Rose Bowl Overview

The Rose Bowl is 100 Years Old! In celebration of this milestone we are covering the history of the stadium and the New Years Game game associated with it by gathering research from resources from some of the finest historians and authors in the gridiron realm. Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us to get the kick off our 40 day celebration with a very appropriate overview of the Tournament of Roses classic and the origins of the annual football game,

The Rose Bowl is as iconic of a stadium and annual game as there is in American football. It started off as a sideshow entertainment for folks visiting the Tournament of Roses celebration held in Pasadena, California. The pagenat of sorts was developed in 1890 as a way of the city of Pasadena to show off their beauty and warm weather to visitors in a New Years Day celebration. The celebration soon included activities with the crops of nearby farms including flowers such as the roses grown in Southern California and rose soon became an early iconic symbol of the event. A parade to comemorate the advent of a new year helped in the celebration as well. The Rose Parade's official website states that ,

"In 1890, Valley Hunt Club members, led by Charles Frederick Holder, sponsored the first Tournament of Roses. The abundance of flowers, even in the midst of winter, prompted the club to add a parade before the competition, where entrants would decorate carriages with hundreds of colorful blooms."

The first football game of the Tournament of Roses was not played until 1902 and was called the "Tournament East–West football game", at a venue built in haste at Tournament Park. 

Pasadena's Tournament Park, approximately three miles (5 km) southeast of the current Rose Bowl stadium, near the campus of Caltech. Tournament Park was found to be unsuitable for the increasingly large crowds gathering to watch the game and a new, permanent home for the game was commissioned.

The Rose Bowl stadium, designed after the Yale Bowl in New Haven, hosted its first "Rose Bowl" game on January 1, 1923. The name of the stadium was alternatively "Tournament of Roses Stadium" or "Tournament of Roses Bowl," until the name "Rose Bowl" was settled on before the 1923 game.

-Transcribed Timothy Brown on the Rose Bowl Game History Overview
  
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We are also celebrating the Rose Bowl in its centennial anniversary at the stadium.

And the game's gone on quite a bit longer than that. And we have a historian who's going to talk to us about that. His name is Timothy P. Brown.

You've heard him before here every Tuesday. And Tim Brown, welcome back to the Pig Pen. 

Hey, Darin. Thank you. Thank you. I am looking forward to chatting.

Love the Rose Bowl. I grew up a Northern Midwesterner, Great Lakes sort of person. And so the Rose Bowl was near and dear to my heart as a young man.

Well, I can say the same thing, being from the Great Lakes. It's always been an interesting game in our household as well growing up. And, you know, some great things have happened.

And, thanking you for coming on and celebrating this Rose Bowl 100 coming up this anniversary and get to talk a lot about the history of the game in the stadium this month. And we're glad that you could be a part of that. Yeah.

Looking forward to it. I actually, the Ohio State, Utah game was played there this year. I think it was on the first, right? Played on the first.

I think it was played on the first or second, whichever day it was. I was there the next day. Ah, okay.

I didn't get to see, see the game itself, but, you know, did the stadium tour the next day with my family. And so had a blast. It was a great environment.

Popcorn was a little bit cheaper that day. I'm sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and there was all the glitter and, and whatever, you know, stuff that you could find and, but it was actually pretty well cleaned up by the time we got to, I was impressed. Wow.

Very interesting. So, the cleanup crew gets their props at the Rose Bowl. Great job guys.

But this is our, sort of our kickoff into this Rose Bowl month. And you've volunteered to come on and give us some great history of the Rose Bowl, even before it was called the Rose Bowl and some of the early roots and beginnings. And we're interested to hear that.

Yeah. You know, so, I mean, I, you know, I said that I've always loved the Rose Bowl and actually the, the first book I wrote was, and a lot of my collecting early on was Rose Bowl, you know, related. And so, you know, it's the, the history of Incevolution is always, you know, kind of fascinating to me, but, you know, it's, it's really a story of, you know, Los Angeles, the LA area back in the day was just, you know, it was a dinky little town.

There weren't many people there, but obviously, you know, had some, you know, it was a nice setting. And so, you know, Pasadena, which was North of town and connected by the railroads, they started, they wanted to promote their, their place, you know, their, and, you know, there were a lot of orange groves and everything out there. By way of promoting and getting people to move their tourists to visit, they started this thing called the Tournament of Roses in 1890.

And so, you know, that went on and on and, you know, kind of, again, promoting life and real estate. And they eventually decided to schedule a football game associated with their annual tournament, which was always, you know, January 1st, unless it was a Sunday. So they ended up fairly early in the season, they invited Michigan to come out and play.

And ultimately, they, you know, hooked them up with Stanford, and that was for the 1902 game. So at that point, you know, Michigan was a powerful point-a-minute team under Yost and Stanford; Yost had actually coached them the previous year, two years before. So there was a connection there, but they just weren't as strong.

And, you know, so, you know, they, the two teams, agreed to play, but they didn't have a stadium. So they had to, you know, they had to go through the process. They bought land in town and, you know, slapped up a stadium with box seats and everything.

And I think it held, you know, something, 15,000 or something like that the first year; they called it Tournament Park, you know, because it was Tournament of the Roses, so Tournament Park. And so, you know, they ended up spending a bunch of money on building the stadium. And while they made money, you know, they sold all their tickets and everything.

That was great. They ran into two problems. One was that Michigan blew the doors off of Stanford.

So it was 49, nothing, but they stopped the game early and it just was not a competitive game. So, and then the second thing was, they spent a bunch of money on building the stadium. And so the ticket revenues and the subscriptions that they had sold, left them with, I think it was like 4,500 bucks in debt, which is, you know, big money in those days.

So they ended up in a situation where it's like, okay, do we, you know, how do we make sure we don't have another blowout? Because then nobody's going to want to come or if we don't have a good matchup. And yet they had to service this debt. So they were in a bit of a quandary.

So, in 1903, they tried to schedule a game. I'm not going to get into that because we're going to do a separate segment on that. But, you know, just to say that they tried to schedule a game and they tried to do it, you know, a couple, a couple of additional years, but you know, things didn't work out.

And then you, then you had a situation where Cal and Stanford dropped football in 1906. And so, you know, they're just, there just weren't many good, at least California-based teams playing. So they didn't really get to play another game until 1916.

And by then, you know, some of the teams, Washington, Washington state, Washington had a run of great teams in that era. But in 1916, Washington had a really good team under Lone Star Dietz. And they ended up playing, you know, playing Brown in the 16 games.

17 was Penn and Oregon. So you're getting this kind of Northwest versus Northeast, you know, Ivy sort of thing, which is really, you know, it was a neat thing. And, you know, at that time, most people still saw the Ivy as the top team out there.

So, to get them to come out and play was a big deal. And it, you know, it got a lot of national attention because, you know, hardly anybody else was playing at that time, you know, maybe some all-star teams or something here and there. But basically, it was like it was the only show, not just in town, but in the country, for the most part.

Then we get into the war years. And so military teams played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. Again, we won't get into that too much because we'll do a separate segment on that.

But suffice it to say that, you know, they almost weren't able to, they almost didn't play them, but basically, you know, Woodrow Wilson gave the nod and said, you know, go ahead. And so, for different reasons, they ended up with some military matchups. I know 1920, and then we go back to the Ivy League. Harvard is playing, and they played Oregon.

So Oregon was, you know, a really pretty top-notch team back then. And so after that, then, then we get into this, you know, what I'd call kind of from 1921 to 1945. That's really where, when it became truly, truly like a big-time national event, you know, I mean, it had gotten lots of attention before, but, you know, you started seeing more teams being willing to go out to California to play.

You know, one of their early challenges was that teams just, either the faculties wouldn't let, you know, the, the teams go out to California, you know, they thought it was commercializing football, you know, that kind of thing. Or in a lot of cases that especially, you know, Cal and Stanford, they didn't want to play, you know, they had their seasons, they were done. And like going to Pasadena was no, you know, great strokes for them.

You know, they were already out in California. So, but so, you know, in the twenties is when it really started, you know, boom. And they had some great games.

Cal had Andy Smith as a coach. So they, you know, they were really top-notch USC was starting to, you know, which had been playing small college football before that, they start becoming relevant nationally. And then, you know, the big thing too, was in 22, they started building this new stadium, which was originally called the Tournament of Roses Stadium.

But, you know, in the run-up to the game, a columnist kind of copied the nomenclature from the Yale Bowl and called it the Rose Bowl. And the name stuck. And so, you know, both the event and the stadium had been called the Rose Bowl, you know, really ever since.

Very interesting. Yeah. You can see I'm camped out in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl.

I got it behind me. That's right. And well, I should say that, you know, the official name still remained like the East-West.

I forget what it was called. East West Classic or something. It was some really bizarre, a bizarre name.

And so, even like all the tickets at the time, you know, had that printed on it. I don't think the Rose Bowl popped up on there for, you know, maybe a couple of decades. But, you know, so, you know, I was saying how it became more like nationally relevant.

One of the neat things in the 20s was in 1926, which was the first year Alabama played in the Rose Bowl. So, they were the first Southern team. You know, Georgia Tech played in 1929.

And that's when we've got the game. They played Cal, and that was the wrong way, Roy Regals, you know, game. You know, so it's just a really memorable game. You know, Navy played during the 20s.

You know, the Columbia and Ivy League team shows up again in 34. You know, so, but just generally, like the Big Ten didn't play. Notre Dame played once in the 20s or 24, I think it was.

But, you know, and the Ivies pretty much stopped coming, you know, for the most part, with a couple of exceptions. But, you know, what's now the SEC and ACC, those teams were open and willing. Nebraska, you know, plays in the 41 Rose Bowl.

So, again, it was just a, it was a great event. And it was also, you know, it started seeing intersectional games being played during the regular season. So, the Notre Dame USC thing got going cooking in the 20s.

And, you know, the Rose Bowl kind of reflected that. And then, you know, kind of mid-30s, you also then see the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl get started, as well as the Sun Bowl. You know, so that whole bowl season comes from the name of the Rose Bowl, right? And, you know, so that, you know, bowl games, bowl season, all that really is a result of the Rose Yeah, I think last year, I think it was 42 bowl games for college bowl games last year.

So, that shows you how much has grown since then. Yeah, well, and, you know, I think ESPN, NFL teams, and, you know, a couple of other networks own like 65% of those games. So, they're pretty much made for TV.

I mean, they're fun. You know, your team goes, hey, great, good for you. Have fun at whatever the destination is.

But, yeah, I mean, most of them are not about tourism anymore. It's all about television content. So, and then, you know, I guess just one other thing, just a minor little thing, but during World War Two, that was the only time that two teams from the same conference played in Rose Bowl because USC and Washington, due to travel restrictions, you know, for the colleges, USC and Washington played in 44.

So, then the big news really, and so the reason I love the Rose Bowl is that in 46, the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference, which became Pac-8, Pac-10, Pac-12, agreed to play one another every year. You know, they were the two conferences that were kind of most, other than the Ivy's that hadn't been formed yet, they were the two conferences that were, you know, more academically oriented, less commercialized. And so, both of them, both of them played, they sent one rep, and that was the only team that played in bowl games, you know, from like 46 until, I want to say, into the 70s, that was pretty much, maybe it was early 70s that switched.

You know, so it was, yeah, I think for most of us alive today, it was, it was the Big Ten and the Pac-10 or eight that played. And so, you know, that's still my vision of it. And, you know, post-2000, you start, then we start getting into the national championship tournaments and that kind of stuff.

So, like Miami, Nebraska in 2002, Oklahoma, and Washington State in 2003. And then, you know, there's been several others. So, I think there's now been five or six, maybe there's no seven, yeah, seven, USC, Texas, probably about a decade ago.

Yeah, that was 2006. And like 18 was Georgia, Oklahoma. So, you know, there's, there's been a number of them where, you know, it's kind of, for me personally, it's kind of lost the luster.

I mean, I just love the conference affiliation. But for the general fan, you know, the general football fan, it's, you know, obviously the national championship is a big deal to most people. And so, it is what it is, you know, and we'll see how it all shakes out.

I got a couple of questions, maybe, you know, I don't mean to spring these on you, but maybe you don't know the answer. Maybe you do. Now I take it with this starting out being the Tournament of Roses deal, and still is the Tournament of Roses is sort of the organizer of it.

Now, I take it that that part of California, Pasadena, has a time, or maybe still does, a large growing cultivation of roses. You know, I think it was kind of a civic pride thing early on that they were, that they kind of decorated the streets or planted roses in the boulevards, and that kind of thing. But, but other than that, I don't think there was really any, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the floats and everything were, you know, weren't necessarily roses, you know, back then and certainly now.

I, you know, but it's a much better name than Tournament of Carnations, right? Right, right. Yeah. Tournament of daffodils.

So watch it. They might have a ESPN might have a, on ESPN for a bowl game that the daffodil bowl or something. So we got to watch it.

So, yeah. Okay. I guess my other question is now, you know, Keith Jackson, and maybe he's the one who coined it, but he called it the granddaddy of them all, you know, famously.

And it's still, it's got such a great association with the Rose Bowl. Where did that term come from? Was it Mr. Jackson who started, or did it come up? Yeah. I mean, as far as I know, he's the one that coined the term, like, you know, as you said, and I'm going to write something down about that, but you know, he was a Washington State grad.

And so, you know, he was kind of part of that, you know, that culture. And yeah, I mean, he just had a way of saying certain things, and whoa, Nellie, and hold on. And, you know, some, some of his little slogans, but you know, the granddaddy of them all a number of times after he, you know, came up with that phrase, it shows up on, you know, Rose Bowl tickets.

And you know, they definitely bought into it. There's no doubt about it.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: Timothy Brown and his FootballArchaeology.com website.

Banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of Scene from the late 1890's Tornament of Roses Parade. A Decorated carriage, "Tallyho", drawn by six black horses during the Tournament of the Roses Parade, ca.1895-1899
Photograph of decorated carriage, "Tallyho", drawn by six black horses at 313 South Spring Street during the Tournament of the Roses Parade, Pasadena, California, ca.1895-1899. At least seven fancy-dressed ladies with parasols and a driver are aboard. Could perhaps be the queen and court. Courtesy of USC archives and the California Historical Society.