The Birth of the Fiesta Bowl

It has always been the thinking of the Fiesta Bowl's founders and volunteers that the best is yet to come. Heck, who would have thought in 1971 that a bowl game in Arizona would host five national championship games and generate an economic impact of more than $1 billion to the state's economy?

The answer to that question: Several People; and they all wear yellow.

It all started in 1968 when former Arizona State University President G. Homer Durham spoke to an athletic awards banquet and proposed that Phoenix should have a football bowl game.

The idea could have died right there, as it had several times in the past. But Arizona Republic sports editor Verne Boatner wrote a column supporting the idea, and several Valley of the Sun business leaders banded together to bring a bowl game to Phoenix.

Getting a bowl game anywhere is a long shot. Countless contingencies from cities all over the country had paraded before the NCAA's Extra Events Committee, lavish presentations in hand, only to be told, "No, the NCAA doesn't need another bowl game."

And in December of 1968, a bowl game for Phoenix was merely an idea, let alone a well thought out plan to place before the NCAA.

But then things started to roll. Prominent Valley sports enthusiast Glenn Hawkins called a meeting of the area's top community leaders, who ultimately put together the package that was to become one of the most phenomenal stories in bowl history.

"There was a lot of interest," Boatner said at the time. "A lot more than I thought there would be. I didn't believe that so many influential people could be brought together in one place."

Jack Stewart, who was one of the driving forces for bringing the game to Phoenix, was elected to head the effort. He and the current original members of the Executive Committee -- Hawkins, George Isbell, Jim Meyer, Donald D. Meyers, Karl Eller, Bill Shover and George Taylor, later to be joined by Don Dupont -- put together the successful plan that would get an NCAA sanction for the game.

Key to the Fiesta effort was to win over the Western Athletic Conference for a tie-up. Then WAC Commissioner Wiles Hallock provided the direction to achieve that -- his immediate past position had been that of Director of Public Relations at the NCAA's headquarters in Kansas City.

With Hallock along, the Phoenix group appeared before the NCAA Extra Events Committee on Jan. 10, 1970, in Washington D.C. It was at that time that the group proposed to make the bowl a charitable venture, with portions of the proceeds committed to the fight against drug abuse. This was to be a key point for the Fiesta Bowl. The NCAA had granted only one new bowl during the 1960s -- Atlanta's Chick Fil A, also a charity game.

The Fiesta's effort, however, was thorough. Then Washington State athletic director and chairman of the NCAA Extra Events Committee Stan Bates said that he never had seen a group as well prepared. A few months later, Bates would become commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference after Hallock moved to the Pacific-8 Conference.

The group stressed vital points in its presentation. They told the NCAA that the Rose Bowl was the only bowl game outside of the South and that Arizona had the population and the climate, the game would be played for a worthy cause and they hastened to add that good WAC teams had been overlooked for bowl appearances in the past.

"Your presentation was so well received that I can think of no important questions to ask," Bates said afterwards.

But victory was to be farther away. On April 27, 1970, the NCAA Council, the official policy-making body of the organization, rejected six bowl bids, including one for the Valley of the Sun.

The group could have taken the defeat and moved on in their lives. Instead, they kept on fighting. A year later, on April 26, 1971, the NCAA Council approved a bowl game in Arizona, and the Fiesta Bowl was born.

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