The
First Post-Season College Football Game
At
the turn of the 20th century, Pasadena was a quiet California
town at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains a few miles northeast of Los
Angeles. Wealthy people, including many from the East, wintered there. Starting
in 1890, Pasadena hosted an annual New Year's Day parade of carriages covered
with flowers. After the parade, spectators watched footraces, polo, tug-of-war
matches, and a Spanish-style horseback riding competition called the "tourney
of rings." The entire affair was therefore called the Tournament
of Roses.
The
1900 tournament attracted an estimated 50,000 visitors. Hotel owners and other
area businessmen decided to increase interest even further with a college
football game to be played at Tournament Park between a West Coast team and
one from east of the Mississippi.
At
the time, the "powerhouses" were all Eastern schools such as Harvard,
Yale, Princeton,
Penn, and Cornell
– teams that much later, but not at that time, comprised the "Ivy
League." Harvard finished
1901 with a 12-0 record. However, a team from the Midwest finished 10-0 and
outscored its opponents 128-0, causing sportswriters to proclaim them the
national champions. So the Tournament of Roses Association invited the "point-a-minute"
Michigan Wolverine team of Fielding
Yost as the visiting team.
Finding
a West Coast team anywhere near Michigan's
caliber proved to be a daunting task. Southern
California played mostly high school and athletic club teams.
California finished 9-0-1 but
only two Bears' victories were
against college teams, Nevada
and Stanford. Despite their
loss to Cal, 3-1-2 Stanford
became the host team because Yost had coached them the previous
season. So it was felt that the Indians
would be ready for Yost's tactics.
Tournament
officials agreed to give Michigan
players $3 a day in meal money while they were in California. The team journeyed
for a week to the Golden State by rail.
The
game was delayed thirty minutes because the players rode to Tournament Park
on parade floats. The teams went through a brief warmup in 90-degree heat,
making spectators wonder if the Wolverines
would wilt late in the contest.
The rules
were different from today in some important ways.
Michigan
started slowly and after 10 minutes the score remained 0-0. The visitors'
speedy halfback, Willie
Heston, started a sweep around right end but stopped and darted
back to the left in a "naked reverse." He gained 40 yards before
getting knocked out of bounds. Then All-America fullback Neil
Snow crashed through the middle for the first score and the rout
was on.
With
six minutes to go, Michigan
led 49-0. Heston had gained 170 yards and Snow,
107. The Stanford captain requested
that the game be called because his players, not the cold-climate team, were
exhausted. The Wolverines, in
fact, had not substituted at all. Stanford
guard W.
K. Roosevelt, second cousin of the president, played 15 minutes
with a broken leg before fractured ribs finally forced him to the sidelines.
(Teddy himself intervened when football became so brutal
that a number of players nationwide died. But that's a story for another Golden
Moment.)
8,500
fans attended the first bowl game in college football history. The event earned
a profit of $3,161 for the Tournament of Roses Association. However, the fact
that there was not likely to be any West Coast ready to compete with Eastern
opponents any time soon caused Festival leaders to put the game in mothballs.
The
1903 festival featured polo but drew only 2,000 spectators. From 1904 to 1915,
the main draw was chariot races based on the novel Ben-Hur. During
that period, the parade became more elaborate, with floats and prizes to the
most attractive ones. (There were several post-season football games elsewhere
during this period but, again, we'll save that story for another time.)
In
1915 the Association resurrected the idea of a New Year's Day football game.
Because of the chariot races, Tournament Park now held 25,000 in wooden bleachers.
The Ivy League powerhouses were not interested in an expensive trip across
the continent. However, Brown
accepted the invitation to play Washington State,
which was 6-0 against college competition, outscoring opponents 190-10. The
West Coast team dominated on a muddy field 14-0, holding Brown's
African-American All-American back Fritz
Pollard to 40 yards. (Pollard went on to play
and coach in the National Football League.)
The
Rose Bowl has been played every year since 1915. The only game not played
in Pasadena was the 1942 contest between Oregon
State and Duke
which was moved to Durham NC because of fear of a Japanese air attack on the
West Coast.
Reference:
Bowl
Games: College Football's Greatest Tradition, Robert M. Ours, 2004
Time
article on Michigan's next appearance in the Rose Bowl in 1947