Grim News About Schools--Direct From the Gridiron

For our traditional Tournament of Roses festivities, a lot of people camped out all night on New Year’s Eve along the parade route in Pasadena to get a good view of the colorful floats and colorful flowers and colorful bands and colorful Bob Eubanks.

But that wasn’t the best part.

A lot of nice folks from Wisconsin flew to California for the Rose Bowl football game. It was a welcome getaway for those mellow-yellow cheeseheads from Fond du Lac and Chippewa Falls and beautiful downtown Sheboygan, as well as a good break for every poor cow back there that still gets milked the old-fashioned way, by a farmer with cold hands.

But that wasn’t the best part, either.

Nor was it the Rose Parade itself. It was held in drop-dead gorgeous weather. The parade was wonderful, which explains why it was televised by Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 60, 70, 99, 999, the Food Channel, the Sci-Fi Channel and the Pet Channel.

Nor was it the Rose Bowl football game. It was a beautifully played contest, won by Wisconsin over a skinnier and obviously non-dairy-eating team from UCLA. The game was dominated by a Badger running back named Ron “Great” Dayne, who was the approximate size of North Dakota. He was thick, he was quick and he was about as easy to tackle as a 16-wheeler hauling hogs to Omaha.

Was this the Rose Bowl’s highlight?

Not for me.

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A couple of nights before New Year’s Day, I just happened to be watching “The Tonight Show,” starring Jay Leno, on NBC, when Jay introduced a funny bit.

I’d seen him do it before. It’s an unrehearsed question-and-answer thing, a little intelligence test Jay likes to give to randomly chosen men and women on the street. A pop quiz.

In the process, these individuals sometimes prove themselves to be among the truly dopey people on the face of the Earth.

One night--I believe it was the Fourth of July--I remember Jay asking questions like: “Which day is Independence Day?” “Which country did we fight against in the Revolutionary War?” “Which year did the United States gain its independence?”

I believe the answers he got included: “March 15?” “Mexico?” and “1945?”

One guy, I swear, not only didn’t know which day Independence Day was, but when Leno told him it was “between the Third of July and the Fifth of July,” his guess was the Third.

It made me wonder whether Jay and his producers deliberately went out and looked for dimwits. Maybe they all hung out at a particular place. You know, like at the corner of Clueless and Vine.

I found out differently.

I found it out during Rose Bowl week, because Leno and a TV crew did not simply lasso a bunch of simpletons. They did one of their pop quizzes with a select group of students from two of America’s great universities, Wisconsin and UCLA.

They interviewed football players.

Eighteen through 22 years of age, every one.

And on national TV, during Rose Bowl week, we saw a must-see event on NBC that was more hilarious than “Frasier,” more grim than the nightly news with Tom Brokaw and more amazing than anything you saw in either a football game or on a float.

Ignorance on parade.

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One UCLA student was asked where Wisconsin was. The best he could guess was America. One of Wisconsin’s athletes was asked if Canada was north or south of the equator. He guessed south. Another player was asked to name the pill that helps cure impotence. He guessed Prozac.

On and on it went. Wrong answer after wrong answer.

At least the one guy didn’t think Prozac was a French author.

I wish Leno would run it again, just for everyone who missed one of the most remarkable demonstrations of stupidity (not hosted by Jerry Springer) in the history of television.

I haven’t seen anything so daffy on late-night TV since Tiny Tim played a ukulele.

Have you ever seen one of those TV halftime segments during a Saturday college football game, the house-produced films about all of the school’s outstanding labs, libraries and landmarks? About all of the school’s educational advancements? About all of the young Einsteins being created on campus?

Trust me, neither Wisconsin nor UCLA will ever show this.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes. com