never chears USC

There is a first time for everything.  Good news and bad news.  First the good news:  I found the free parking at the Rose Bowl.  Just east of  I-210 off of Mountain Street  (if you use to live in Nepal you gotta try out Mountain Street) I found the last available parking spot on Chapman Avenue three hours before game time.  Chapman Avenue sounded auspicious to me because I take Chapman Avenue to get home in Orange after every Angel game at the Big A.  Homeowners on Pasadena's Chapman Avenue charged $30 per car to park on their front lawns and driveways.  On the walk to the Rose Bowl on Seco Street there were plenty of homeowners asking $75 a parking spot and one who wanted $100.  No way would I pay more for a parking space than I would for a game ticket.

Outside the southwest gate to the Rose Bowl there were plenty of tickets available.  I enquired the aisle location from ten prospective sellers.  The best tickets I found were on aisle 21.  That is roughly around the goal line give or take a few yards in the SW corner of the Rose Bowl.  That is when I had a serious brain cramp.  I bargained the price down to $60 for an aisle 9 ticket erroneously thinking it was in the SW corner.  Aisle 9 is actually in the NE endzone, ideal for looking into the sun in the third quarter.  Think NE corner of the Coliseum at the peristyle end.  I bought the ticket twenty minutes before game time.  If I waited another ten minutes I surely would have got a ticket for my original offer of $40.  There was nothing to do but go forward.  

After passing through security and the turn-styles I took out my trusty pen and wrote ones in front of the nines on my ticket.  Forget tunnel 9!  I then made my grand entrance through tunnel 19.  I took an aisle seat at row 53 seat 1 where I stood for a minute of silence for former President Gerald Ford, the National Anthem, and the military flyover and watched the first two minutes of the game.  When the patron for that seat arrived I moved up to row 76 seat 7 on the 40 yard line where I had a conversion with a couple from North Carolina.  I mentioned I had been at the North Carolina State-UCLA NCAA semi-final basketball game in Greensboro, North Carolina in March 1974.  The gentleman replied that he was an undergraduate at NC State at the time and remembered the game well.  After the Trojans took a 3-0 lead I mentioned that twice I had seen Michigan play to a 3-3 tie through three quarters in a Rose Bowl game, 1970 vs USC and 1972 vs Stanford.  This year the 3-3 tie only held up until early in the third quarter.

With a minute left in the first quarter I had to vacate my row 76 seat.  As I descended the stairs I felt like I was falling off a mountain.  I searched for an empty seat as a handhold to stop my descent.  If a seat did not materialize I was headed for the endzone.  At the top of the tunnel there were a pair of seats to my left and a pair to my right.  I had a choice between the 42 or 34 yard line.  I opted for the 42 yard line, row 40 seat 1 to be exact.  I wondered how long I would get to stay there.  A few minutes later an usher walked up the aisle and spoke in general to the people around me that the person who had been carried out on a stretcher had suffered a heart event.  He had been taken to a staging area on the SE side of the Rose Bowl before being taken by an ambulance to the hospital and was in stable condition.  There were three empty seats behind me to my left.  The heart attack victim either had been in one of those seats or my seat.  During the second quarter a police officer at the tunnel entrance who resembled Anderson Cooper looked at me several times, perhaps thinking the heart attack victim was back.  I kept my binoculars on the game action.  I was not going to win a staring contest with Cooper.

The fan to my left and I high-fived after Dwayne Jarrett's first td catch made the score 16-3.  It was a member of his party who had the heart attack.  As a measure of condolence I said there probably would be a heart attack in my future.  I recall my grandfather Othmar telling me about Cardiac Hill behind homeplate at Candlestick Park.  I told Grampa that was nothing, watch out for the steps outside Chavez Ravine.  The stadium hike that takes the cardiac cake is north of Jack Murphy Stadium parking lot in San Diego.  I last did that hike on Thursday night after the Holiday Bowl.  In September 1972 at a Texas A&M @ Nebraska game played in 90 degree heat 18 fans were carried out on stretchers.  One of them was on the aisle I was seated on.  One of these seasons they will have to carry me out.  When it happens I would rather it be at a sushi bar than at a stadium.  We don't get to choose, so you never know.  I mentioned that it was a blessing that the heart attack occurred at what in essence was a home game.  It would be more difficult for a Michigan fan having to be hospitalized 2,000 miles from home.

Two Michigan fans were in front of me.  I cheered them up by saying I had seen Michigan win a Rose Bowl game back in 1980 when Gerald Ford was the Grand Marshall of the Rose Bowl Parade.  I was up front with my being a UCLA fan rooting for USC only because they were a Pac 10 team.  I stated I was confident that the Trojans would win because I had only seen a Big 10 team win the Rose Bowl once.  My lifetime Rose Bowl Standings (including 2007) are:

Pac 10

USC                6-0
UCLA            2-0
Stanford         1-0
Washington        1-1

Big 10

Michigan        1-7
Michigan State    0-1
Ohio State        0-3

Big 12

Texas            1-0
Nebraska        0-1

Big East   

Miami            1-0

Among the three Rose Bowl wins that were not by a Pac 10 team only one was by a Big 10 team.  That is a far cry from 1947 to 1959 when the Pac 8 only defeated the Big 10 once in the Rose Bowl.  Off the past track record I certainly expected USC to win.

Four rows in front of me were seated a 4-star Air Force General, a 2-star Air Force General, a Colonel and a Major.  Five rows in front of me there was a 3-star Air Force General.  As I had been in the General career field back in the seventies I definitely was in the right section.  Of course, I got out after four years as a sergeant (E-4, error second base).  

Over the past two months I had plenty of military readings.  My recent book list included (in order read) "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward, "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Frank Rich, "Fields of Fire" by James Webb, "Lost Soldiers" by James Webb, and "The Iraq Study Group Report" with James Baker and Lee Hamilton as Co-Chairs.  Webb (Senator-elect (D) from Virginia) wrote about Vietnam.  The other books concern Iraq.   Saddam Hussein was in agreement as his time expired with the "The Iraq Study Group" that Moqtada Al-Sadr was the worst of the three Shia leaders in Iraq (pp 14-15).  Of these six books I would recommend "Fiasco" and "Fields of Fire" as being the best.  One of soldiers in "Fields of Fire" is nicknamed Senator.  It is appropriate that Webb was elected to the Senate.  Thomas Rick's compares Iraq to the Philippines, where the US had a presence for 46 years.  With 1991 as a start, the US may well be in Iraq until 2037.  At least we no longer have "no fly" zones.  Next weeks announcement of a 20,000 troop increase is too little, too late.  In the summer of 2003 we should have had 400,000 troops in Iraq.  Bush the 43rd was more concerned about winning the elections in 2004 and 2006 than he was winning in Iraq.  We are on the precipice of winning the war and losing the peace.  I confidently can guarantee you that we will be in Iraq for at least the next two years.  I lived in Nepal for eleven years.  The government there has a bholi parsi tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next year, the year after that attitude.  Bush's White House has bholi parsi down pat regarding Iraq.  Recovering from hepatitis at Pokhara in central Nepal in April 1984 I met the British author Wilfred Thesiger.  His writings include "The Marsh Arabs," about southern Iraq north of Basrah.  Thesiger lived in Iraq for seven years in the Fifties.  After Iraq's monarchy was overthrown in 1958 he never went back to Iraq.

For the past three years my attitude has been let Iraq split into three parts.  Looking at the map on page 102 of "The Iraq Study Group" gives me hope that Sunni Arabs can be lumped with Sunni Kurds so that Iraq only will be split in two.  Good luck drawing that partition line!  After we captured Saddam in December 2003 I thought of the "we go home now" line by Air America aviators after observation missions in crop dusters over Laos in "The Ravens" by Christopher Robbins.  That was what I was reading while my sons were swimming in the Mekong River near Luang Prabang, Laos over Christmas and New Years six years ago.  You can't go to the Rose Bowl every year!

In the fourth quarter a Cal fan sat behind me.  When Adrian Arrington scored Michigan's first touchdown he asked if he was related to the Arrington who had played at Cal.  I said that was a definite maybe.  I told him I had seen Cal beat Texas A&M 45-10 in the Holiday Bowl four nights earlier.  He had been to that game too.  In the Aggies three previous losses in 2006 they had been out-scored by a combined total of only six points.  It was a shock to see the Bears win by five touchdowns.  I told the Cal fan that I had seen the Bears win two other times:  17-0 over UCLA in 1999 and 48-15 over Stanford in 1975.  The Cal fan said his enrollment in Berkeley started in 1974.  His comment that both Miami and Nebraska had gone immediately downhill after the 2002 National Championship game drew a rebuttal from me.  Miami narrowly lost to Ohio State in the 2003 Championship game.  After that game Maurice Clarett dropped out of school in an attempt to get in the NFL a year early.  I commented that Mike Williams would follow Clarett anywhere.  With Dwayne Jarrett on the team USC never missed Mike Williams.  True, Bill Plaschke wrote a superb Christmas Day 2003 article about Williams.  Williams did not get the right advice regarding court cases concerning rule interpretations.   The 25 second clock regarding playing eligibility runs out quickly in court.  At games end I told the Cal fan I might see him at the Cal-UCLA game in October if the Angels are not playing in Game 1 of the World Series that day.

Back to the free parking.  From Mountain Street I had a short two block drive to the I-210 eastbound on-ramp.  After five minutes of stop-and-go that started on the on-ramp I had clear sailing after the 134 fork.  If I had parked at Parson's on Walnut Street I would have been stuck in the parking garage for twenty minutes after the game.  I arrived home early in the second quarter of the Boise State vs Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl instead of at halftime.

My predictions for the remaining major games are LSU over Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl and Ohio State over Florida in the National Championship game.  If Michigan had played Ohio State in the National Championship game LSU would have been USC's opponent in the Rose Bowl.  The Geaux Tigers would have convinced homeboy John David Booty that LA stands for Louisiana, not Los Angeles.