In America, the end of every college football season is celebrated with a variety of “bowl games”: the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl are just a few. And, of course, the NFL took a cue from the college game by naming its yearly championship the Super Bowl.
But why are they bowls? Did the winner get a bowl of roses or cotton or sugar or oranges? A free set of tableware? Did the first trophies look like bowls?
Haha… no. It actually comes from 1914, when Yale University built the first modern football stadium in the United States. Prior to this, most universities just took a large area of flat ground, marked off the football field, then built wooden or metal stands on one side of the field. As the team grew in popularity, the school would then build stands on the other side of the field, then on either end zone as needed. And by that time, the school would enclose the whole area with a fence of some kind, so that only paying customers could watch the game. Or they’d just use a baseball field, which presented its own set of problems.
But Yale’s new stadium was different. For one thing, the entire thing was recessed into the ground, so that the playing field was several feet (meters) below the surrounding ground. Bathrooms and food stalls were included. Access was controlled by various gates, and the entire building was circular. The whole thing kind of looked like a giant bowl from above, and this led people to call the stadium the “Yale Bowl”, which is the name it has today. It was new and it was breathtaking. And it was such a success that the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (1921), the Rose Bowl (1922) and Michigan Stadium (1926) copied the basic design.
But here’s the thing: the very first “bowl game” – the Rose Bowl – was originally created to help fund a preexisting event: Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. If you’re an American, you’ve no doubt seen at least a bit of the famous “Tournament of Roses Parade” on TV every New Year’s Day. Well, what happened was that the tournament was barely breaking even most years, so someone on the organizing committee suggested holding a football game to generate a bunch of revenue.
As envisioned, the game was to feature the best team from the western states playing the best team from the eastern states. However, in the inaugural game – played on January 1, 1902 – the eastern team (Michigan) crushed the western team (Stanford) by a score of 49-0. I don’t know if the Californians’ feelings were hurt or what, but for the next several years other sports were substituted for football. Given the immense popularity of college football today, it’s hard to believe that chariot and ostrich races were more popular than football, but so it was.
15 years later the game was resurrected. The first few games were played in nearby Tournament Park, but the game quickly grew so popular that a proper stadium became necessary. And so, in 1922 the “Tournament East-West Football Game” moved to the “Tournament of Roses Stadium”. Within a year, the stadium was called the “Tournament of Roses Bowl” (thanks to the Yale Bowl), and soon the game itself was just called the “Rose Bowl”.
