There was plenty of room for memories Friday at Soldier Field.
Spectators occupied only a tiny fraction of the storied lakefront playpen’s 66,944 seats, leaving ample space to stretch out and recall the glory days of the Prep Bowl football game, when an empty seat was as likely as a first-down punt.
Those were the days of Bill DeCorrevont and Billy Marek, days when there were no state playoffs and no one in Chicago really gave a hoot because when you had the best of the Catholic League and the Public League, what else mattered?
Those were the days when the hottest ticket in town was for the Prep Bowl banquet. Mayor Richard J. Daley would beam down from the dais at the Bismarck Hotel as he dispensed equally huge doses of food and praise on both players and coaches.
The mayor was a regular at the game itself, usually sitting in the west stands and working his way through the press box at halftime.
Those were also the days when the Prep Bowl was the biggest game in town. It dominated the sports sections, and first radio and then TV provided play-by-play coverage.
All that is gone now, as distant a memory as the drop kick.
At the 65th Prep Bowl Friday, Mayor Richard M. Daley, the late mayor’s son, was nowhere to be seen, and empty orange, blue and yellow seats seemed to stretch almost to the horizon despite flawless weather.
There were no play-by-play television broadcasts, and newspaper buildup had been scant at best. Attention was focused 150 miles southwest on the state football championship games in Normal.
It was a scene that almost screamed, “Why bother?” Why bother to match teams already eliminated from state title contention when so few seemed to care?
The answer came from the field itself, where players from Hubbard and Joliet Catholic competed as though a state crown really was at stake. And when Hubbard (13-1) had finally won 28-16 in its first Prep Bowl appearance, the Greyhounds didn’t seem to remember–or care– that they had been bounced by Providence 28-0 in the second round of the state 5A playoffs.
“This has been a blessing from above,” said All-State running back Charles Frazier, who ran for 172 yards and three touchdowns. “This is the first time Hubbard has won the Prep Bowl, and to us it’s a very big thrill and honor to come out and compete in Soldier Field. We’re on top of the world now.”
Hubbard coach Elton Harris has seen the game as an elementary school kid, when free tickets from policemen and firemen got him into Soldier Field in the mid-’60s, and as an assistant coach, when he helped Robeson take the 1990 crown.
Leading a team into Solider Field, he said, was an almost indescribable thrill.
“I remember as a kid just wanting to go on the field,” he said. “When I first walked out today, I thought about how Papa Bear (former Bears owner and coach George Halas) walked on these sidelines.
“It seems like a dream come true.”
Hubbard’s victory, coupled with Dunbar’s 28-21 triumph over Marian Catholic last year, gave the Public League only its second back-to-back victories over the Catholic schools since 1959 and cut the latters’ lead in the series to 42-21-2.
Public and Catholic League teams met in a championship game at Soldier Field as early as 1927, but it didn’t become an annual event until Mayor Edward Kelly revived it in 1934 as a charity contest. The game became known as the Kelly Bowl, a name changed to the Prep Bowl in the late 1940s.
The Kelly Bowl was an instant hit and achieved immortality in 1937 when a crowd generally estimated at 110,000 overflowed the old configuration of Soldier Field to watch legendary halfback DeCorrevont lead Public League champ Austin over Leo 26-0.
With the Mayor Daley Youth Foundation sponsoring the game and city employees selling or giving away tickets, huge crowds continued to jam Soldier Field as late as 1970, when 65,735 fans watched Marek help lead St. Rita past Lane Tech 12-8.
Then two events changed the course of the Prep Bowl for good.
The first was the state playoff system, which in 1974 started to siphon off the best Catholic League teams. In 1979, the Public League joined the state playoffs, making the Prep Bowl seem even more a matchup of also-rans.
(Currently, Public League and Catholic Metropolitan Conference teams that reach the third round of the state playoffs cannot enter the playoffs leading to a Prep Bowl berth.)
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The second big event was the December 1976 death of Richard J. Daley, the Prep Bowl’s greatest champion. The city soon stopped sponsoring the game; by 1978, attendance had dropped below 5,000.
By the 1980s, the game’s very existence seemed in doubt. It took City Hall intervention to keep the Chicago Park District from moving the 1988 game to Gately Stadium, and the Prep Bowl needed the Illinois High School Association to bail it out with rules changes at least twice–the second time in 1996 when the Chicago Catholic League and the East Suburban Catholic Conference combined in football into the Catholic Metropolitan. The IHSA bylaws had allowed only for the Public League champion to meet the Chicago Catholic League winner.
The Prep Bowl finally got a break in 1995 when J.W. Smith became head of the Public League. Smith was determined to restore the game’s luster. He revived the Prep Bowl dinner in 1996 and tried to market the game better.
“I’d like to make it a spectacular, much like a college bowl game,” he said. “I’d like to have a Prep Bowl week.”
In the last three years, attendance has improved slightly, though Friday’s actual crowd seemed only about half the announced 6,273. Smith wants 20,000 and pins his hopes on the strong player and parent response to his eight-year-old elementary school football program.
What the Prep Bowl really needs, though, are more fans such as the Rev. Richard Ream, who along with sons Joe and John Owens-Ream took in Friday’s game simply because they wanted to watch football.
“The Prep Bowl has a long tradition,” Ream said. “It means something–to the people of Chicago, anyway.”
No one understands that better than Gordon Tech Athletic Director Tom Winiecki, who won Prep Bowls as a head coach with the Rams and as a player in 1956 with Leo. History, he said, makes the Prep Bowl worth saving.
“Too many times we throw away tradition, and when it’s gone someone says, `Why did we do that?’ ” Winiecki said.
Smith vows the Prep Bowl is safe as long as he’s in charge.
“This is Chicago’s game, and it’s a great game,” he said. “We are going to make it live.”