A Liberty Bowl Game Played Indoors
December 13, 2014 10:43 AM | General
 |
| A wide view of action during the 1964 Liberty Bowl game played at the Atlantic City Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. |
| Liberty Bowl photo |
Right around this time 50 years ago, West Virginia faced Utah in the 1964 Liberty Bowl game played at the Atlantic City Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It was the sixth game for the fledgling bowl, originated in Philadelphia by former Villanova athletic director A. F. “Bud” Dudley, and it was the first bowl game in college football history ever played indoors.
Dudley’s dream was to create a major college football showcase in the city of Brotherly Love in 100,000-seat JFK Stadium, but what he ended up getting were sparsely attended games in often brutally cold weather conditions. Northeastern sportswriters began referring to Dudley’s Liberty Bowl as the “Deep Freeze Bowl” the “Masochist Bowl” and the “You’re-Out-of-Your-Mind Bowl.”
The 1963 game featuring Mississippi State and NC State drew less than 10,000 fans and lost more than $40,000, requiring Dudley to make some hard choices if he wanted to have another game in 1964.
One of those difficult decisions entailed moving the event to another city, and Atlantic City became a very appealing alternative when a group of businessmen there chipped in $25,000 to entice Dudley to bring his bowl game to the Convention Hall. Dudley, who initially intended to move the game around to different cities, jumped at the offer.
By 1964, Atlantic City – once a playground for the rich and famous in the northeast - was in dire straights. The boardwalk was no longer a popular destination because affordable jet travel had made vacations to Florida, the Caribbean and Europe much easier and more practical, so civic leaders there rallied to try and attract additional first-class events to the boardwalk (the Miss American Pageant was held there yearly), most notably the Democratic National Convention, which took place in the summer of 1964, and Bud Dudley’s Liberty Bowl.
Atlantic City was the pick of the Democrats by default, primarily because their top choice, Miami, had a large population of Cuban refugees living there and it was feared that protesting would disrupt the convention so soon after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Reporters covering the political event in Atlantic City that summer complained about poor hotel accommodations, inadequate facilities and the horrible boardwalk food.
The Liberty Bowl also had many insurmountable obstacles to overcome a few months later.
No. 1, the Atlantic City Convention Hall was not comparable to JFK Stadium, but Dudley rationalized that away by stating that he had “90,000 less headaches” to worry about. It turned out he had 94,000 less headaches to worry about because only 6,059 showed up to watch the 1964 game.
“There was no one there,” recalled West Virginia wide receiver Milton Clegg, now living in Tupelo, Mississippi. “It was like going to a ghost city.”
Also, no one was sure the Convention Hall could adequately handle a major college sporting event. The Miss America Pageant had just received a new lighting system as a result of the political convention and pageant organizers were not too thrilled about the idea of flying footballs crashing into their new lights.
Plus, Astro-turf was still in its developmental stages and was not yet available to use, so a four-inch-thick grass surface with two inches of burlap underneath it to serve as padding was installed on top of the Convention Center’s cement floor. To keep the grass alive, artificial lighting was brought in and kept on 24 hours a day at a cost of about $16,000.
“If the game is dull, you can just sit there and watch the grass grow,” wrote Phil Pepe of the New York World Telegram.
To justify the $16,000 expense to preserve the grass, a number of high school and small-college football games were played in the Convention Hall leading up to the Liberty Bowl, which wore the sod surface right down to the cement by game time.
“The sod was as hard as playing on brick,” said Clegg. “When you hit the ground … you hit the ground.”
Dudley’s other big issue was finding two suitable opponents to satisfy ABC, which agreed to televise the game to large portion of the country with its top announcing crew of Curt Gowdy, Paul Christman and Jim McKay assigned to work it.
Dudley had settled on West Virginia, which upset Sugar Bowl-bound Syracuse in the regular season finale, but his other choice, Villanova, was not good enough for the TV people. Dudley thought a local team would help fill up the 12,000-seat Convention Hall with West Virginia being so far away, but ABC preferred a team more appealing to its TV audience so 8-2 Utah of the Western Athletic Conference became the choice.
West Virginia, which turned down a bid to play in the 1962 Gotham Bowl because it would have been a losing proposition financially for the school, had 60,000 reasons for agreeing to play in the 1964 Liberty Bowl. And to make sure the trip to Atlantic City was profitable, the school kept its expenses to a minimum.
“I remember Utah was able to bring their wives to the game and a lot of our players were married back then and they didn’t let us bring our wives,” said Clegg, who caught seven passes for 92 yards and was named West Virginia’s most outstanding player for the game. “For entertainment one night (the bowl) had a dance or something and we had maybe 60 players on the team and we’re sitting there listening to a guy who looks like Frank Sinatra up on a stage singing love songs while the Utah players danced with their wives.”
The late Eddie Barrett, West Virginia’s sports information director at the time, once recalled in 2004 some of the Mountaineer players catching wind of what Utah was doing for its players and what West Virginia wasn’t doing for its players during the trip.
“At the luncheon on Friday before the game, naturally the players on both teams are going to get together and talk about what they got for the bowl game,” said Barrett. “The Utah players got sport coats and watches and were taken to New York City to watch a Broadway show and some of the West Virginia players were mad as hell because they hardly got anything. As a result our mind was not on that game.”
Aside from that, Utah was not a good matchup for the big and slow Mountaineers anyway. Roy Jefferson was the Utes’ best player and he played well against West Virginia, but the star of the game was speedy running back Ron Coleman, who ran for 154 yards and scored a touchdown.
Utah built a 19-point halftime lead and the Mountaineers were never in the game afterward, West Virginia scoring a meaningless third-quarter touchdown when the Utes were already ahead by 25 points. It was Clegg’s six-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Allen McCune that kept the game from being a whitewash.
Clegg believes he could have made several more catches that afternoon had it not been for the spotlights that were installed near the field to help illuminate the arena for television.
“I had caught seven passes and was about ready to catch my eighth and I looked to the side and the damned spotlight hit me right in the eye (blinding him),” he recalled. “I missed the pass and I just went ahead and hit the guy in front of me just for the hell of it because I was getting disgusted.”
 |
| Dudley |
Everyone was getting disgusted. It got so bad that well-known local public address announcer Dave Zinkoff wise-cracked late in the game to those still remaining in the stands, "Two minutes left in the game … Yeah man!”
Mickey Furfari, who covered the game for the Morgantown Dominion News, recalled listening to all of the reporters complaining afterward about how bad the game was on the train ride back to Philadelphia.
Then in Monday morning’s paper, Mickey unloaded on the Mountaineers, “West Virginia may not have to worry about football bowl bids for another 11 years,” he wrote. “After Saturday’s sad, sad showing in Atlantic City, no invitations are likely to be forthcoming from anywhere.
“The 32-6 setback by Utah in the Liberty Bowl was even more humiliating than the 42-19 loss to Georgia Tech, which supposedly had soured the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 1954.”
The bowl game turned out to be a profitable trip for West Virginia, however, the school netting about $40,000 after expenses.
And Dudley, whose one-shot deal with Atlantic City netted his game about $10,000, set his sights on much bigger things down in Memphis, Tennessee the following year in 1965.
Nearly 39,000 showed up at Memorial Stadium to watch Ole Miss defeat Auburn 13-7 in a game that was both entertaining and profitable.
Bud Dudley had finally found a home for his Liberty Bowl.
Ross Hodge, Honor Huff & Brenen Lorient | Oklahoma Postgame
Monday, April 06
Ross Hodge, Treysen Eaglestaff & Brenen Lorient | Creighton Postgame
Saturday, April 04
Ross Hodge & Honor Huff | Stanford Postgame
Friday, April 03
Geimere Latimer | April 2
Friday, April 03
