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ARENA / Bowl where dreams are stirred: 13 The Rose Bowl: Richard Williams explains the unique allure of one of America's most historic and attractive stadiums

Richard Williams
Saturday 16 July 1994 23:02 BST
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SOME DAYS in the past couple of weeks, you could hardly see the hills above the Rose Bowl at all. Only a mile or two away to the north of Pasadena, the ragged rim of the San Gabriel mountains was obscured not by the usual Los Angeles petrochemical smog but by the thin blue-grey smoke from forest fires, the summer plague.

On the afternoon that the United States made history by reaching the second round, for instance, the fires got so bad that the Forest Rangers closed the canyon roads, hustling picnickers away while they tried to contain the wildfires. Down in the Rose Bowl's locker rooms, the players of the US and Romania were still gasping for air after 90 minutes of intense effort in extraordinary conditions.

That day in particular, the weather seemed to have gone crazy. A couple of hours after the game, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, the temperature in the Rose Bowl car park was still close to 120 degrees. Down on the pitch in the second half, it may have reached beyond 130. Even the spectators were dousing themselves in overpriced mineral water.

When you can see the mountains, they provide a lovely backdrop for one of the nation's favourite arenas, home of some of American football's biggest events since 1923, when it was built to host the East v West inter-collegiate American football championship from which it takes its name.

There are 18 annual end-of- season 'bowl games' now, but the Rose Bowl was the original, first played in 1902 between the University of Michigan and Stanford University in front of 8,000 spectators at Tournament Park in Pasadena. Its name came from the Tournament of Roses, a winter floral gala founded in 1890, when members of the local Valley Hunt Club decorated their horses and carriages and paraded them through the streets of Pasadena. A dozen years later the Rose Bowl was born, although in its second year a disastrous experiment was conducted: polo replaced football, attracting a crowd of only 2,000. The following year, chariot racing began an 11- year stint, but in 1916 football was permanently reinstated. In 1923 the new Rose Bowl stadium was opened, and has since been the venue for some historic encounters, including the 1929 game in which the California centre Roy Riegels picked up a Georgia Tech fumble, tried to make ground (as the rules allowed then), got his bearings confused, and raced down the pitch towards his own line, to be halted by a team-mate's block just one yard from the end zone. After his side had lost the game by a single point, Riegels claimed that he had thought the noise he heard was the crowd yelling their encouragement.

In more recent times the Rose Bowl has hosted three NFL Super Bowl games, including the 1993 event, in which the Dallas Cowboys established their dominance of the Buffalo Bills. As a soccer stadium, its history extends all the way back to 1958, when the Los Angeles Kickers won the US Open Cup; it was also the home base in the Seventies of the LA Aztecs, whose foreign players included a couple of chaps called Cruyff and Best. When crowds of 80,000-plus turned up for the soccer tournament at the 1984 Olympic Games, their enthusiasm laid the basis for the World Cup bid.

A fine open oval whose single broad terrace has an official capacity of 102,083, it has welcomed the largest audiences of a singularly well attended tournament over the past four weeks, and this afternoon it becomes the 14th stadium to host a World Cup final since 1930. (This is, of course, the 15th tournament, but Mexico City's Azteca Stadium was the venue in both 1970 and 1986.)

The attendances at the Rose Bowl have been outstanding by any standards: 91,856 for Colombia v Romania, 83,989 for Cameroon v Sweden, 93,194 for the United States v Colombia, 93,869 for the US v Romania, 90,469 for the inspiring game between Romania and Argentina, and 84,569 for the semi-final between Brazil and Sweden. The figure for today's final is likely to be close to the six- figure maximum, although the alterations to the seating to accommodate the world's media will keep it below the record.

The Rose Bowl lies within Brookside Park, itself a bigger bowl indented between the cities of Pasadena and Glendale. Tall California palm and eucalyptus trees drape their fronds above the rim of the stadium and line the roads winding around the sides of the park, which bear names such as Linda Vista Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard, constituting a kind of semi-rural imitation of Beverly Hills, stocked with spacious and well-kept family houses.

The impression here is one of unbroken serenity. But less than a mile to the south-west of the stadium, in the lee of Highway 134, lies the seismological laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. They know something about eruptions there, and a solo by a Baggio or a Romario down the valley this afternoon could make fresh demands on the Richter Scale.

(Photograph omitted)

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