NEW YEAR’S DAY BOWL GAMES : Riveting 1963 Game Was Grandest Daddy

In a way, it may have been the best of the Rose Bowls, the granddaddy of them all, so to speak.

Wisconsin won it, 37-42.

Wait a minute! you exclaim. Wisconsin never won a Rose Bowl!

That’s what you think. Never mind the score. An irrelevancy. Trust me on this.

You have often heard a beaten team growl, “We didn’t lose--time just ran out on us”?

Well, Wisconsin could say this with a perfectly straight face.

The time was New Year’s Day 1963. The game was a rout. Wisconsin quickly fell behind, 21-7. Then, 28-7, then, 42-14 with only 14 minutes left.

Then came The Quarter.

Fourth-quarter heroics had been commonplace in Rose Bowl history. Doyle Nave coming off the bench as a third-stringer in 1939 to throw for the only touchdown scored against the Duke defense all year; Charles White (a la Art Murakowski) going into the end zone with or without the football in the closing mnutes in 1979, and UCLA’s Bob Stiles, 5 feet 9 and 160 pounds, stopping Michigan State’s Bob Apisa, 6-2 and 220, at the goal line on a two-point try that would have tied the game in 1966.

But the greatest one-man show in any Rose Bowl fourth quarter was On Wisconsin’s. It was put on by a young man with the uptown name of Ronald VanderKelen, a native of Green Bay, and came on the gloomy first afternoon in the Year of Our Lord 1963.

Wisconsin had come into the game ranked No. 2 in the country. USC was No. 1. “I think that was the first time in the history of the Rose Bowl that had happened, that teams ranked 1 and 2 came in,” Ron VanderKelen remembered the other day, as he was getting ready for Wisconsin’s first return to a Rose Bowl since that afternoon. He will be a spectator this time, attending with a daughter who is now a freshman at his alma mater.

VanderKelen electrified the Rose Bowl that distant afternoon. But before he could, he had to run the risk of summary ejection from the game. “As we fell further and further behind, (Wisconsin Coach Milt Bruhn) was within an eyelash of yanking me out of that game and going with a younger, fresher player to give him experience,” VanderKelen recalled. “But then he decided to give me one more series.”

The score was 42-14 at the time. “We were really embarrassed,” VanderKelen said. “I called the guys around me. I said, ‘Hey! We’re a good football team! Let’s score a couple of times, get respectable here. If we lose, let’s lose with our flags flying.’

“Well, we scored a couple of quick touchdowns to make it 42-28. As you know, football is a game of momentum. And we had momentum. Everything came together. We ran the Trojans ragged.”

VanderKelen completed 18 of 21 passes in that fourth quarter, which was being contested in such Stygian blackness of inadequate lighting that it looked as if they were playing by kerosene lamp. It was the longest game in Rose Bowl history. “The halftime show that year went on almost as long as the game,” VanderKelen said. “We almost had to be reintroduced.”

One result was that the Trojans seemed to have very little idea where the ball was, or even if there was one, and they spent the whole quarter running around like Keystone Kops or characters in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

By the end, the Trojans were almost praying for the clock to run out. They looked for all the world like a fighter on the ropes with his ear torn, nose bleeding, mouthpiece gone and the referee looking at him quizzically.

“They were just waiting for the clock to run out,” VanderKelen said. “I can remember (USC Coach) John McKay practically lying down on all fours on the ground watching the plays. He looked like he was seeing a ghost.”

The strangest part of the scenario was that before the season, VanderKelen, who looked like a Heisman Trophy candidate that day, had not played quarterback since 1958. The Badger coaching staff had tried him at several other positions, including defensive back.

“But Milt let me call the plays and run the offense when I got there,” VanderKelen said. “So I knew where everyone was that day and what they were capable of.”

Like every man, he remembers the might-have-been. “It was just before the half,” he said. “I found Louis Holland in the end zone for a touchdown. But the officials said we had an ineligible man downfield and they called it back. You can’t help thinking that would have been a big touchdown. We were behind, 21-7, at the time. I remember Bruhn running out on the field and arguing the call with the officials at the half.”

All USC won was the game. At Trojan banquets all winter long, the question persisted: “What happened?” After one such instance, the blocking back, Ken Del Conte, was moved to protest: “Hey, you’d think we lost the game! We won by five!” But Wisconsin had outgained the Trojans, 486 yards to 367, out-first-downed them, 32-15, outscored them, 23-0, in the final quarter and had the ball as the game ended.

For Wisconsin, which had been the first Big Ten team to lose in the pact with the Pacific Coast schools and had suffered the worst Big Ten loss to Washington, 44-8, a few years earlier, the game was redemptive.

For Ron VanderKelen, it was to be a career climax. Even though he led the College All-Stars to victory over the Green Bay Packers the next summer, the last game the collegians were to win in that series, his pro career was a frustration. Drafted by the Minnesota Vikings, he played behind Fran Tarkenton for four years, and when Tarkenton was traded, Joe Kapp stepped in. “Your uniform stays pretty clean playing behind those guys,” he laughed.

Now vice president in charge of sales for Fitness Quest, an aerobic exercise product company, VanderKelen is philosophical about his day in the sun (and gloom) of Pasadena. Now that Wisconsin is in the Rose Bowl for the first time since his epic performance (33 completions and one 17-yard touchdown run), do the memories stay evergreen?

VanderKelen laughed: “Well, when you get to the Rose Bowl only once in 31 years, the subject doesn’t come up too often.”

But for everyone who was there that day, the lasting image is of Ron VanderKelen filling the murky air with footballs while USC seemed to be running around looking for a bed to hide under.