San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The death of the Rose Bowl is an ominous sign for us all
The Rose Bowl game, an annual sports spectacle embodying cherished California conceptions of beauty and inclusion, is dead.
It was 121 years old.
The cause of death was our winner-take-all culture.
In Pasadena, the hometown of your columnist, city officials remained in denial, claiming that the Rose Bowl was very much alive. After all, the old stadium in the Arroyo Seco is still called the “Rose Bowl” and will host college football playoffs for years to come.
But the Rose Bowl itself — a postseason football game pitting conference champions from the West (Pac-12) and East (Big Ten) — is no more. Ever-changing California has lost a rare and reassuring New Year’s tradition.
Once considered cutting-edge — for example, the game was the first sporting event broadcast on transcontinental radio — the Rose Bowl represented values so old-fashioned that they now seem even foreign in our angry nationalist age.
Today, Americans are bitterly divided by politics, region and identity. Our systems, in everything from business to governments, spread division through competitions that identify an uber-winner, making everyone else a loser.
The Rose Bowl incubated a different tradition — of college football bowl games that brought together Americans from different regions. This bowl system, headlined by the Rose Bowl, produced many winners, rather than just one. Champions of the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl and so on could each claim a share of a mythical national championship.
It was like a Scandinavian election, where four emerge as winners.
But such a unifying, democraticminded spirit couldn’t long survive in our cutthroat country. Television executives and football-playing universities believed they could draw bigger audiences — and make more money — by establishing a college football playoff system.
The Rose Bowl and other bowls resisted a playoff for decades. But in the 21st century, the pressure for a playoff grew. Then-President Barack Obama, taking time from building systems of mass surveillance and
deportation, even lobbied for a winner-take-all national football playoff, arguing: “If you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner.”
In 2014, the Rose Bowl surrendered and agreed to become part of the playoff system. The Rose Bowl negotiated a deal preserving its EastWest tradition in part; most years, it could pit a Pac-12 and Big Ten champion, but every third year, it would instead host a playoff semifinal.
Sadly, that compromise only delayed the game’s death.
In 2022, television companies and college football conferences moved to expand the playoffs from four teams to 12 to make more money. The Rose Bowl resisted this push but had little leverage.
So the Rose Bowl signed its own death warrant this fall — giving up not only its traditional East-West matchup but also its traditional time, on the afternoon of New Year’s Day (except in years when Jan. 1 falls on Sunday and the game shifts to Jan. 2). Instead, the Rose Bowl will be one of the playoff games.
In Pasadena, game officials and city leaders have shamelessly spun the death of their traditional game as some kind of victory. More tourists might come to our hometown because of greater excitement around a playoff, they’ve said. But that’s nonsense. Pasadena needed to keep a college football game because it needs the revenue from the broadcast to help fund the Rose Parade. If
that meant jettisoning the Rose Bowl in favor of hosting a playoff quarterfinal — as seems likely — they were willing to do it.
Now, reflecting on the death of the Rose Bowl, some of you may think that your columnist has lost perspective when it comes to his hometown tradition. It’s only a game, right?
But it is you, the sanguine, who have lost perspective.
I read the loss of the Rose Bowl through the work of the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a longtime Stanford professor and a friend and mentor to former Gov. Jerry Brown.
Dupuy is a self-described “enlightened doomsayer,” a philosopher of apocalypse. He argues that “humanity is on a suicidal course, headed straight for catastrophe.” Why? Because we don’t respect the sacred things. We blow through limits. And, in doing so, we produce constant calamities and catastrophes and unleash violence.
The Rose Bowl game is one such sacred ritual that inspired togetherness. Its death takes us one step closer to the end of the world.
A memorial service for the Rose Bowl will be held on the afternoon of Jan. 2, 2023. It will be the final Rose Bowl game with a traditional Pac-12Big Ten matchup, pitting Utah against Penn State. There is no need to send flowers — the Rose Parade always has thousands of them.