Coolest bowl game names honour stuff that sprouts from the ground
Astro-bluebonnet Bowl was truly funky, and it’s hard to knock the name Cheez-it
WASHINGTON While we slog again toward 40 televised bowl games and prepare to morph into blobs and disappear into couches in front of gigantic TVS, our nation still suffers from a bowl-naming crisis so sprawling that it has metastasized beyond our borders to the Bahamas.
So many of our bowls have clunky names, which are an inveterate threat to our national coolness, yet we sit there inertly and take it, even as everyone can agree that the cool bowl names involve stuff that sprouts from the soil.
Somehow we have named only seven of the 40 current bowls (Nos. 1-7) thusly: Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Peach, Potato and Camellia.
Special commendation goes to the Potato and the Camellia, so named in 2011 and 2014, respectively, for laudable attempts in a modern era to stem a dreary tide that claimed even the late, great Poinsettia.
The Poinsettia, one of America’s eccentric collection of defunct bowls, existed from 1952-55 and 2005-16, all in San Diego, often involving Navy, and all steeped in a sprightliness the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl cannot approach. At one point, the Poinsettia had the most American bowl name ever, when factoring in the sponsor: the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. Broadcasters should have aimed to state that mouthful on each reference. Verne Lundquist would have aced it with aplomb.
Alas, organizers folded the Poinsettia in January 2017 to concentrate on the city’s other bowl, the Holiday, while revealing another oddity of our lives: the way bowls come and go before us while we sit powerless before the carousel of names.
Now the bowl roster has found itself lacking a Poinsettia and a major Christmas flower has sat around lacking a bowl game.
If you don’t think poinsettias deserve a bowl game, then you’re both anti-poinsettia and irredeemable.
The loss did sting for those of us with a combination of good taste and no life. Some of us are the same people who never recovered fully from the cessation of the Bluebonnet Bowl (1959-87), and the same people who never minded when the Bluebonnet Bowl became the Astro-bluebonnet Bowl (1968-84, 1987) as a way of acknowledging its site, the Astrodome.
As names go, the Astro-bluebonnet Bowl still ranks No. 1, lifetime, in overall funkiness.
At calamitous present, we have 11 bowls (Nos. 8-18) named for places (such as Birmingham, Boca Raton and Frisco), six (Nos. 19-24) named for treasured intangibles (Celebration, Cure, Independence, Holiday, Liberty, Fiesta), and eight (Nos. 25-32) named for products.
Americans long since eased their resistance and accepted product-name bowls, and truly, it’s very hard to malign a bowl that dares to call itself Cheez-it.
Belk Bowl, that Charlotte-based affair with the bouncy name, will change sponsors and names after Dec. 31, enabling us to hope against hope that organizers might rummage around the various foliage possibilities, name a Flowering Dogwood Bowl and improve the country.
That game might even attract butterflies.
Three bowls (Nos. 33-35) are named to honour a general group of people we admire (Military, First Responder, Armed Forces), so we can leave those alone, even while still welcoming any future changes that tilt toward botany.
There’s one bowl (No. 36) named for a fashion detail — Pinstripe, because it’s played at Yankee Stadium — but that one should defer to a New York plant, such as a Weed Bowl.
There’s one bowl (No. 37) named for a historical event (Alamo), and if you look at the flowers around San Antonio, that one would yield in any worthy world to the return of the name Bluebonnet.
There’s one bowl (No. 38) named for a reptile (Gator).
There’s one bowl (No. 39) named for a genus of plants (Citrus), and that’s almost good, but needs to revert to its original name, Tangerine, which was untouchably cool.
There’s one bowl (No. 40) named for a popular orb (Sun), and it’s hard to begrudge a bowl named for something without which we all would be dead, but any El Paso bowl should have access to a rip-roaring name once used in Phoenix, “Cactus.”
The late Cactus Bowl of Phoenix also used to be the Copper Bowl, the Insight.com Bowl (at which point it was believed to have been played not on the field but in a gaming centre), the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, the Cactus Bowl and now the Cheez-it Bowl (barely forgivable).
Cactus joins the list of bowl names no longer used, and after time passages, primed for rebirth. There used to be a Pineapple Bowl in Honolulu (1940-52), and there’s no reason Hawaii Bowl can’t resurrect that, even as we should voice no opposition and, in fact, all joy, toward any prospective Bougainvillea Bowl.
There used to be a Cherry Bowl in Michigan. There still should be a Cherry Bowl in Michigan.
Fresno used to have a Raisin Bowl, and that was inspired. Northern California once had a Grape Bowl (1947-48), and if they brought it back and held it around wine country, it would not be tragic.
There have been bowls named Corn and Wheat, but strangely, never Barley.
Phoenix once had a Salad Bowl (1947-55) which raises the question of the acceptability of a bowl name relating to several botanical elements rather than just one.
Why are you all going to Phoenix? Oh, we’re going to the Salad Bowl. Bring it back.
Other defunct names might be welcomed back as exceptions even as they don’t stem directly from stems. One such would be the bowl that became the first of 50 through time to welcome LSU, the current No. 1 team. LSU beat University of Havana 56-0 in the 1907 Bacardi Bowl in Havana. From there, the Bacardi Bowl occurred seven times between 1907 and 1946, perhaps taking breaks to recover from hangovers.
Bacardi technically hails from sugar cane molasses, so it might rate an exception, and while some of us would prefer a Woodford Reserve Bowl, we shouldn’t get carried away and let the spirits deluge our plants and flowers.
The easiest suggestions in this fight could go to the bowls named for places. Make the Hawaii Bowl the Pineapple Bowl. The Bahamas Bowl should become the Yellow Elder Bowl, honouring the national flower, and doesn’t the national bowl landscape look brighter already? And then:
■ New Mexico Bowl -> Green Chile Bowl
■ Arizona Bowl -> Saguaro Bowl
■ Frisco Bowl -> Mesquite Bowl
■ Boca Raton Bowl -> Palm Bowl
■ Texas Bowl -> Pecan Bowl
■ Music City Bowl -> Iris Bowl
■ New Orleans Bowl -> Baldcypress Bowl
■ Birmingham Bowl -> Longleaf Pine Bowl
If I went to college and played for a team and told people later in life that I had played in a Longleaf Pine Bowl, I would know I hailed from a country of singular vividness.
Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Bowl could go rogue if it liked, for something colourful and ersatz-botanical, like Artificial Tree Bowl.
Look at that iridescent panorama! Smell the flowers, almost. And then change all the product bowls, with the possible exception of Cheez-it.