By Woodrow Carroll
My having had the good fortune and good health to cover 41 college football bowl games through last season, it is enjoyable to look back on how it all started for me.
It was the 1991 Copper Bowl in Tucson, Ariz. that this writer covered his first bowl game. Arizona Stadium, home to the University of Arizona Wildcats, was the venue.
The Copper Bowl made its debut in 1989. The bowl billed itself as the last bowl of the 1980s since it was first played New Year’s Eve 1989.
Organizers, knowing that the presence of the home team will always put a few more fans in the seats, put the University of Arizona against North Carolina State that first year.
Arizona Stadium, capacity of more than 56,000, pulled in just more than 37,000 for that first Copper Bowl.
The third year of the Copper Bowl was another New Year’s Eve attraction. You could just as easily call the game “Northern Illinois Past and Present.”
The 1991 Copper Bowl had Baylor University playing Indiana University which tells you that the number of bowl games out there were far fewer in number than today. To get a Big 10 side to play a Big 12 team, then and now, would be an attention-getter.
Who coached Indiana in the 1991 Copper Bowl? One Bill Mallory, after his stint as Northern Illinois head coach for four seasons ending with the 1983 season when the Huskies finished 10-2 and defeated Cal State-Fullerton, 20-13, in the California Bowl in Fresno, Calif.
Mallory’s success at Northern Illinois earned him the head coach job at Indiana. Mallory was in his eighth year at Indiana by time the game with Baylor came along. The Hoosiers has strung together four winning seasons the prior five years at a school better known for basketball.
Mallory played his collegiate football at Miami, Ohio. His first three years at the school his coach was famous Ara Parseghian. Mallory’s senior year John Pont was head coach. He later coached Indiana in 1967 to the school’s lone Rose Bowl appearance. Indiana lost, 14-3, to a Southern California team that featured O.J. Simpson.
Mallory’s defensive coordinator and linebackers coach in 1991 was Joe Novak who guided the Northern Illinois 1996-2007 and, along the way beat both Alabama and coaching great Urban Meyer (Meyer was at Bowling Green at the time.)
Not a Northern Illinois coach, but a local favorite was Buck Suhr, a Sycamore graduate, was Mallory’s running backs coach at the time.
Indiana uniform No. 55 the night of the Copper Bowl game with Baylor was a 6-6 and 265-pound center, by the name of Rod Carey, who later guided Northern Illinois through last season and is now the head coach of the Temple Owls.
All’s well that ends well. For Indiana won the game with Baylor, 24-0.
Mallory recently died. Novak has retired. Although Carey continues his coaching saga, few would say Indiana-Baylor game was scintillating. Yet, the memory is firmly and fondly in place.