Rose Bowl Memories and Lessons Learned

 Twenty-six years between appearances, and twenty-three years of my personal waiting to attend a game

 I attended the Rose Bowl this year for the first time in my life. Growing up in the state of Michigan, I remember watching the televised Rose Parades every year and the annual football game. It seemed at the time that the only schools from the Big Ten conference that played in that game were the University of Michigan and Ohio State University.

My mother was a graduate of Michigan State University (MSU), as well as many of my aunts, uncles and cousins. I grew up being surrounded by MSU partisans and later, that is where I went to college. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, MSU's football program wasn't the greatest. I attended the games while in school, but we lost more than we won.

This changed after I graduated when they hired a new coach and in 1988, MSU went to the Rose Bowl and beat the University of Southern California.

I couldn't attend that game due to timing and finances, but I did cheer on my team as I watched the televised broadcast.

In 1991, my husband and I moved to California. We promised each other that if Michigan State ever made it to the Rose Bowl while we lived in California that we would go to the game. It has been an annual joke when I told my bosses that I would be willing to work the New Year's Day holiday, *unless* Michigan State was in the Rose Bowl. Usually by October I told them that we had been mathematically eliminated from contention and I could work that holiday. So my husband and I have waited twenty-three years since moving to California for MSU to be in the Rose Bowl (but it has been 26 years between appearances.)

Getting Tickets to the game

The last few years have been nail biters as to determining if MSU was going to go to the Rose Bowl. About three years ago when I thought there was a good chance MSU was going to go, I started investigating how we would actually get tickets. I called a friend who went to the game back in 1988. Josh had a friend who was a season ticket holder and who allowed him to purchase the Rose Bowl tickets reserved for him. I didn't think that it was likely I could score tickets that way, so I went online and discovered the Team Tix option.

Team Tix is a money making scheme, similar to buying stock options. You don't actually purchase the tickets, but reserve the opportunity to buy tickets at face value should your team attend the Rose Bowl.

Here is how it works:

In September, you go to the Tournament of Roses website and follow links to the Team Tix site. The earlier you start the process, the cheaper it is and the greater number of tickets available together. These are non-refundable reservations and you are obligated to buy the tickets if your team wins, and please note that the fee paid to reserve tickets does not apply to the cost of the tickets themselves.

The longer in the season you wait, the higher the price per reservation and the fewer reservations are left. Once all the reservations for a specific team are sold, then there is the ability to trade them on an online market where people will place bids for these reservations and the current holders will determine which bids they want to accept.

So we paid money for reservations in 2011 and 2012, but didn't get any tickets from the process. We just gave money to an agency for the right to dream that our team would go to the Rose Bowl. For them, it is like printing money. They get money from alumni from dozens of schools who get nothing for their reservations. It is kind of like playing the lottery where you know going in that you might not win and you won't get your money back if you lose.

This year, it worked for us. We reserved four tickets at $25 a reservation and when Michigan State won the Big Ten Championship playoff game against Ohio State University, we received an email the next day telling us how to obtain our tickets at the face value of $150 each.

That experience was a lot better than a friend of mine who decided two weeks before the Big Ten Championship game to try and get tickets for the Rose Bowl. The Team Tix at that point was red-hot for MSU fans and her online bid didn't get accepted, like she thought it did. Instead, she had to wait until the tickets went on sale to the general public on a Tuesday morning. Ticketmaster was sold out of their allotment in minutes. My friend Sue wound up paying a different website $520 per ticket for two seats near the Stanford end zone.

It was crazy, but at least she bought tickets at that point in time. Later, the secondary market had tickets over a thousand dollars each.

That's what happens when it is twenty-six years between Rose Bowl appearances, you get a lot of pent up desire by alumni to attend. MSU did have a certain number of tickets reserved for their alumni, but 24,000 was not close to meeting the demand. The alumni tour packages sold out instantly and some creative Spartan fans looked to the Stanford allotment of tickets and found a loophole.

Since Stanford had gone the previous year and won at the Rose Bowl, there was not the same level of hunger by their alumni to attend the Rose Bowl. Stanford offered the ability to purchase four Rose Bowl tickets at face value to those who put a $100 deposit down on 2014 season tickets. It was discovered that MSU fans were swallowing up these tickets with no intention of purchasing season tickets at Stanford.  Once it was discovered, this opportunity was taken down off the Stanford website. That is why there were many Spartan fans in the Stanford sections.

Getting to Southern California:

Since we live in California, we didn't have the travel headaches that Michiganders did. We simply chose which day we wanted to start driving down and arrange for hotel accommodations. We ran into a few Spartan fans who said they were unable to get a flight into LA, and instead flew into Las Vegas and got a rental car to make it the rest of the way.

That's just crazy, but it does show the determination of Spartan fans to be where they needed to be to cheer on their team.

Getting hotel rooms in the area was a difficult and expensive task. We decided to avoid the Pasadena area entirely and instead looked to Anaheim the home of Disneyland. We went to the theme parks on December 31st and January 2nd and saw many MSU fans wearing Spartan green. After making the decision to watch fireworks on New Year's Eve at midnight meant that getting to Pasadena early in the morning to be at the parade would be pushing our luck and energy. If we tried doing everything, we would be exhausted by the time the game started and *the game* is the reason we were down there in the first place. So we decided against going to the parade and instead just programmed it to be recorded on our DVR before we left home.

Parking

There is limited parking at the Rose Bowl Stadium. It is first come, first served with the lots open at Oh Dark Thirty in the morning. I am not joking, the parking lot opens at 4 am. Imagine celebrating New Year's Eve at midnight and then getting ready to wait in line for a parking lot to open four hours later. YIKES.

The Rose Bowl Stadium does allow for tailgating before games, but there are specific rules about that and a long list of prohibited items.

There is also another parking lot that is about a half an hour's walk away - the Parson's Lot. They have passes you can purchase in advance and that is the option my husband chose. However, we did not get the pass in the mail when it was promised. By the time we realized it hadn't come, and we had the postal Christmas holiday to contend with, it was very late in the calendar year. My husband sent an email and had to wait for a few business days for a reply. Thankfully there was enough time for the company to reply and have passes waiting for us at "will call" at a certain entrance.


Getting to the parking lot

We would have been better off using a paper map. Instead we trusted modern technology and GPS. BIG MISTAKE. The GPS recognized that there were barricaded streets due to the parade route, but it still tried to direct us through streets we could not traverse. We were coming from Anaheim and made really good time on the LA freeways because it was a holiday and there was no traffic to speak of, but we should have thought long and hard about the parade route and tried to go west and north of the parking lot and then get closer. Instead we followed the GPS and approached it from the south and east. Once we actually got around the parade route and were on the street we needed to be, the traffic was at a snail's pace. We would watch the traffic lights go through two or three cycles where we would advance maybe a single car's length.

It was painful.

Once we got to the parking lot, they did have our parking pass waiting for us. :whew:


There is no tailgating allowed at this parking lot, so we had to try and meet up with our friends at the stadium.

It was a sea of green and white that stretched out into a really long line waiting to board the shuttle buses. There were some Stanford fans wearing red, but they seemed outnumbered by the green wearing Spartans.

In retrospect, it would have been faster for us to walk to the stadium. Instead, we waited patiently in line.

I had made grand plans to meet up with friends and family before the game. I had read and re-read the guidelines for what was allowed for tailgating. Except, I didn't quite understand some of the finer details so my grand plans didn't work out too well.

I did meet up with my Uncle Jim, but that was after several cell phone calls and text messages trying to explain exactly where I was standing using land marks. It wasn't easy, but here we are mugging for the camera.

  
Lessons learned from my attempt at tail gating fiasco: unless I am willing to brave the morning rush of cars at 4 am to get a prime parking spot at the Rose Bowl Stadium's parking lot, forget about trying to bring food or drink to tail gate. They have food and drink for sale in a specified area and will not allow you to bring in anything from the outside.

Plus, I should have kept my cell phone in my pocket on vibrate. I certainly could not hear it ring reliably in my purse with the ambient noise of thousands of excited football fans.

My husband had brought his nice camera with him. Too bad we didn't notice a mention in the fine print of a prohibition for telephoto lenses. He had to surrender his camera during the game and had only a specified short period of time to pick it up after the game concluded. To make sure he didn't lose out on getting his camera back, he left the game with about three minutes left. So he missed the greatest play of the game which guaranteed Michigan State's victory.

(We did watch it on our DVR'd recording after we returned home.)

Here is a view from the Spartan end zone:

I also ran into my cousin Joann in a tunnel before the game started and had a chance for a quick hug and picture.

My thoughts about the game:

It was a close, hard fought game. I wasn't too worried when Stanford at the beginning. I knew there was a lot of time left in the game and we would get our chance.

I was surprised that the MSU Fight Song had a few minor changes done to it since I had last attended a football game. There's a part of the song which goes,

"See their team is weakening
We're going to win this game
FIGHT, FIGHT, RAH TEAM FIGHT
Victory for MSU!"

 The way the fans in the stands near us were singing was a little more "in your face" style.

"See their team is WEEEEEAK"

It is fun to sing, but kinda mean.

Other observations:

I enjoyed watching the Spartan Marching Band as always. They are a great tradition and I am proud to have them represent my school.

I thought the Stanford Band was weird.

Their dress is not uniform, their instruments are not always real instruments, (one woman was using a STOP sign as a percussion instrument), they don't really march in formation or make good formations one can understand, their sound is passable but not great. Maybe if it was my school I would learn to love it and feel their irreverent ways were really cool. Being from a different background and competing school, I was taken aback by my surprise in their attire and casual approach to music.

I also think the Stanford mascot is weird. They have a dancing tree that looks like it is covered in carpet remnants. Strange.

One more thing that I find uncomfortable about Stanford is referring to the team as "the Cardinal." Singular. It is not a title of a religious leader nor of a bird, but instead it is a color.

I heard sentences that had strange syntax in them using the singular "cardinal" in a manner meant for plural usage. It was awkward and as someone obsessed with language, it bugs me.

A tree as the mascot, but the team is referred to by a singular color. Eh?

Michigan State University's mascot is Sparty, but the school and the fans are referred to as Spartans, and our colors are green and white. It doesn't seem difficult to understand or say in the singular or plural usage.

/end rant about my befuddlement about the Stanford mascot/naming scheme

Here is a scene after the victory by Michigan State University:

 My group of happy Spartan fans found each other after the game was over in the parking lot. We decided to follow the large crowd walking back to the parking lot rather than wait for the incredibly long queue to take shuttle buses back. That was one of our best decisions of the day.

All in all, it was a great time and one that I am glad we did. I will always have the memories of being at the 100th Rose Bowl and cheering on my alma mater to victory.

Reflections on a Magical Game and its legacy, 30 years later

My son said yesterday, "Mom, I didn't think you liked basketball."

Well, I do not play basketball. This white chick cannot jump or shoot hoops.

I also do not watch random televised basketball games just to pass the time.

Nope. I only watch basketball when there a team that I care about is playing. And there are only two teams I care about:

The Detroit Pistons and Michigan State Spartans.

Thirty one years ago I heard after the fact, that Michigan State University (MSU) had almost won the NCAA championship in basketball. They lost to Kentucky who went on to win the title game.

MSU had this phenomenal freshmen who great things were expected from in the future. He led his high school team to win the state championship and many thought it inevitable he would lead MSU to the national championship as well.

His name was Earvin Johnson. The nickname that he picked up in high school was "Magic." This was because of his uncanny ability to know exactly where his teammates were on the court and pass the ball without looking at them.

I was still in high school at the time, but I was looking forward a few years down the line to when I would be in college. Many in my family were MSU alumni, and it offered my chosen field of study as well. MSU was my first choice.

I started thinking of myself as a Spartan. I decided if MSU was fated to win the NCAA basketball tournament in 1979 that I should pay attention to the entire season.

So I did.

I watched every televised game that season. The games that weren't televised, I listened to on the radio.

Every game. Even the heartbreaker where MSU lost to Northwestern.

I followed the stats of all the Big Ten schools.

I still remember the names of the starting players.

Earvin Johnson.

Greg Kelser.

Jay Vincent.

Terry Donnelly.

and

Mike Brkovich.

I happened to like Brkovich because I thought he was cute. Not dreamy, just cute.

Jay Vincent and Earvin Johnson had been cross town rivals in high school. Then they were teammates in college. T-shirts were made bearing the slogan "All the Way with Earvin and Jay" proclaiming the aspirations of Spartan fans to win it all.

Knowing how important Jay Vincent was for the team, I agonized when he was sidelined for awhile because of an injured foot.

I remember during one game a second (or third) stringer play with the last name of Huffman played for a few minutes. He stopped in the middle of the court to tie his shoe. An announcer was so taken aback by that unusual sight that he proclaimed from henceforth that player shall be referred to as "Shoes" Huffman.

There weren't many people in my high school who shared my interest, or obsession, in Spartan basketball. I remember my friend Debbie also wanted to go to MSU. She was about the only person I compared notes with during that fateful season. Except for my MSU alumni relatives who I met sporadically at family functions.

Otherwise, I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy without really sharing it with anyone else.

That is, until the NCAA Tournament began.

The announcers began playing up their expectations for Michigan State. Preferential treatment toward my favored team? It was fine by me.

Then there was talk about another team which was thus far, undefeated. It was a little known team out of the basketball crazy state of Indiana. It was not the Big Ten conference Indiana University home of the lunatic coach Bobby Knight. No, it was Indiana State University. Their leading player was named Larry Bird.

The general public in a short period of time became fascinated by the match up of "Magic" and Bird.

I cannot say why this struck a chord in the general public.

I was going to watch the game because the school I wanted to attend was playing for the national title. If they had lost an earlier round, I would not have watched.

The game was fabulous, although what I remember best are the images after the game was over. Earvin Johnson helping to cut down the winning net and Larry Bird crying in his towel.

Both images were captured in photographs the next day in the Detroit Free Press.

I was deliriously happy the night we won.

The game was the most watched game in NCAA history. To this day.

A few weeks afterward, a teacher stuck his head into our classroom to pass on the news that "Magic" Johnson was the very first player picked in the NBA Draft.

I had mixed emotions at the news.

I had hoped he wouldn't go pro just yet. He was still a sophomore at State and I selfishly wanted him to stay and win two more years of NCAA titles. Before the term was coined I wanted a Threepeat. I was greedy.

I also knew that a single injury could end an athlete's career.

So I understood that it would be better for him to turn pro while all eyes were upon him and he was in demand.

Getting past my own selfishness, I was thrilled that a player from MY team was the number one draft pick. I took it as an affirmation of my beloved Spartans.

That 1979 game between Michigan State and Indiana State is heralded as a turning point in NCAA tournament history. It also helped reinvigorate the NBA once Magic and Bird transferred their magic to the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Thirty years later and the NCAA wanted to mark the anniversary of that landmark game. They are having Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Larry Bird give out the game ball to the winning team.

And thirty years later Michigan State University is once again in the NCAA Finals.

This time, the game is being held in Downtown Detroit.

Detroit.

Or as they say in Detroit: Deeeeeeetroit.

Or sometimes: Day - Twah.

(I know there's no "s" in Detroit, but when Detroiters want to sound like they're pronouncing their town in French, they say Day - Twah.)

Detroit is only an hour and a half drive from East Lansing, home of Michigan State University.

Ford Field will be filled with Spartan fans. Look for a sea of rabid green supporters making a lot of noise.

With this tough economy, there's not a lot to cheer about in Michigan. The MSU Spartans right now have captured the hearts and imagination of Michiganders.

And Michiganders are not known for showing passive approval. They are known for raucous crowds at rock concerts and boisterous cheering at sporting events.

There will be no golf claps.

I will be watching and screaming myself hoarse in the comfort of my living room while wishing I were in the nosebleed seats in Detroit with my friends.

The University of North Carolina will have their supporters cheering for them.

They even have the blessing (or burden) of being picked by President Obama as the team predicted to win it all.

But I do not think the Tar Heels can win.

They will be in a hostile arena, surrounded by crazed Spartan fans.

And the Spartans will have an X Factor in play.

They want that game ball from Magic Johnson.

It is their legacy.

And it is their time to shine.

Go Green! Go White!



Edited to add:

My heart was broken. I saw the basketball rim the hoop and refuse to fall into the basket many times for the Spartans. As if the basketball gods simply did not want my favored team to win.

Sigh.

I remember being in high school and attending a home football game in Spartan stadium with my mother. It was a non conference game against Miami of Ohio. It was at the beginning of the season and did not mean much. However, do not tell that to the fans of MSU.

At one point the visiting team was close to getting a touchdown. The fans in the stands did not want that to happen. We cheered.

Loudly.

So much so that the officials had to call a time out because the opposing team could not hear their quarterback giving his signals.

Then they tried a second time.

We cheered louder.

The announcer gave us a warning from the officials that if the team couldn't hear the signals for a third time that our beloved Spartans would be penalized due to the interference by the crowd.

So we quieted down. Someone then decided to wave their arms over their heads. It spread like wildfire. Soon the entire stadium (save for the bloc of seats reserved for visitors) were waving their arms. Capacity of Spartan stadium is 75,000. Imagine 120,000 arms being waved at once. There was this eerie sound like a massive flock of birds flying overhead.

Our opponents did not score.

Because the fans would not allow it to happen.

That is the type of home court advantage that I expected in Ford Field. I expected the massive green and white fan contingent to lift the spirits of the Spartan players to a level where they could not lose.

Except they did.