How Oklahoma State played a huge role in Fiesta Bowl's rise to prominence
Thomas Wolf made a memorable trip to Phoenix in the winter of 1974. He was a senior captain and an offensive lineman at Oklahoma State, and that season, the Cowboys broke a 16-year bowl drought, going to the Fiesta Bowl and defeating BYU.
“It was so great,” Wolf said.
Great for the program and the players, the coaches and the fans.
But several years later, Wolf, a longtime ophthalmologist in the Oklahoma City area, returned to Phoenix for an internship, and during that stay, he found out that OSU’s trip had been great for the Fiesta Bowl, too.
“I heard this from people who were … involved in the Fiesta Bowl,” Wolf said. “They found out I played there, and they said, ‘Oh, my God, that turned the bowl around financially.’”
During this weekend’s annual Cowboy Football Reunion, Wolf and his 1974 teammates will be honored during OSU's game against Texas Tech. What they did 50 years ago provided the first bit of foundation for the Cowboys’ more recent successes. Much has happened to bolster the program since then, but they laid the groundwork that begat a Big Eight title two years later, the Jimmy Johnson era, Thurman and Barry and all that’s come after.
Cowboys everywhere should celebrate that 1974 squad.
But Phoenix might want to add its voices to the chorus. The Fiesta Bowl has taken its place among the postseason granddaddies. It’s a New Year’s Six Bowl alongside the likes of the Rose, the Cotton, the Sugar and the Orange, bowls that existed for decades before the Fiesta even came into existence.
Nowadays, no one questions the Fiesta’s place as a part of the College Football Playoff’s rotation of bowls that will host a quarterfinal or semifinal every year.
But it wasn’t all that long ago that the Fiesta was an upstart trying to get its footing, hoping to survive.
We know some bowls don’t.
Poinsettia Bowl, anyone?
Bacardi Bowl? Cherry Bowl? Salad Bowl?
Yep, those died, too.
The Fiesta Bowl was born in the late 1960s out of frustration over the Western Athletic Conference not having an automatic bowl bid for its champion, often Arizona State in those days. Alumni of the school in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe wanted somewhere for their Sun Devils to play, and when rival Arizona wrangled a Sun Bowl invitation before its game against Arizona State in 1968, then promptly got throttled by the Sun Devils, who got no bowl invite, the annoyance turned to action.
Within a few months, a committee of business leaders in Phoenix had devised a plan for a bowl that would pit the WAC winner against an at-large invitee.
Less than two years later, the inaugural Fiesta Bowl was played.
Arizona State vs. Florida State.
“Well, we were lucky to get ASU in the first game,” said Bill Shover, who spent 40 years at Phoenix-area newspapers and was one of the Fiesta Bowl’s founders. “We built the audience of the bowl game, and we sold it out.
“It was a very good launch for us to have ASU in the first game.”
The Sun Devils played in the first three Fiesta Bowls. Won all three of them, too, beating Florida State, Missouri and Pittsburgh. It was a boon for locals looking to provide a postseason platform for Arizona State.
But the boon wasn’t universal in the Valley of the Sun.
“All these out-of-state teams that they had invited to play ASU in Phoenix — that was their home city — they didn’t travel,” Wolf said of what he heard from people in Phoenix years later.
“They just didn’t show up.”
Even though all of the first three Fiesta Bowls were sellouts, their opponents were coming from 1,300 (Missouri), 1,800 (Florida State) and 2,100 (Pittsburgh) miles away. What’s more, traveling then wasn’t as fast or as easy or as economical as it is today.
That may have caused some trepidation when Arizona State lost the WAC title to BYU in 1974, meaning there would be a Fiesta Bowl without the Sun Devils for the first time.
But Cougar fans were pumped; it was BYU’s first bowl game in program history. Many fans made the trip from Provo, Utah, only 600 miles north, but with the school’s tie to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Cougars drew folks from all over.
Cowboy fans were equally excited when OSU was invited to the Fiesta Bowl, breaking the program’s bowl drought. Only a couple of weeks after the bowl invite was announced and a full month before the game, OSU had already sold more than 7,000 tickets from its allotment.
The 1974 Fiesta Bowl ended up being another sellout.
“What a great place to play a December bowl,” Wolf said. “I mean, it’s terrific.”
But as good as the bowl was for the Cowboys and Cougars, OSU and BYU were good for it, too.
“I think it gave them a shot in the arm as far as economically,” Wolf said, “and it came what it became.”
Did OSU help save the Fiesta Bowl?
Maybe not.
But that big crowd in 1974 was significant. Even without the hometown team playing, the fine folks in Phoenix knew they had something that could be sustained.
The Fiesta Bowl could work.
Fifty years later, it still is.
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