, but futilely, building sandbag barriers around the north end.

A Rose Bowl ticket booth was washed a mile down the Arroyo.

Nicholas was on his way to a phone, to notify the Pasadena city manager that the stadium was lost, that its foundation was being undermined.

Then, the water changed course.

“There was no explanation for what happened at that moment,” Nicholas said at the time. “But the floodwaters, for no reason we could see, suddenly veered off to the right, away from the Rose Bowl.”

The Rose Bowl lived, for maybe another century.

Rose Bowl Milestones

Construction completed: Fall, 1922. Capacity: 57,000.

First game: Oct. 28, 1922. USC 12, California 0. Attendance: About 30,000.

First Rose Bowl game: Jan. 1, 1923. USC 14, Penn State 3. Attendance: 52,000.

First wirephoto transmission: Jan. 1, 1925. Notre Dame 27, Stanford 10.

First nationwide radio broadcast: Jan. 1, 1927. Stanford 7, Alabama 7. Announcers: Graham MacNamee, Bill Munday.

First expansion: 1928. Open end enclosed, capacity increased to 76,000.

Second expansion: 1931. Capacity increased to 83,677 by replacing wooden bleacher sections. First telecast: Jan. 1, 1948. Michigan 49, USC 0. Announcer: Bill Welsh.

Third expansion: 1949. At a cost of $335,000, 10,733 seats added, increasing capacity to 94,410.

Fourth expansion: 1950. Capacity increased to 100,983.

First nationwide telecast: Jan. 1, 1952. Illinois 40, Stanford 7. Announcer: Mel Allen.

First nationwide color telecast: Jan. 1, 1962. Minnesota 21, UCLA 3.

Fifth expansion: 1972. Permanent seats installed in end zone sections, increasing capacity to 104,594.

Rose Bowl Trivia

Distance north to south rim: 880 feet.

Distance east to west rim: 695 feet.

Rim circumference: 2,430 feet.

Field level circumference: 1,350 feet.

Fence circumference: One mile.

Capacity for Super Bowl: 102,083.