Be careful, or you might drive into a bunker in the dark

We just couldn’t let this stuff go …

On the night of Jan. 1, 2013, hours after the close of another daydreamy Rose Bowl, a visitor lumbered across the grass of the vast makeshift parking lot toward the car and encountered a sight so eccentric that you would have to say it helps make the Rose Bowl the Rose Bowl. There, in the dark darkness and near-emptiness, teetered a neighboring car, the left half of it still clinging to solid ground but the right half hovering as if the whole machine looked ripe to topple right on into ... that bunker.

That golf bunker, writes Chuck Culpepper of The Washington Post.

There are hellish bunker escapes, and then there are hellish bunker escapes.

A tow truck stood dutifully nearby.

The thing is, this screwball sight qualifies as an extreme that happens from time to time and backlights a uniqueness. Perhaps the nation’s most venerable stadium, its majestic, low-slung self, stands in an arroyo next door to city-owned Brookside Golf Club, its neighbor with two 18-hole courses and a paucity of wind. And on Monday, the courses will buttress its annual 40,000 or so cars, these latest ones carrying those interested in witnessing No. 1 Michigan vs. No. 4 Alabama in a Rose Bowl national semifinal.

Most of those 40,000 will come and go without complication, but some will wander through the winter darkness into the kinds of graphic circumstances that fasten themselves to human memory banks. Their drivers will try short-cutting and drive smack into a bunker.

“It happens quite often,” Brookside tournament coordinator Philip Di Nova said. “We’ve had that, and we’ve had people drive their cars into the lakes.” So: “If you’re not careful and you don’t follow the painted lines (to exit the lot), you will end up in a precarious situation. It will take a couple of great shots to get out of that bunker.”

Then there’s that other category: “Tuesday after the Rose Bowl, we’ll have probably half a dozen cars that are left behind.” That means the sunrise golfers of Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024, might play through a stray car here or there, a situation both irksome and preferable to the alternative of these people having driven home.

More often, Di Nova said, golfers won’t even notice anything odder than stuffed trash bags, owing to the brisk, yeoman work of cleanup crews.

Trivia question

On this date in 1961, the Green Bay Packers beat the New

York Giants 37-0 for their seventh NFL title. Green Bay’s Bart Starr threw three touchdown passes, but another star, a private on Army leave, accounted for 19 points. Who was it?

He wrote it

From longtime Milwaukee Sentinel Packers beat reporter Bud Lea, who died in 2021 at the age of 92: “Why, it was as easy as taking candy from a baby. The powerful Packers ran the Giants off the property Sunday, 37-0, and proved to the football world that they are the very best.”

Trivia answer Paul Hornung

“Golden Boy” scored the game’s first touchdown on a 6-yard run, hit three field goals of 17, 22 and 19 yards and added four extra points. Hornung also rushed 20 times for 89 yards and caught three passes for 47 yards.