More Bowl Games That Could Be Movies

“The Mosquito Bowl” was released over the weekend to, eh, well, less than rapturous reviews. Not that reviews matter with such a movie. No, in my experience, “The Mosquito Bowl” is the kind of movie where viewers who accuse critics of having already made up their minds before watching it have, in fact, themselves already made up their minds before watching it. Based on the 2022 book by Buzz Bissinger, the two-hour war film tells the true story of two regiments of American Marines at Guadalcanal in 1944 that played a football game on Christmas Eve dubbed The Mosquito Bowl. It was directed by Peter Berg, our go-to filmmaker for noisy nationalism, and so I understand why in making a movie about a football bowl game he chose The Mosquito Bowl rather than the so-called Atomic Bowl played by two Marine units at Nagasaki six weeks after it was obliterated by an atom bomb. That would have required tact and a multidimensional viewpoint that is not typically part and parcel to the Berg arsenal. Nevertheless. 

Movies and college football bowl games are my two foremost interests, of course, and just as they intersected a couple weeks ago, now they have again. And even if I will likely not see “The Mosquito Bowl,” I am grateful for its existence. Because it’s Election Day in America, after all, and everybody is angry, exhausted, and tense, and I was able to distract myself the last few days by imagining a few real bowl games as fake movie pitches.

More Bowl Games That Could Be Movies

1933 Festival of Palms Bowl. Before the Orange Bowl became a south Florida institution, there was the ramshackle beginning in which principal organizer Earnie Sieler lured Manhattan University to play a middling hometown Miami team for $3,000. Yet, when he couldn’t make the guarantee, Sieler cut a deal with some local bookmakers to make up the rest with the understanding that Miami keep the score relatively close so those bookies, no doubt, could make back their money, a reminder of when gambling in college sports was under the table rather than out in the open and right in your face. Yet, perhaps owing to a combination of Manhattan’s arduous trip and a field in rough shape, Miami did not just keep the inaugural Festival of Palms Bowl close, they won 7-0. And good for them. But in our Festival of Palms Bowl movie, with local bookmakers making not-so-subtle threats, the desperate bowl game organizers must ensure Miami does not beat Manhattan, or else, forcing them to slip Manhattan a teamwide mickey, deliberately sodden the field, deploy a wind machine, steal signals, and send a dog running onto the field at a crucial moment to try and prevent a handicapping calamity. 

1912 Bacardi Bowl. This strange but true version of a bowl game that existed in Havana, Cuba at different points during the first half of the previous century in different iterations was so strange, in fact, that The New York Times filed a report on how Florida football coach George E. Pyle was taken into custody by the police after having some manner of disagreement with the officiating. (The contemporary Times dispatch erroneously calls him “Pyles.”) The one-time Florida sports information director Norm Carlson elaborates: “a Cuban judge...ordered (Pyle) to take his team and get out of town before he put them all in jail.” Ah, but this is a movie, and in our 1912 Bacardi Bowl movie, the Cuban judge will put Pyle in jail, forcing his team to draw up a scheme without the ol’ ball coach’s help to break him out, fleeing the island and justice.  

2003 Hawaii Bowl. This wild-assed affair that ended in overtime with hometown Hawaii winning 54-48 over Houston did not, in fact, end there, but rather with the two teams brawling and throwing punches on the field to such a lengthy and inflamed degree that police had to intervene to break it up. This was more ironic because the game was contested on Christmas Day – and a happy New Year! “The Mosquito Bowl” took place during war, but “The Hawaii Bowl” will demonstrate the price of treating football like war.

1990 Independence Bowl. When the 15th edition of the Shreveport, Louisiana bowl game christened in the year of the United States Bicentennial found itself on the verge of folding, it was resuscitated by virtue of a corporate sponsorship with the since bought out Poulan/Weed Eater, thereby creating the infamous, glorious, ridiculous Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl. Our two-hour drama will not recount the bowl game itself, per se, but the Independence Bowl chairman’s frantic rush to secure corporate sponsorship before the clock runs out. The movie ends with Maryland and Louisiana Tech players looking askance at their Weed Eater gift bags.

1902 Rose Bowl. In the nascent era of the college football playoff, bowl games have wound up on the endangered list. Indeed, Bowl Season executive Nick Carparelli gave the whole extravaganza the vote of confidence just last month and in this business, a vote of confidence is typically the kiss of death. (I honestly did not know that Bowl Season was an official organization. That not only feels inane, like trademarking March Madness, but at odds with the dodgy local hucksterism that bowl games were all about in the first place.) So, let’s make a movie of the first bowl game, the Tournament East-West football game, in which Michigan routed Stanford so badly that as dust swirled and darkness descended, Stanford opted to concede. That is how our 1902 Rose Bowl movie will end, in the dust and darkness, a lyrical eulogy to bowl season itself, one of my absolute favorite things in this world and one that has been rendered archaic gradually, to quote Hemingway, then suddenly.