Blue White Illustrated

A new Penn State football book by Lou Prato with a forward by Adam Taliaferro The Remarkable Journey of the 2012 Nittany Lions Price: $14.95 plus shipping Published by Triumph Books (soft cover) Autographed copies available via louprato@comcast.net or through Lou Prato & Associates at 814-954-5171 Autographed copies of Lou's book We Are Penn State: The Remarkable Journey of the 2012 Nittany Lions are still available via louprato@comcast.net or through Lou Prato & Associates at 814-272-1853. Price: $19.95 plus tax where applicable and shipping game as the host team is a story of its own, filled with intrigue and political pressure statewide. The Nittany Lions defeated Alabama, 7-0, in the inaugural game and returned the next year and beat Oregon, 41-12. However, Philadel- phia could not sustain the game, and in 1965 the Liberty Bowl moved to Mem- phis. Penn State has played in only one Liberty Bowl since then, beating Tulane, 9-6, in the 1979 game, which was so un- appealing to fans disappointed with the team's 8-3 regular season that barely half of the school's allotment of 5,000 tickets was sold. The same year the Liberty Bowl began, the city of Houston came up with the Bluebonnet Bowl, primarily featuring Southwestern and Southern major-col- lege teams, and both new bowls fell in place behind the Gator Bowl in the sec- ond tier of the late-December postsea- son games. The Bluebonnet Bowl had a nice birth but a slow death, finally dis- appearing in 1987. One more secondary bowl popped onto the scene in the next decade with the Peach Bowl in Atlanta in 1968, and it has survived its annual late-December scheduling – thanks in part to the open- ing of the Georgia Dome in 1993 and the sponsorship of a fast food chicken restaurant chain. In fact, it's doubtful we would have so many bowl games today, including, per- haps, a couple of the pre-1969 ones, without the naming rights money that has fueled all sports in the past 20 years. Sponsors come and go so often in the bowl environment that confused fans can't keep up with all the changes, like the Cotton Bowl, for example. The traditional Cotton Bowl game is now played at AT&T Stadium in the Dal- las suburb of Arlington, Texas, while the old Cotton Bowl Stadium at the Texas State Fairgrounds, where Penn State's 1947, '72 and '75 teams played on New Year's Day – and won – is now the site of the late-December Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl game, which was known in 2011 as the Ticket City Bowl when the Nittany Lions played there in the after- math of Paterno's firing. Got all that? Which brings us back to the TaxSlayer Bowl. In 2011, the Georgia-based tax preparer and software company became the sixth sponsor of the Gator Bowl, and a new six-year contract last year elimi- nated the traditional Gator from the of- ficial name. Meanwhile, old Gator Bowl Stadium, was razed in 1994 to make way for the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, and Jacksonville Municipal Stadium was built for both the Jags and the Gator Bowl game. Subsequently, the facility was named Alltel Stadium from 1997- 2000, went back to Jacksonville Munici- pal from 2001-09 and was rechristened EverBank Field in 2010. OK, one more thing about Penn State and the old Gator Bowl: The Lions played in it four times, and the 1964 team could have played in the game, too, but the players voted overwhelm- ingly against it. That season, the team lost four of its first five games before winning five in a row, including a 27-0 upset of No. 2 Ohio State in Columbus, and winning the Lambert Trophy as the best team in the East. "We had a bad experience in 1962 that left a bad taste in our mouth," remembered fu- ture Hall of Famer Glenn Ressler years later, "and we had nothing more to prove." There were no more player votes until five years later when Paterno allowed the players on the great 1969 team to vote on playing in the Cotton Bowl or returning to the Orange Bowl. That's another story familiar to Penn State fans involving race, the politics of President Richard Nixon and a still-smouldering contro- versy over a lost chance to play for the national championship. The actual vote by the players remains shrouded in mys- tery because the man who counted the secret ballots, Paterno, never showed them to anyone. However, that was the last time Penn State players were permitted to vote on bowl games. This year, it wouldn't have mattered anyway. If the 2015 players had voted on the TaxSlayer Bowl, the result certainly would have been unanimous or nearly so. They deserve it. ■

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