'Fall'-ing for traditions

Sure, L.A. has its own traditions and we are trying to learn them. But we are not abandoning our traditions of old. It is fall, afterall, and fall means cooler weather (well, not here) and changing leaves (um...not so much) and football!!

There are challenges to living 3 hours behind our friends and family on the East Coast (2 behind the Iowa contingent), but there is the occasional silver lining. Such as being able to watch all of a Monday Night Football games without needing to stay up to ridiculous hours. It may be a challenge to have to find places to have brunch with the early Giants and Redskins games at 9 a.m. PST (and just what tailgating drink goes with scrambled eggs and hashbrowns?), we'll take that as a trade-off to not having to fall asleep at half-time of a Sunday night game and wake up to find that the Jets pulled off a Farve comeback and we really should have stayed up.

But if you are in L.A., what better way to kick-off a new football season than in the Grandaddy of Bowl Game stadiums...the Rose Bowl. Whether or not you are in love with college football, I highly recommend the Rose Bowl experience. Afterall, who doesn't want yams as a half-time treat? (Yup, yams....as well as tri-tip and churros. Isn't that what you cook at a tailgate?) I do not, however, recommend sitting in a large sea of the Orange of the Tenessee Volunteers when the Bruins pull off the upset of opening weekend football. ;-) Okay, it's not the yams that are the attraction. The stadium is steeped in history and lore, and there are lots of great seats.

The first Tournament of Roses was staged in 1890by members of Pasadena's Valley Hunt Club, former residents of the East and Midwest eager to showcase their new home's mild winter weather."In New York, people are buried in snow," announced Professor Charles F. Holder at a Club meeting. "Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise." (Good thing I was not on that committee!)During the next few years, the festival expanded to include marching bands and motorized floats. The games on the town lot included ostrich races, bronco busting demonstrations and a race between a camel and an elephant (the elephant won, unlike in the 2008 elections!). Reviewing stands were built along the Parade route, and Eastern newspapers began to take notice of the event. In 1895, the Tournament of Roses Association was formed to take charge of the festival, which had grown too large for the Valley Hunt Club to handle.In 1902, the Tournament of Roses decided to enhance the day's festivities by adding a football game – the first post season college football game ever held. Stanford University accepted the invitation to take on the powerhouse University of Michigan, but the West Coast team was flattened 49-0 and gave up in the third quarter. The lopsided score prompted the Tournament to give up football in favor of Roman-style chariot races. In 1916, football returned to stay and the crowds soon outgrew the stands in Tournament Park. William L. Leishman, the Tournament's 1920 President, envisioned a stadium similar to the Yale Bowl, the first great modern football stadium, to be built in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco area. In 1922, the Pennsylvania team of Washington and Jefferson was enough of a East Coast powerhouse to be invited to the Bowl Game to play California. The lengthy preview article extolled the vitrues of the California team and ended with the sentence: "The only thing I know about Washington and Jefferson is that they are both dead." Admittedly, Washington and Jefferson lost that game miserably, but we stood in the stadium where it happened and we are better (entertained) for it. But the game garnered enough money for a new playspace to be built.

The new stadium hosted its first New Year's football game in 1923 and soon earned the nickname "The Rose Bowl." Never mind your high-tech new fangled stadiums...classic does just fine. It seems weird to tailgate on a golf course, but when in L.A..........well, we have to do what we can in the absence of any NFL games to go to here. (We're not quite ready to be Chargers fans ;-)