In 1890, members of Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club, and former residents of the East and Midwest yearned to exhibit their new home’s beautiful winter weather, which led them to create the first Tournament of Roses. At a club meeting, Professor Charles F. Holder reminded members that in New York, people are buried in snow. Whereas in Pasadena, the oranges were about to bear and the flowers were blooming. He felt they should share their paradise with the world by engineering a festival. On New Year’s Day, more than 2,000 people turned out to rejoice in a ceremony of carriages varnished in flowers, preceded by foot-races, polo matches, and organized competitions of tug-of-war on the town lot reminiscent of the “Battle of the Flowers” in Nice, France. The myriad of flowers and tournament games led to Professor Holder recommending the festival be named “The Tournament of Roses.” As the festival grew, they began incorporating motorized floats and marching bands. Games were played on the town lot, consisting of bronco-busting demonstrations, ostrich races, and an elephant racing a camel (the elephant won).
As the festival’s popularity grew, stands were built for spectators along the Parade route. The Tournament began garnering the attention of newspapers from the East Coast. As the Tournament grew too big for the Valley Hunt Club to handle, the Tournament of Roses Association was created in 1895 to administer the festival. With the Tournament of Roses Association now in charge, they decided to add to the day’s events by adding a football game in 1902. The game was the first post-season college football game ever played. In the inaugural game, the University of Michigan pummeled Stanford University 49-0. The one-sided contest led the Tournament to replace football with Roman-style chariot races. Football returned to stay in 1916. Shortly after, the large crowds were too big for the original stands in Tournament Park. In 1920, Tournament President William L. Leishman pictured a venue similar to the Yale Bowl, which was the first modern football stadium of its time. Leishman proposed the Tournament build the arena in the Arroyo Seco area of Pasadena. On New Year’s Day of 1923, the stadium hosted its first game and was appropriately nicknamed, the “Rose Bowl.”
The decorative Rose Parade floats of today’s Parade are now sophisticated and high tech, featuring digital animation accompanied by alluring natural materials gathered from throughout the world. A few floats are still constructed or decorated solely by volunteers from their sponsoring associations. Most of the floats are manufactured by professional float-building companies, which can take nearly a year to create. The hard work is rewarded New Year’s Day morning, when the millions of world-wide viewers and the local audience in Pasadena get to enjoy the Rose Parade.
Appropriately referred to as the Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl Game has been a sellout since 1947. That year’s game was the first in which the Big Ten faced the Pac-12 under the Tournament’s exclusive pact between the two conferences. To this day, the agreement remains the longest conference bowl association. In 2002 and 2006, the Rose Bowl Game hosted the National Championship Game in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) between the nation’s top two teams. The National Championship games in 2010 and 2014 were hosted both by the Tournament of Roses and Rose Bowl Game. In 2015, the Rose Bowl Game hosted the first-ever College Football Playoff Semifinal as part of the new College Football Playoff system and hosted a semifinal again in 2018 and 2021.
