Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

There will be a St. Petersburg Bowl game this year!! Get your tickets now for two sixth place teams to battle it out at ThunderDome.

In doing his research when the St. Petersbowl game first came up, Trib sportsguy Brett McMurphy said the game would

become the third collegiate bowl in the Tampa Bay area, joining the Outback Bowl and the defunct Cigar Bowl, held in Tampa from 1947 to 1954.

I tried to find out more about this Cigar Bowl, and came across Richard Ziegler’s Tampa Bay Football History Network. There, Richard tells us of all the precursors to Tampa’s Outback Bowl (I added all the links in the text below):

…The Outback Bowl, formerly known as the Hall of Fame Bowl, was not the first college bowl game in the Tampa Bay area. From 1947-54, the Egypt Temple Shrine sponsored the Cigar Bowl in Tampa. The game featured teams like Missouri Valley College and the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, or state teams like Rollins College and the University of Tampa. The most notable Cigar Bowl was a January 2, 1950 game where Florida State, in just the football program’s third season, played in the school’s first bowl. Wofford College was on a 23 game winning streak and favored over the Seminoles, but FSU beat the Terriers 19-6. On the other side of the Bay, St. Petersburg hosted the Holiday Bowl from 1957-60. That bowl featured small schools, such as Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hillsdale College and Humboldt State University. The last Holiday Bowl also served as the National Association of Intercollege Athletics (NAIA) national title game.

The first attempt to bring a major bowl game to Tampa took place on January 9, 1966. The newly formed West Coast Bowl Association sent a delegation to Washington D.C. to meet with an NCAA committee, however, they were unsuccessful in the attempt to land a new bowl game. Shortly after that effort, Tampa did begin hosting some college all-star games. The All-American Bowl was played in Tampa from 1969-77. That all-star game featured a north versus south configuration with the north winning seven of the nine games. The Can-Am Bowl, which matched up collegiate players from the United States against Canadian college players, was held from 1978-79. The U.S. all-stars won both of those contests…

Ziegler also has the result of a single “Phillips Field Bowl” played in December of ‘51 between UT (as in Tampa) and Brandeis, and Tom McEwen wrote about the all-star games in Tampa a couple of years ago.

Much thanks to Richard Ziegler for the information, and big-time thanks to librarian George Rubb in Special Collections (sports) department at Notre Dame (yep that Notre Dame) for scanning the covers of those old programs.

By the way, Greg Auman says organizers are optimistic the new St. PetersBowl will be approved next week.

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