The Tobacco Bowl: Still TBA

NC State's Riddick Stadium

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© Tim Peeler, 2022

Practically every devoted college football fan know the first postseason bowl game played in the state of North Carolina was the 1942 Rose Bowl between Duke and Oregon State in Durham.

What about the second? Well, that’s tricky. This year will be the 20^th anniversary of the Queen City/Continental Tire/Meineke Car Care/Belk/Duke’s Mayo Bowl, played annually at Carolinas/Ericsson/Bank of America Stadium in downtown Charlotte, a game with more names and locations than a British monarch.

However, there was an NCAA-certified, properly scheduled and ticketed postseason bowl game with two interested national television networks ready to broadcast it live from NC State’s campus on Dec. 19, 1964. Had it lasted as an annual contest as envisioned, it would be among the 10 oldest bowl games.

The local bowl committee successfully convinced the NCAA that the growing area — with its temperate December climate, the recently formed Research Triangle Park and access to multiple college football programs to serve as the host team — was the perfect location for a postseason game.

Everything was ready to roll for an event to be played in the “Raleigh-Durham-Wake Forest area,” after three long years of lobbying the NCAA by the local committee, headed by general manager Charles Gesino, former publicity director for the Orange Bowl and the general manager for the short-lived Raleigh Cardinals of the Carolina League.

Tickets were sold in various locations around Raleigh and Durham. There was already a queen selected to lead the bowl parade. There was a pro-am golf tournament scheduled at the old Wildwood Country Club off Leesville Road. The selection committee scouted 12 different teams and had one in mind that it was sure would sell out whichever Triangle-area stadium chosen to host the game.

It was to be called the Tobacco Bowl, in homage to North Carolina’s biggest agricultural crop. (It was not affiliated in any way with theregular-season Tobacco Bowl played between regional opponents in South Boston, Virginia, from 1935-41 and Richmond, Virginia, from 1948-84.)

The Raleigh-based Tobacco Bowl Association (TBA) Inc. business office was located at 308 Capital City Building. Leaders involved in the effort were president John I. Barnes Jr. of Clayton; executive vice president William P. Johnson of Raleigh, secretary Louis Patton of Raleigh and treasurer Rev. Wayman E. Pritchard of Raleigh.

Board members included Raleigh attorney J. Melvin Broughton Jr., Morehead City banker James R. Sanders, Wilmington industrialist Horace Corbett, Benson feed mill operator Robert Denning, Tarboro attorney Martin Cromartie, Wilson accountant Carl M. Whitley, Clayton cotton broker R.L. Cooper, Fuquay attorney Charles W. Daniel, Clayton Peace Corps representative James S. Clayton and Zebulon attorney Ferd Davis.

The game was one of two postseason games certified at the NCAA Extra-Events Committee meeting at New York’s Commodore Hotel on January 7, 1964, along with the Mayor’s Trophy Bowl in New York’s Shea Stadium. The main condition was that both bowls had to have $100,000 in ticket sales on deposit 30 days before kickoff to ensure that each participating team would receive a minimum pay-out of $50,000. It was not a requirement placed on any of the other postseason games.

The Mayor’s Trophy Bowl was to be played in conjunction with the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair as a replacement for the defunct Gotham Bowl, played in 1961 at the Polo Grounds and ’62 at Yankee Stadium as a fundraiser for the March of Dimes. Both games lost money.

The Raleigh bowl game was pretty much doomed from the start. Four days after the bowl was approved, U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry, M.D., released his devastating first report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, which concluded that cigarette smoking is an official cause of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer in men, a probable cause of lung cancer in women and the most important cause of chronic bronchitis. It began a six-decade decline in the popularity of tobacco use.

Tobacco Queens

The location of the inaugural game was also problematic. The TBA leaders from around the state told the NCAA Extra-Events Committee the game could be played in one of four locations, in this order of preference: vacant Groves (now Trentini) Stadium in the town of Wake Forest (capacity 20,000), Duke Stadium in Durham (31,000), NC State’s Riddick Stadium (21,000) and UNC-CH’s recently expanded Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill (48,000).

The intent, however, was first to establish the bowl on a rotating basis, then move it permanently to NC State’s Carter Stadium when it opened for the 1966 season.

There were other issues. Neither the Atlantic Coast Conference nor the local media ever really supported the idea. The ACC no longer had a bowl tie-in with one of the nine established bowls, after its five-year agreement with the Orange Bowl ended in 1957. However, Clemson played in the 1958 Sugar and 1959 Bluebonnet bowls, Duke played in the 1961 Cotton Bowl and both NC State and North Carolina played in bowl games following the 1963 season. The league seemed confident it would always have at least one invitation, perhaps two, to the nine existing bowls in the structure that existed at the time.

Local media at the time was all about basketball, even in the aftermath of the college game's 1960 point-shaving scandal and the end of the famed Dixie Classic. Columnists Dick Herbert at Raleigh’s News and Observer, Smith Barrier at the Greensboro Daily News and Jack Horner of the Durham Morning Herald held great sway among North Carolina’s sports enthusiasts at the time, but they thought the only way it would ever be successful if it was perhaps renamed the Dixie Bowl in reference to Everett Case’s wildly popular holiday basketball event.

Instead of a new bowl game, they advocated adding to college football’s traditional 10-game regular-season slate.

“There are too many bowl games now,” Herbert wrote the day after the possible game was certified. “Approving some more should lead the NCAA to remove the limit of 10 games a season for member schools. Everybody will be going to a bowl, so up the limit to 11.

“It would take a lot of doing to make a bowl game in North Carolina a success. A lot of good national teams are seen during the regular season. Those without national reputations would not attract the fans.”

Burlington columnist Bill Hunter added: “At the rate new bowl games are being inaugurated, pretty soon everybody with a record will be playing 11 games in one season. Why not just add a game to every college slate and have an 11-game season instead of the traditional 10? We have always felt that populous Piedmont North Carolina would turn out in goodly numbers for a bowl game in this area. Providing, we must add, that a member of the Big Four was one of the participants. North Carolina, Duke, NC State or Wake Forest could fill Duke Stadium or Kenan Stadium to overflowing against a reputable intersectional for in a Tobacco Bowl game. That is almost certain.”

At the time, there were just nine postseason games for major college football: the Orange (Miami), Sugar (New Orleans), Cotton (Dallas), Rose (Pasadena, California), Gator (Jacksonville, Florida), Sun (El Paso, Texas), Bluebonnet (Houston), Liberty (Philadelphia) and Tangerine (Orlando, Florida), plus some holiday all-star games to keep football fans entertained. Some have shifted locations, but eight of those nine bowls still exist.

Ticket sales were initially brisk. They were available at the Reynolds Coliseum box office, Womble Inc. on Hargett Street, the Village Pharmacy in Cameron Village, the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Tobacco Bowl business office.

Through the spring, the committee continued to negotiate for a host stadium for the inaugural bowl game, eventually settling on NC State's aging Riddick Stadium, even though it was small and perhaps the least equipped to host such an event. Since the NCAA required that one-third of all tickets (7,000) be required for the participating teams, it left the bowl association with just 14,000 seats to sell at $5 on the sidelines and $4.50 for the end zones. If every available ticket had been sold 30 days before kickoff, the TBA would only have $70,000 on deposit.

Midway through the 1964 football season, a bowl selection committee began scouting teams in the South Atlantic area, narrowing its choices to 12 teams: East Carolina College, NC State, Villanova, North Carolina, Duke, Air Force, Clemson, Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Richmond, West Virginia and Florida State.

Selection committee chairman Charles Gordon said: “Naturally, other teams will be added to the list as the season progresses, but we feel that a game between any of the teams we have mentioned would be a good one.”

There were talks with both ABC and CBS of televising the game live as part of a three-game extravaganza with the Tangerine and Bluebonnet bowls on the Saturday before Christmas. No contract, however, was in place as of late October.

Throughout the year, the TBA and NC State lobbied the NCAA to reduce the amount needed on deposit before the game could move forward, saying its initial bid had been based on playing the game in a stadium with 50,000 seats.

“During our meeting with the NCAA Extra Events Committee in New York last January, we offered to place a fund in escrow raised by the sale of preferred stock,” TBA president Charles I. Barnes. “The committee then suggested that the money be raised by sale of tickets and we understood that the amount was to be $100,000 if we played in a stadium seating 50,000 or more.

“However, we advised the committee by letter dated April 10, 1964, that we would play in Riddick Stadium, which seats between 21,000 and 22,000, with all extra stands available. On May 7, the executive committee of the NCAA confirmed the action of the Extra Events Committee but did not refer to any fund to be placed in escrow.

“We could not meet the impossible conditions arbitrarily put on us and the Mayor’s Trophy Bowl.”

On Nov. 12, exactly five weeks before kickoff, the Tobacco Bowl announced that the NCAA denied its request to lower the required ticket sales deposit, effectively killing the game for the 1964 season. The Mayor’s Trophy Bowl, which had a big enough stadium but had similar troubles with ticket sales as the old Gotham Bowl, was also canceled.

The TBA applied for bowl certification again at the 1965 NCAA convention in Chicago, along with three other bowls: the Santa Claus Bowl in Atlanta, an unnamed bowl in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Aluminum Bowl in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Tobacco Bowl was denied certification outright, while the other three were allowed to move forward with proposals to host games following the 1966 football season.

The TBA never filed another application, as Gesino returned to his roots in Miami and the bowl committee disbanded.

The NCAA eventually added a 10^th postseason game, the Junior Rose Bowl, in 1967 and then an 11^th, the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, in 1968. Games were added in Tempe, Arizona, in 1971, Birmingham, Alabama, in 1976, and Tampa, Florida in 1977. Two bowls were added in 1978, one in 1981 and three in 1984.

By the start of the new millennium in 2000, there were more than two dozen bowl games and a record 41 in 2015 and a post-pandemic total of 38 last year.

Interestingly, an agreement with the Raleigh bowl would have been a godsend for the ACC. No team from the league received a bowl bid in 1964, ’65 or ’66 because of overall mediocrity. In 1964, when Earle Edwards’ team won the second of three consecutive ACC titles, no team in the league had a winning overall record.

NC State played Georgia in the Liberty Bowl at Memphis, Tennessee, and South Carolina played West Virginia in the second-annual Peach Bowl in 1969 at Atlanta. The league didn’t have two games in the postseason again until 1972.

Another twist to the entire saga: The local team for the inaugural Tobacco Bowl would most likely have been East Carolina College, which had its best season to date, winning eight of its nine regular-season games. The small-college division Pirates eagerly anticipated playing in the program's first major-college postseason game, accepting an invitation to play Massachusetts in Tangerine Bowl in Orlando. However, the game drew just 7,500 spectators. That total, no doubt, would have been larger had a similar game against a regional opponent been played in Raleigh.

Though there was never a Tobacco Bowl played in Raleigh, Virginia and Virginia Military Institute faced each other in the regular-season at the 1964 Tobacco Bowl in Richmond. There was also a smaller-scale postseason game by that name played on Thanksgiving weekend when youth football teams from North Carolina and New Jersey met on Nov. 28 at Dunn Memorial Stadium. The South Plainfield Pop Warner Football Eagles defeated the Dunn Black Panthers, 21-7.

And Riddick Stadium, shivering under 14-degree temperatures and blustery winds thanks to a rare Arctic winter blast, was alone and empty on the proposed date of the inaugural Tobacco Bowl.