From Chariot Races to World Cup Finals: The Rose Bowl Story
The first game inside the Rose Bowl, on January 1, 1923, started more than an hour late because Penn State could not reach the stadium. The team watched the parade, then boarded taxis at 11 a.m. for a 2:15 p.m. kickoff. Post-parade traffic swallowed the whole party, and the cab drivers eventually gave up on the streets and drove across the front lawns of Pasadena residents to get the players in.
The two head coaches nearly came to blows over warmup time, and officials pushed kickoff back a full hour. The game finished in near darkness, with sportswriters striking matches to see their notebooks. USC won 14-3. More than a century later, the one thing that has not changed around that stadium is the traffic.
The Rose Bowl Game Came First
The Tournament of Roses East-West football game predates the stadium by two decades. The first match happened in 1902, when Michigan beat Stanford 49-0. Stanford actually gave up with eight minutes left, and that was enough for organizers to drop football from the program entirely.
Polo filled the slot in 1903, and drew even thinner crowds. Roman chariot races followed in 1904, inspired by the Ben-Hur novel that had just found a Broadway audience, and they held the New Year’s Day slot for more than a decade. By 1913, organizers were adding ostrich races and a camel-versus-elephant race to boost interest. The elephant won. None of it could match what football eventually drew. The game returned to the Tournament in 1916 and has not left since, with the current stadium still six years from opening.
A Stadium in the Arroyo
Architect Myron Hunt looked east for inspiration and landed on Yale Bowl, open for all of eight years. He adapted Yale Bowl’s horseshoe form and set it into the Arroyo Seco in October 1922 with room for around 57,000. Expansions over the following decades brought it to just under 91,000, and what Hunt borrowed from Yale Bowl eventually earned a designation to match its age.
The Rose Bowl now carries dual landmark status as both a National Historic Landmark and a California Historic Civil Engineering landmark, a combination very few sports venues can claim. What neither designation mentions is that the roads feeding into it were never quite sized for 90,000 people all leaving at once, a fact most first-time visitors discover on the way out.
College Football Moves In
UCLA made the Rose Bowl its permanent home in 1982, leaving the LA Coliseum after years of sharing it with USC. The move gave the venue a year-round college football anchor and paired it with the Rose Bowl Game’s existing history and the nickname “The Granddaddy of Them All.”
That game carries weight in college football beyond what any single program brings. Some of the sport’s most documented moments played out on this field, including Vince Young’s game-winning scramble against USC in January 2006 and decades of Big Ten-Pac-12 matchups that defined the New Year’s Day bowl calendar. Attendance for the game fills the stadium in a way that a mid-season UCLA Saturday rarely does, and the difference is visible from the parking lots.
Five Super Bowls and an Olympic Gold Medal
The stadium has hosted five Super Bowls between 1977 and 1993, pulling some of the largest crowds in NFL history. Super Bowl XIV in 1980 drew 103,985 spectators to watch Pittsburgh beat the Los Angeles Rams, a figure that held as a Super Bowl attendance record for years.
The Olympic connection came earlier. For the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the stadium hosted a cycling track, a temporary installation that turned the field into a velodrome for the competition. When Los Angeles hosted again in 1984, the Rose Bowl staged soccer, including France’s 2-0 gold-medal win over Brazil in front of 101,799 spectators.
Where Soccer Made Its American Statement
The 1994 FIFA World Cup brought eight matches to this venue, including the men’s final between Brazil and Italy. Neither team scored in regular time or extra time, and Brazil eventually won on penalties in front of a crowd that helped push total tournament attendance here to around 716,000. For eight consecutive matches, the stadium ran near capacity for a sport most of the country was still learning to follow.
Five years later, the same field hosted the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final, where the United States faced China in front of just over 90,000 spectators. The Americans won on penalties in what many consider the most-watched women’s soccer match in history. That combination, a men’s and women’s World Cup final on the same grass, puts the Rose Bowl in very small company among venues worldwide.
The LA Galaxy called the Rose Bowl home for their first seven seasons, and the stadium has since hosted Gold Cup finals, Copa América matches, and major club fixtures, including Copa América Centenario and Chelsea vs. Liverpool in the International Champions Cup.
The Arroyo Has a Green Room, Too
The same grass that hosted the 1994 World Cup Final was under concert scaffolding just months later, when Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones each sold it out in the same year. That kind of overlap has always been part of how the Rose Bowl works.
In 2014, Beyoncé and Jay-Z came through on the On the Run Tour, the same summer One Direction became the first act to play three consecutive sold-out shows there. Kenny Chesney played the first country concert at the stadium in 2015, a genre that somehow took until then to find its way here.
Concert nights hit the Arroyo differently than football. The crowd does not trickle out from the third quarter onward; at a show, 90,000 people decide to leave at roughly the same moment, which is why Lincoln Avenue can back up faster after a concert than after a game.
A Stadium Even When Nobody Is Playing
The Rose Bowl Flea Market started November 10, 1968, when R.G. Canning and Bill Tunnell set up around 200 vendors in the parking lots and 12,000 people showed up. Nearly six decades later, 2,500 vendors arrive each second Sunday and around 20,000 buyers come through. Celebrities and interior designers are among the regulars, which is how it earned the nickname “Flea Market of the Stars.” The lots are color-coded by category, blue for new merchandise, orange for antiques, and white for vintage, and all tickets require advance purchase since there are no gate sales.
Beyond the flea market, the venue rents spaces year-round for corporate dinners, weddings, and private celebrations, with the field accommodating up to 3,500 seated guests or 7,500 standing. The stadium does not sit idle between marquee events.
The Exit Is the Hard Part
The Arroyo Seco has always rewarded a little advance thought. The stadium has had a century to figure out how to pull 90,000 people in. Getting them out is still the harder part.
What the regulars figured out long ago, first-timers tend to discover on the exit, and most of them already know the way in by the time they come back. The traffic, apparently, has not changed much since 1923.
