EL PASO, Tes.By the time you read this, you’ll probably know the score of today’s Sun Bowl football game between Kansas and Pittsburgh.
And some of you may be burning behind the ears because you’ll have to read to find out further details about the game.
Yes, today was a work day for many folks and that meant no opportunity to watch the gam love, except perhaps in spots, on, let’s say, a long lunch hour.
Many who wanted to see the game couldn’t, at all. To those unfortunates, the Sun Bowl heartily apologizes and would like to point out it is between a rock and a hard place because of television.
To go to the beginning, CBS-TV is in the eighth year of a 10-year pact with the Sun Bowl. the bigwigs at CBS headquarters in New York pay the Sun Carnival Assn. $125,000 for broadcast rights.
At those prices, CBS can ask for a 6 a.m. kickoff on Christmas morning if it wants. The TV network wouldn’t go that far, of course.
The reason today’s Sun Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl, which immediately followed, were on a Friday is because of ratings. Saturday was out, because CBS wasn’t about the buck the pro football playoffs.
Granted, 10:10 a.m., El Paso time, for a kickoff is pretty strange, and one which wouldn’t seem to be conducive to high ratings. But CBS did some homework and discovered that 82 per cent of the national work force supposedly had today off.
The ratings figured to be surprisingly good because (1) the game started at noon in the East, (2) an Eastern team was involved and (3) the biggest TV markets are in the East.
Undoubtedly, though, the ratings would have been even better if the Sun Bowl were played tonight. Why isn’t it? Simply because that’s where the Sun Bowl puts its foot down.
“CBS tells us to have it at night,” says Sonny Yates, the Sun Carnival’s energetic young executive director. “But we can’t. It’d kill us. It’s so cold in December around here, especially at night, and people in El Paso are used to warm weather, believe me. It’s a mental block.”
But there’s another reason, too. They aren’t anxious to change the name to Moon Bowl.
“From an image standpoint,” Yates continued, “you can’t have a Sun Bowl at night. People around here would croak if we did that.”
Yates certainly doesn’t want that. In only his first year ramrodding the show, he’s convinced an apathetic populace what the Sun Bowl means to them, not only in tourist dollars but in the fostering of a big league image.
A former sports information director at New Mexico State, Yates can take most of the credit for the game selling out for the first time ever this December. That’s right, the first time in 41 years. When you consider the Sun bowl stadium on the Texas-El Paso campus hold only about 30,000 people, you can see how blase El Pasoans have been about the game.
“People around here,” Yates explained, “thought the Sun Carnival was a cloud up in the air someplace. I was talking to a bank president the other day and told him the game had never sold out. He though I was kidding him. But he believed me when I showed him the audit.”
CBS raised its ante by $25,000 this year and the Sun Bowl boosted its guarantee from $120,000 to $150,000 for each team. That’s a $60,000 boost, meaning ticket sales had to cover the $35,000 not accounted for by the TV hike.
It was a gamble, one that paid off when the game was officially sold out Tuesday.
Yates estimates total receipts of $375,000 meaning there will be enough left over for Sun Carnival expenses.
