The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part one of three)

So this time--for sure--the BCS will reform, right? In the wake of Boise State's spectacular, incredible, excellent, very good Fiesta Bowl comeback against Oklahoma (a game that included both a hook-and-ladder and a Statue of Liberty play, both for scores), we are faced with the very real possibility of the only undefeated Division I-A team--having won a BCS Bowl and beaten four Bowl teams, including Oregon State (which beat USC, which clobbered Michigan, which lost to Ohio State by three points)--ranked second in the BCS come next Tuesday. Surely, then, this will be crystallizing moment, when college football sees the error of its ways and institutes the long-awaited playoff system--four teams, eight, ten?

No. Of course not. The reasons why, in a minute. First, a few words about the Fiesta Bowl, and how appropriate it was that Boise State's classic victory should take place there.

The Fiesta Bowl has always been for upstarts. In the beginning, it was formed by resentful triplets starving for attention: the Western Athletic Conference, Arizona State University, and the powers of the greater Phoenix/Tempe area.

As is recounted in the history of the game, in the late sixties and early seventies, the Western Athletic Conference was growing dissolute about the fact that no prestigious bowl would accept its champion. Football in those days was even more a closed shop than today, as a long-ago (and non-archived) Sports Illustrated article recounts. To paraphrase, outside of a few tie-ins, the power rested neither in the NCAA nor the conferences but in a few powerful schools, which invariably meant that a few coaches-for-life who would set up bowl match-ups between themselves and present the match-up as a fait accompli. (The 1975 Sugar Bowl, between Alabama and Notre Dame, was apparently settled on a single phone call between Bear Bryant and Ara Parseghian.) Arizona State, churning out one undefeated (or one- or two-loss) season after another, was simply shut out, not only from the big four (Rose, Orange, Sugar, Cotton) but from most bowls, most years, period.

The solution--for the WAC, for Arizona State, for the Phoenix community at large (itself tired of feeling like a suburb of Los Angeles, its citizens receiving boring 10-7 Los Angeles Rams shoveathons week after week)--was the Fiesta Bowl. The very existence of the Fiesta Bowl was, as the sixties became the seventies, a close-run thing; throughout the sixties, the only bowl game approved by the NCAA was the Peach Bowl, a game (incidentally) won by Arizona State to make the school even so much as a blip on the college football radar. The Phoenix businessmen who backed the Fiesta Bowl would follow the Peach Bowl's model, and blend the game with endless charity efforts in the Valley of the Sun. The model was presented, and the NCAA approved.

From the start, there was no question of why the game existed. The Fiesta Bowl was contracted to feature an at-large invitee to play "The WAC champion," but it was clear the game was designed by wealthy Phoenicians as a Valley showcase for Arizona State, period. ASU played in five of the first seven Fiesta Bowls, winning four; had the Fiesta Bowl been incorporated (as it should have been) in 1969, ASU would have played in seven of the first nine, and almost certainly won six. The entire country (by which I mean the football-watching country at large) was in ignorance of the squads ASU coach Frank Kush was turning out year after year--which he did, first, by securing the best (not-insignificant) talent between Texas and the Colorado River; and second, by working and drilling said talent until said talent dropped. The ASU training facility in Northern Arizona is called Camp Tontozona; the hellacious mountain to be climbed at a jogger's pace is called, to this day, Mount Kush.

In the first few years, the Fiesta Bowl was between Arizona State and some offensive-minded independent such as Pittsburgh or Florida State. It was a nice sideshow, a flurry of offense in the dry desert Christmas air, right up until 1975, when ASU went 11-0 in the regular season and intruded in on the AP Top Ten, much like an newly minted oil baron might crash the country club.

The andidote, it seemed, was number three Nebraska, who (in the view of paranoid Sun Devil fans; "They're out to screw us" is embedded in an Arizona sports fans' psyche) seemed sent by the nation's football establishment to squash the Devil uprising. Oklahoma or Ohio State or Notre Dame might have worked, but (Devil fans projected) Nebraska would do. Nebraska was 10-1, having lost only to Oklahoma, and only accepted the Fiesta Bowl invitation the second time it was extended.

Compared to Boise State versus Oklahoma, no one can imagine the sense of David v. Goliath that December 26th, 1975, when the team with the sophomore quarterback (Dennis Sproul), the sophomore receiver (John Jefferson), and the stud cornerback (Mike Haynes) took the field against the Great Red Farm Combine.

I was ten years old, and living in Phoenix. The game itself was a classic, and held my family and I spellbound for every minute of its play. ASU scored two field goals early (courtesy of coach's son Danny Kush). Nebraska responded with two touchdowns; then, when Sproul was injured near the goal line, sophomore back-up Fred Mortensen replaced him. Mortenson's first play: a touchdown pass to Jefferson. His second play: a two-point conversion, another pass, this time to Larry Mucker. 14-14.

Fourth quarter: another Danny Kush field goal. 17-14, ASU. With a few minutes to go, the Huskers began a march toward the end zone. Their lineman blew the Devil defenders off the ball, their running backs were pile drivers. My family, assembled before the black-and-white RCA, sat silent, resolved to our team's fate. Nebraska drove the ball to ASU's 31. Quarterback Terry Luck threw two incompletions. On third-and-ten, he completed a pass to fullback Tony Davis, who was hit by two Devils and fumbled the ball. The Devils recovered and ran out the clock.

Bedlam. Sheer insanity.

To this day, Arizona State 17, Nebraska 14 is a score I keep in my head alongside USA 4, USSR 3. When I heard a commentator say, "Well, 52,000 fans paid for seats they didn't use much today," Yes, I thought, and yes. I was ten. I had never loved a team with such innocence, nor ever would again. (My next sports crush, the late-70s Yankees, would introduce me to winning's ugly side.) I had been given a mini-bike for Christmas a day earlier--the greatest Christmas gift of my life; it was a magical week--and, after the game, as my father drove me and my mini-bike out to a place where I could ride, as we listened to hi-lights of the game on his AM radio--especially Mortensen's heroics--I thought, What a team. What a game!

My father chose a spot of desert that, in a few year's time, would be a golf course. As I puttered up and down the hills, as a typically breathtaking Valley sunset broke pink and orange over the distant mountains, I saw my father through the dust, seated in the Country Squire station wagon, smiling as the game commentary played on the radio.