Rose Bowl: An ideal stage for the largest moments in sports activities

Charlotte Wilder

FOX Sports activities Contributor

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA — I’m portray the rose on the sphere of the Rose Bowl.

For some purpose, the upkeep crew has deemed me worthy sufficient to carry the paintbrush, dip it in vermillion paint, and fill within the stencil that they’ve already outlined on the legendary discipline. I really feel like one of many enjoying playing cards in Alice in Wonderland as they paint the white roses purple. An occasion this magical ought to solely happen by way of the wanting glass.

But it surely is not. It’s happening in actual life, as part of our Final School Soccer Street Journey, and I’m however a mere mortal who has come to pay respects to the beating coronary heart of school soccer.

That’s what the Rose Bowl is. There isn’t a larger sight within the sport than the Rose Bowl on New Yr’s Day, when the solar units behind the San Gabriel Mountains and turns the panorama into various shades of pink and purple. Gamers take the sphere in what would possibly as nicely be a kind of previous Microsoft screensavers.

I noticed it in individual for the primary time on Thursday evening, two days earlier than UCLA and USC meet on the sphere (8 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX Sports activities app). Saturday’s sport might be UCLA’s senior day, and for this 12 months’s graduating class, it will likely be the primary time they’ve confronted USC in entrance of followers, due to the pandemic.

Standing within the Rose Bowl’s magnificence feels as important as its historical past. This is without doubt one of the oldest stadiums in America. It was constructed between February and October of 1922 with such pace that it received engineering awards. The stadium — which was constructed on land that was as soon as the city dump — celebrated its hundredth birthday this 12 months. Within the in-house museum, I noticed a wagon wheel and license plates from 1914 that the contractors dug up after they broke floor (in different information, I used to be a full-grown grownup once I discovered that that they had license plates again in 1914).

The stadium will get its identify from the Pasadena Match of Roses Parade. It was an occasion first organized in 1890 by the Valley Hunt Membership (which, so far as I can inform, was only a membership for individuals who wished to do outdoorsy stuff). In keeping with legend, membership member Charles F. Holder mentioned, “in New York, persons are buried in snow, whereas right here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear — let’s maintain a competition to inform the world about our paradise.”

As somebody who lives in New York Metropolis, I really feel focused. But it surely’s a tough level to argue with. 

This place has change into an integral a part of the American and worldwide sports activities panorama because it was constructed. Other than its vaunted place in faculty soccer, it has hosted 5 Tremendous Bowls, the Olympic males’s soccer gold-medal sport in 1984, and the lads’s and ladies’s World Cup.

And never simply any girls’s world cup, however the 1999 remaining between the U.S. Girls’s Nationwide Staff and China. I keep in mind it vividly. I watched on TV at 10 years previous as I sat in certainly one of my finest buddy’s front room with our total youth soccer staff. The sport had come right down to penalty kicks, and all of us bit our nails and watched by way of our fingers as Brandi Chastain stared down China’s goalie. Chastain made the kick, ripped off her shirt, and all of us misplaced our minds.

Brandi Chastain’s legendary World Cup second

Twenty years after her iconic World Cup second, Brandi Chastain relived her unimaginable second, from what was going by way of her head as she stepped to the spot, to her legendary response.

To face within the hallowed floor the place my first expertise of sports activities euphoria really befell was the stuff of bucket lists. As a result of I grew up watching that staff, I by no means thought girls’s sports activities had been lower than males’s, even when the world I lived in tried to situation me to assume so. Brandi’s second of glory in her sports activities bra imprinted on me. It confirmed me what power, pure emotion, and an entire disregard for arcane societal expectations regarded like. It felt becoming that it befell on the Rose Bowl, a reputation so elegant and historically female for a spot so powerful and enduring.

However I’ve wished to return right here for different causes. The setting takes my breath away on tv at any time when I watch the Rose Bowl every year. To not quote myself, however right here’s what I as soon as wrote about watching Georgia and Oklahoma play in 2018:

“I’m stress-eating at this level. I’m sweating. I’m laughing. I’m tweeting. I’m short-circuiting. I’m obsessive about the Rose Bowl. I need to transfer into the Rose Bowl. I’m a rose. I’m product of bowls. My fingers are footballs. I’m laughing once more, uncontrollably now, as we go to extra time for the primary time in Rose Bowl historical past.” 

Georgia quarterback Jake Fromm celebrates after the Bulldogs beat Oklahoma in a 2018 School Soccer Playoff semifinal sport on the Rose Bowl on January 1, 2018 in Pasadena, California. (Photograph by Matthew Stockman/Getty Photos)

I’m blissful to report that it’s simply as majestic in individual. The Rose Bowl is the sort of place that you just assume would possibly solely exist in your creativeness till you really go there. It’s nestled in a valley, surrounded by palm timber and the idyllic neighborhoods of Pasadena. There’s a calmness right here when the stadium is empty. More often than not, empty stadiums echo with the ghosts of crowd noise and helmet clashes.   

However the Rose Bowl feels prefer it’s a stately older aunt in a silk gown welcoming you into her home with a cup of tea. “What took you so lengthy?” The place appears to ask. The very best I might do was say that I’ll attempt to come again.  

As a result of, regardless of its calm, there’s a sort of exhilaration this stadium conjures up — Brandi ripped off her shirt right here for a purpose. And now, having seen it for myself, I totally perceive how this place gives the right stage — painted roses and all — for the sports activities world’s greatest moments. 

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Charlotte Wilder is a common columnist for FOX Sports activities. She’s honored to signify the consistently uncared for Boston space in sports activities media, loves speaking to sports activities followers about their emotions and is happiest consuming a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Observe her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.

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