Sunday, August 12, 2001
[ ALOHA BOWL ]
Aloha Bowl The condition of the Aloha Bowl took a turn for the worse after the Pac-10 voted Thursday not to send a team to Anaheim, Calif.
running out of
time, locations
Pac-10 officials don't want
any part of Christmas Day bowlBy Paul Arnett
parnett@starbulletin.com"We were not interested in playing on Christmas Day, in Anaheim or anywhere else," Pac-10 assistant commissioner Jim Muldoon told the Los Angeles Times Friday. "We don't think it will draw."
The Southern California city is one of the proposed sites of Aloha Sports Inc. chief executive Fritz Rohlfing, who is quickly running out of time and cities.
Motor City Bowl executive Ken Hoffman had a brief talk with Rohlfing on Friday about keeping the game here and splitting the profits, but Rohlfing, who reportedly asked South Carolina officials for $1 million to host the game in Columbia, turned him down.
Local sources indicated Rohlfing doesn't want Honolulu to host the game because of the disastrous results of last year's Christmas Holiday games.
The Oahu Bowl on Christmas Eve and the Aloha Bowl on Christmas Day drew embarrassingly small crowds, prompting Rohlfing to list Seattle and San Francisco as future sites for the postseason games.
A deal was reached in Seattle to take over the Oahu Bowl, but the Aloha Bowl hasn't proved as fortunate. San Francisco turned down a proposed deal after ABC-TV refused to move it off Christmas Day.
Anaheim officials stepped up to the plate, but the Pac-10's bad experiences with the now defunct Freedom Bowl left officials there cold. South Carolina became the next flavor of the month. It appears, however, that the Columbia deal will fall through.
That's where Hoffman and his Detroit backers come in. He believes if only one game is played here on Christmas it can work locally and nationally.
"You have a captive audience on the mainland, so you know you can sell the commercial airtime," Hoffman said. "It's also great publicity for Hawaii itself. People are back East freezing and then see all these beautiful shots of Hawaii. It worked for nearly 20 years. It can work again."
Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson would like to see the game played here on Christmas, but said at the league meetings two weeks ago that it was a long shot, especially for this December.
"There's just not enough time to get something done this year," Benson said.
Ironically, the WAC could benefit from the Aloha Bowl's problems. With the Pac-10 cutting its ties with Rohlfing, that means the Pac-10's fifth-place team could wind up at the Las Vegas Bowl with a sixth Pac-10 team being eligible for the WAC's Silicon Valley Football Classic or Humanitarian Bowl.
"We have had some talk with the Pac-10 that if the Aloha Bowl fails and the Las Vegas Bowl moves up from sixth to fifth, that perhaps we could get the sixth team for one of our bowls," Benson said. "We just have to wait and see."
Benson also said the league would help the University of Hawaii host a bowl game any way it could. But that probably won't happen until 2002 at the earliest because of the current NCAA moratorium on not adding any bowl games to the current list.