Bowls

This is how much I pay attention to these things: If you’d asked me yesterday about the Rose Bowl, I would have thought it had been on January 1, when it always is. This morning I picked up the paper and saw the headlines about UT’s remarkable victory—the day before. My first thought was, How can the Rose Bowl be on January 4? Isn't there something in Leviticus that mandates January 1, or January 2 when the 1st falls on the Sabbath? Or maybe it was in the Codex Justinianus, but that wouldn’t have mentioned the Sabbath.

After a moment of that kind of thinking, I was glad that Texas won. It’s Texas, after all. I can’t be a complete UT fan, even if I cared about football, since my grandpa was an Aggie. But I can be a fair-weather fan, and it’s a mighty sunny day down in Austin.

In 1969, when I was 8, we went driving around one evening to see Christmas lights in a neighborhood that decked itself out pretty, and had the advantage of being only a few minutes’ drive from home. This was before the Christmas of ’73, the OPEC embargo Christmas, when so many houses were dark for the season that (I think) people talked about the end of outdoor holiday decoration as middle America knew it.

In ’69, a house on one street had only white and orange lights (UT colors), with a large Longhorn mascot face fixed to the edge of the roof two stories up. On one of Longhorn’s long horns was a #. On the other was a numeral 1. That was the year that UT won the AP sports writers’ poll for #1. True fanatics in that house, I bet.

The Rose Bowl naturally inspired me to spend time looking up other bowls, and before long I was reading about defunct bowls. Some had more entertaining names than others, such as the Bluegrass Bowl, the Gotham Bowl, the Raisin Bowl and the Salad Bowl (were they serious with that one?). Everyone’s favorite defunct bowl, to judge by a scattering of web sites, is the Bacardi Bowl, last played in Havana in the 1930s.