The 1st Rose Bowl Game

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 chat about the first game played at the Tournament of Roses festival way back in 1902.

In 1902 the Tournament of Roses Committee was searching for extra entertainment for visitors to the now annual New Years celebration in Pasadena, California. The game of football was becoming very popular so it was a logical choice to have a game played at the celebration. 

Yes the Rose Bowl was originally billed as the "Tournament East–West football game." What most call the first Rose Bowl game was played on January 1, 1902, at Tournament Park in Pasadena, California. Though they did't realize it at the time, it started the tradition of New Year's Day bowl games.

Photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the very first Tournament East-West football game

This inaugural game featured Fielding Yost's fantastic 1901 Michigan Wolverines football team, who represented the East. Stanford one of the better teams on the West Coast was the Pacific area offering. Hurry Up Yost's Wolverines absolutely demolished  the 3–1–2 team from Stanford University, by a score of 49–0. It could have been an even more lopsided score but Cardinal captain Ralph Fisher requested to quit with eight minutes remaining and by agreement with Michigan team captain Hugh White the second half was shortened to accomodate. Michigan finished the season 11–0 and was considered a national champion. Yost had been Stanford's coach the previous year.

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the 1901 Michigan Wolverines football team
Front (left to right): Everett Sweeley, Boss Weeks, Curtis Redden, Arthur Redner, Albert E. Herrnstein
Middle (left to right): Ebin Wilson, Neil Snow, Hugh White, Bruce Shorts, Willie Heston
Back (left to right): H.K. Crafts, Dan McGugin, George Gregory, Fielding H. Yost, Herb Graver, Charles A. Baird, Keene Fitzpatrick by an Unknown author

The Pasadena boosters were exploring a way to bring in more tourism and money to the area. The Tournament of Roses Association president, James Wagner,  posted a guarantee of $3,500 to cover the expenses of bringing the football teams of the University of Michigan and Stanford University to Pasadena to play in the contest. To offset this then lofty number, an admission price of 50 cents to $1 to see the game. An additional $1 would be charged to admit a family's horse and buggy to the grounds. The game was played in Tournament Park, where temporary stands were built and the field was 110 yards long.

Michigan Fullback, Neil Snow was named as the game's Most Valuable Player. Snow scored 5 Touchdowns in the game on scoring runs of 5yards, 2 yards, 8 yards, 17 yards and four yards.

You can learn more about Yost and this great 1901 squad as well as his time at Stanford in our posts and podcasts with author John Behee.

-Transcribed Chat on the 1902 and 1903 Rose Bowl Games with Timothy Brown
  
Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of pigstyanddispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. It is December, and it is Rose Bowl month.

We're celebrating the great game out in Pasadena, California, and it's 100th anniversary of the stadium. And together with our friend and historian, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen to talk about the Rose Bowl.

Hey, Darin, thank you. I am looking forward to talking about the Rose Bowl again. I can never talk enough about it.

Well, you gave us a great overview of the Rose Bowl to kick us off earlier in the month. And we're appreciating, you're gonna have a few segments here you're gonna talk about this month. And folks, we're gonna be filling up this whole month with Rose Bowl history.

So it's gonna be some great memories that you'll be rekindled and some maybe you weren't aware of that you'll learn like I am. So this is a great event. And Tim, you wanted to talk a little bit about a game that was played before it was even considered the Rose Bowl in the early 20th century.

Yeah, so I guess what I was hoping to chat about it was a game that never took place. Or a series of games that never took place. So, as we talked about in the kind of kickoff segment, Michigan and Stanford played in 1902.

Stanford got blown out, and they ended the game early. And so, the tournament at Rose's people were left with two problems. One was that they had a blowout game.

And so they were concerned that if they didn't come up with a good matchup for future games that people might not wanna come. And they also faced a bunch of debt because while they kind of made money, their cash flow and everything was fine for the 1902 game, they had invested a bunch of money building a stadium, buying the land and then building a stadium called Tournament Park. So, they were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

We need to schedule a good game because it costs a lot of money to bring a team out from the East, and just putting everything on a game costs a chunk of change. So, they wanted to make sure they had a good matchup. The problem was they invited Michigan to come back out for the 1903 game, and Michigan said, no, no thanks, not interested.

They checked in with Stanford and Cal to see if they were interested. And the Cal manager anyway said, yeah, that sounds good; we're interested. And so they kind of, they proceeded.

And the tournament folks looked at; they looked at like Georgetown, Carlisle, and Wisconsin for the 1903 game. And Wisconsin kind of got ahead of things and said, hey, we're interested. They sent an agent out to negotiate on their behalf and basically set up a contract to come on out and play the game on New Year's Day, 1903.

So, that was the Badgers first invitation to the Rose Bowl. Unfortunately, they didn't get to play in a Rose Bowl for another 50 or so years. But, so anyways, they go out there and while he's negotiating, they then go up to Berkeley to kind of tie the bow with those folks.

And the agent says, well, I'm sorry, and the manager, Berkeley's manager, says, well, it turns out the team's not interested. So, the tournament was in a spot where Cal didn't wanna play. They had beaten Stanford.

So Stanford wasn't that great a team. And they were looking around, it's like, who are we gonna have? Who can we possibly invite? USC was still kind of a smaller college kind of team at the time playing Occidental and those kinds of folks. They looked at Utah, but Utah expressed interest, and they just said they weren't that good.

They had been beaten by Stanford and Wisconsin was approved, their faculty had approved the trip only if they played Cal or Stanford. For them, it wasn't at the time, Utah just didn't have the academic credentials, I guess, of Cal or Stanford. So anyways, so the 1903 game basically fell apart.

And then there's the, so the perception has always been, most people's understanding is after 1902, they didn't even try again until 1960. But the fact is that they continued trying. So, they tried in 1903 to schedule a game.

Then, there were multiple other efforts over the next several years to schedule another football game. And they tried things like they invited the Wright brothers to come on out in lieu of football. They had ostrich races and chariot races inside the football field around the cinder track, etc.

So, I mean, they tried all kinds of stuff. And then what also really hurt them was with everything going on in 1905 and the danger of football at the time. Cal and Stanford both dropped football and switched to rugby. So the Cal Stanford big game, if you look at their old yearbooks of the period, they all talk about they're playing football, but actually they're playing rugby.

So that continued on. And then Cal restarted football, gridiron football in 1915 or 16. And then Stanford did like 1918.

But by that point, the tournament was really geared up wanting to get football back as part of the tournament. And so they were able to set up the 1916 game between Brown and Washington State, who had won the Pacific Coast or Northwest Conference title at the time. And that kind of restarted it.

And one of the funny things too, is if you look back at like newspaper articles, really well into the 20s where they would show the list of all the Rose Bowl games, most of the time they didn't list 1902. It was like, people didn't really consider that because there had been such a gap there. People didn't consider that to be a Rose Bowl game.

And I know that used to, I think it was Yost used to really hack off that it wasn't considered, it wasn't on people's list. So he kind of always campaigned to get people to make sure that they would. They listed Michigan and their big victory on that list. But from 1916 on, they were able to play every year.

There were some other fits and starts and changes, as we discussed earlier, but it had a hard little start, but it's turned into quite a spectacle. Now, I believe you said in the first, the inaugural segment of this Rose Bowl celebration, and you're explaining it: this game at that point in time was not called the Rose Bowl. It was called the Tournament of Roses football game, I believe.

Yeah, it was like, I should have confirmed it ahead of time. It was like the East-West Tournament game or something. You know, it was just kind of weird. You know, it was a very awkward name, but it was East-West, something or other.

And it really only became known as the Rose Bowl after the stadium was built. And the first game, you know, it wasn't even a bowl for the first game, but it was a horseshoe when they built it in 1923. But in the lead up to the 1923 game, a local sports writer from Pasadena called it the Rose Bowl and, you know, kind of, it was a nice catchy, great little name, followed on, you know, the Yale Bowl, you know, which had opened in 19, you know, 16.

And so anyways, that kind of caught on and it's been what we call it ever since. Well, very interesting indeed. Tim, you have a great website that you bring out some great football information each and every day.

Maybe you could share the name of the website and how people can get some of your stuff. Sure. So, the website is footballarchaeology.com. You can just, you know, go to the site, and the vast majority of the content there is available to anyone.

Just use the little magnifying glass button or, you know, to search, you know, by searching for content or just scroll through. There is some premium content, but if you wanna make sure that you get the, get access to the articles, just subscribe for free, and you'll get an email every night at seven o'clock Eastern with what I call today's tidbit, you know, 30-second sort of piece of content. And then, you know, a couple of times a month, I also put out, you know, longer form articles, and there's, you know, there's a couple of other things that I do on the site, including posting these podcasts whenever I appear.

All right. Well, we definitely appreciate that. And we appreciate you coming and sharing not only football history but this Rose Bowl history in honor of the big game coming up here in a really short time on its 100th anniversary at the stadium.

So Tim Brown of Football Archaeology, thank you once again for joining us. Hey, thank you, Darin. Look, I know we've got one more that we're gonna talk about in a couple of weeks, so looking forward to it.

Yeah, definitely. Thank you.

The banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the very first Tournament East-West football game, hosted by the Tournament of Roses. The game would become known as the Rose Bowl Game and like (nearly) all subsequent games it was played on New Years Day, January 1, 1902. The first game featured Fielding H. Yost's dominating 1901 University of Michigan (representing the East) crushing previously 3-1-2 Stanford (representing the West) by a score of 49-0. Michigan would end the season 11-0-0 and considered the National Champions. Yost had been Stanford's coach the previous year. The game was so lopsided that the game wasn't played again until 1916, when it would become a yearly tradition. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library's Photo Collection, by an Unknown author

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet site Football Archaeology and its author Timothy P. Brown