The Outback Bowl: Quite a success

Posted Jun 3, 2009 by Tom McEwen

Updated Jun 4, 2009 at 09:15 AM

Surely, the Outback Bowl is among the best continuous major sports productions originated in this great place of ours.

The one held this past Jan. 1 was the 23rdth since Vince Thornton or Joe Zalupski or John Adcock or one of us in my business said out loud, “Why don’t we in the Tampa area get in the bowl business?” Got the weather, got the original Tampa Stadium, got the interest, got the best football playing surface in the National Football League, got some bigtime football folk among us, got the inclination to get involved.

Doesn’t really matter who suggested it. We jumped on it, and got in the postseason football business. A firebrand promoter named Ron Gorton jumped in and created the American Bowl, matching college stars from the north and south, before it moved to its present correct position of the Outback Bowl when founders Chris Sullivan, Bob Basham and Tim Gannnon, Tampa successes (the Henderson Avenue store) said they’d join in.

Now, get this: the Outback director, Jim McVay, said they had just signed the four-year extension with Tim Allen, new Outback president, agreeing to four more years of the bond.

“This is huge,” said McVay, who never understates anything. “This is wonderful. The Outback Bowl returns as the Outback Bowl.”

We all love it. Outback fits perfectly. It is pretty enticing to college football players to be told a steakhouse is your sponsor— about all you can eat all the time — you are on ESPN, you are going to Florida and Tampa on Jan. 1, and your college is going to earn over $6 million for your holiday fun and games.

The deal with the Outback and convincing the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten to join the selection list for the Tampa presentation both were landmark events. Of course, having Ron Gorton around early, and then McVay the rest of the time and the cooperation of the Tampa-St. Pete-Wauchula folks to get it done, to support it, all have been vital. McVay is from a football family, the McVays of the former New York Giants head coach, John, and he cut his promotional teeth as a promotions executive with the old, colorful Tampa Bay Bandits of John Bassett, Steve Spurrier, Burt Reynolds, and that wild, successful bunch.

McVay has been steadying, not one to rush in without a plan, one who could work with early low budgets, and with the one-of-a-kind Jimmy McDowell. McDowell, for years, the early ones of the growing bowl here, loved Tampa, loved spring training, loved the Football Foundation and the Hall of Fame for which he was the executive director in New York.

McDowell was a great friend of this Bowl, and of the SEC. He was here all the time. Never went to a bowl city which did not have, say, beaches or bathing beauties. But, he’d come to Tampa to speak to the West Tampa Boys Club. He was also a pal, and guiding light and the elected boss of the Football Foundation of those years. Vince Drawdy, “whose other interest,” said McVay, “was Nike, also was involved early. Vince did well. Was our friend, too.”

On a trip to New York for an annual Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf, not my customary digs, Drawdy took McVay and Auburn Coach Pat Dye to the 21 Club. Saw Eddie Ulmann there with his railroad engine-leasing company dad, and mom. Mrs. Mary Ulmann owned and ran the Sebring Road Race for years with the help of son Eddie and husband, Alec.

The dad, Alec, took my wife Linda and the Dick Grecos on a night motorcycle ride though the Sebring infield the night before the race one year.  Anyway, the Outback Bowl seems now cinched to be among us for a long time and that’s just dandy. Perhaps it will have the staying power of the Sebring Race, to last long after I’ve written my last account of this Tampa sports success.

None will be so dramatic reporting of a Canadian Outback Bowl when a high point was naming the American of the Year. Well, when McDonald’s originator Ray Kroc didn’t show, I went with Ron Gorton to ask the producer of the Mizlou Network, doing the game, if he’d take it. He cursed us and slammed the operations door in our face.

There was a well-known movie star at the game, but we found him drunk. At the last minute, Gorton said the fellow working the field as a handyman was a war hero. We went to get him and got him standing on an end zone man-hole cover to keep sewer water off the field. It had rained like heck for days. We had asked and gotten Mayor Greco to open the gates to the Hillsborough River during the game to allow runoff, to avoid flooding the parking lots. He allowed that.

But, we got the maintenance man, Bobby Eews, to accept the award. I wrote a quick lead-in to be read at the half at center of Tampa Stadium. It was the American of the Year. We did not encourage an acceptance speech.

Nor did we have the American of the Year in the future.

Dews, by the way, wrote a book.

But, we surely have the Outback Bowl and it is a beauty. Nice to have Super Bowls now and then, but, the Outback, its glamour, entertaining, $40,000,000-$50 or more of bowl bucks and good relations all around? Heck, we got a good deal now.

Oh, by the way, those involved in the Outback Bowl are toasting themselves this weekend at Tom Dempsey’s Saddlebrook Resort.