KU alums go nuts for bowls

By Terry Rombeck Dec 23, 2003

Bill Snead/Journal-World Photo

Kansas University fans Tom Hall, left, of Leawood, and Brian Dixon, Denver, visit the KU football pep rally at the Caribe Royal Hotel in Orlando, Fla. The two have attended 22 bowl games in 19 years.

Orlando, Fla. ? Tom Hall and Brian Dixon have a mission: to attend every college bowl game at least once.

Going into Monday’s Tangerine Bowl, they had seen 22 games in 19 years — but had never seen their alma mater, Kansas University, play a bowl.

“We were excited and relieved when we found out KU was going,” Hall said. “It’d be a crime to go to what now could be 28-plus bowl games and never see our alma mater.”

Hall, who lives in Leawood, Kan., and Dixon, of Denver, have used the bowl quest as an annual way to renew their friendship, which started in the late 1970s and early 1980s at KU.

The idea for attending all the games came in 1984 at the Sugar Bowl. Hall, who works for a Kansas City, Mo., construction equipment manufacturing firm, said they had so much fun they wanted to do it every year.

The yearly trip has almost become ritualistic, said Dixon, sales manager for a Denver scientific manufacturing company. They prefer to go to bowls that are in their first or last year. And they must root for opposite teams, with the loser buying food and beer later.

“We have as much fun as possible and try to spend as little money as possible,” Hall said.

After all, they have wives and children back home.

“We started this before either one of us had met our wives,” Hall said. “It was part of the package. It wasn’t a prenuptial, but they knew this bowl thing was going to go on for some time.”

The gluttony of college bowl games is making Hall’s and Dixon’s goal more challenging every year. In 1984, there were 18 bowl games. Now, there are 28.

So how did the Tangerine Bowl stack up against the other 22 games?

“It’s been great,” Dixon said. “If you can party with your alma mater, it makes it a lot more fun.”