The most elusive treasure in Tucson’s sports community isn’t Arizona’s return to the Final Four or regaining possession of the 122-year-old Territorial Cup. It’s an invitation to play in the Rose Bowl.
Even if it takes the next 122 years for Arizona to play in the “Granddaddy of Them All,” UA football fans will treat it as if they’ve discovered lost gold in the Superstition mountains.
Or will they? Once the baby-boomer sports fans are gone, will the Rose Bowl’s aura be diminished, reduced in scope the way the World Series has fallen from prominence in American sports?
I bring this to your attention because four Ohio State football players have chosen not to participate in Saturday’s Rose Bowl. The operative words in this me-first generation of college football is “opted out.”
Can you imagine not wanting to play in the Rose Bowl? It’s not the Cheez-It Bowl. It’s not in Shreveport or El Paso. It’s college football’s most historic game, played on the most sainted piece of turf in college football history.
Yet Ohio State’s Chris Olave, Garrett Wilson, Nickolas Petit-Frere and Haskell Garrett all declared they would prefer not to spend a week being celebrated by the Tournament of Roses Committee, flee the Miidwest winter and have a spot in school history next to Woody Hayes, Hopalong Cassady and Archie Griffin.
They prefer to prepare for the NFL draft.
It’s not the same as five ASU Sun Devils opting out of the SRS Distribution Las Vegas Bowl or five Virginia Tech Hokies betraying their teammates by backing out of the New Era Pinstripe Bowl.
This is like being nominated for an Academy Award but not showing up because you had to work on your tan.
College football used to be the Four Horsemen “outlined against a blue-gray October sky.” Now it is becoming the Four Buckeyes, sitting on a couch waiting for the draft.
Until I heard of the Buckeyes opt-outs, I had nothing but a competitive animosity for the Utah Utes dating to my college days; I developed ill feelings for Utah the way a Wildcat fan feels about Sun Devils.
Now my favorite team in football — for one day and one day only — is Utah. If you disrespect the Rose Bowl, you disrespect a generation of sports fans who sat in front of a fireplace on New Year’s Day, waiting for the voice of ABC’s Keith Jackson to make you feel warm all over.
One of the happiest days of my newspaper career took place in December 1981, when the Star’s sports editor, Sam Pollak, called me into his office and told me I was to travel to Pasadena to cover the Iowa-Washington Rose Bowl.
“We cover the Rose Bowl?” I asked, incredulously.
“We put it in the budget when Arizona got into the Pac-10,” he said.
Everybody wanted to be part of the Rose Bowl grandeur.
As I stood outside the Rose Bowl press box hours before kickoff, several police cars and a dozen motorcycle cops — lights flashing — pulled up. Security guards ordered me and several other writers to the parking lot, creating a corridor so that former president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, could catch the next elevator to their press box suite.
Did I say it was a Big Game?
I even slept at the Rose Bowl, maybe the only sportswriter in history to do so.
In the summer of ‘72, me and my friend Dave Ringle set out for Southern California to discover what life was like out of little old Logan, Utah. We were told by a prominent donor at our school that we could get jobs at a Pepsi plant near his restaurant in San Gabriel,
We saved enough money to stay in a motel for about 10 days, go to an entire Los Angeles Dodgers homestand and then play it by ear. We hopped in my 1963 Pontiac Catalina and drove straight through to Los Angeles.
The job at the Pepsi plant didn’t work out — we naively discovered we were to be “scabs,” strike-breakers — so after a week we knew we’d be heading back to Utah for the summer.
“Let’s go to one more Dodgers game,” Dave said.
“But we won’t have enough money for a motel,” I replied.
‘That’s OK; we can sleep in your car.”
We decided that if we absolutely must sleep in the car, it would have to be at what we considered the most famous landmark in Southern California — the Rose Bowl. Even in the summer, the famous Rose Bowl insignia was illuminated at night. We parked directly beneath it. We couldn’t wait to tell our friends.
In the middle of the night, someone rapped on the car window. It was a policeman.
“Do you know you could get killed here?” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”
I risked my life to sleep at the Rose Bowl. Now four Ohio State football players won’t risk getting injured before the NFL draft.
Go Utes!
