T Park: A Great Venue, but a Forgettable Fight Hunger Bowl
Fight Boredom Bowl Face Off All That Was Expected
T Park is a great place to watch a baseball game. The park itself is perfectly constructed to view the game, the accommodations are first class, the staff is friendly and helpful, and the view of San Francisco Bay is magnificent. It does get cold at night. All year round.
AFL football game
Many years ago in the 1960s when I saw an AFL football game in the original Anaheim Stadium before it was first rebuilt into a multi-purpose stadium to house the Rams as well as the Angels, and then re-re-built to again become a baseball-only stadium, I became acutely aware of the fact that there were no good seats in a baseball stadium being used for football. How fans attending the Fight Hunger Bowl, or for that matter, fans of the California Golden Bears who have used the facility as their temporary home can see the action, is a mystery. Unless with 21st-century technology, instantly walls can now be moved, seat angles adjusted, and a series of mirrors installed, that is.
I am, of course, writing all this to avoid talking about the game itself. As I’ve written before, the very idea of a 6-6 team on a six-game losing streak meeting a 6-7 team in a bowl game is obscene, and the game bore this out. Details need not be cited. The sooner the game fades into memory, the better.
UCLA
What I will say about UCLA, is that the sooner the last vestiges of the Rick Neuheisel era also fade away, the better. While I have no faith in Mr. Dan Guerrero to choose a capable football coach or Mr. Jim L. Mora to be a capable football coach, at least there is a shot at it. There was no shot at seeing a well-coached game today. Or a well-played game. Or a game worth spending three-plus hours watching on a Saturday afternoon.
I heard part of today’s game as broadcast over the radio airwaves by Mr. Chris Roberts, the longtime UCLA radio voice who is as capable of accurately and entertainingly broadcasting a sporting event as I am of replicating the Mona Lisa, and I have to admit I uttered a brief chuckle as I heard him refer to the game as not the “Fight Hunger Bowl”, but rather as the “Hunger Bowl”. That summed up not just his abilities, but the entire game itself.
