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Mike Bianchi: Happy 80th anniversary, Citrus Bowl, and thanks for the memories

Decades before Pat Williams and Jimmy Hewitt co-founded the Orlando Magic, before Arnie moved to Bay Hill and turned Orlando into a golf mecca, before Phil Rawlins, Kay Rawlins and Adrian Heath came up with the concept of Orlando City and turned Central Florida into an international soccer destination, before UCF played its first football game in a driving rainstorm at St. Leo, and even before Walt Disney’s animated mouse transformed 27,000 acres of Central Florida swampland into one of the world’s top tourist destinations, there was a football game.

A football game that, through 80 years of names, sponsors, realignments and reinventions, has endured as one of Orlando’s most storied, significant traditions.

Happy 80th anniversary, Tangerine Bowl/Citrus Bowl/Capital One Bowl/Cheez-It Bowl. Whatever you call it, just make sure to use the name with respect and reverence and take a moment to realize what this venerable old bowl game and the stadium it is played in has meant for our city.

Florida Citrus Sports, the non-profit organization that now runs the Citrus Bowl, launched a season-long campaign celebrating the upcoming 80th edition of its signature game on Friday night by honoring longtime civic leader George Stuart Jr. — a former Orlando city councilman, a longtime state senator and FCS’ second-ever board president who has been a benefactor of the game since he was an infant.

That’s right, before his first birthday, George Jr. attended the inaugural Tangerine Bowl in 1947 in his mother’s arms while his father George Stuart Sr. — one of the game’s earliest organizers and financial backers — worked the crowd and solicited donors to make sure the inaugural game wasn’t the only game.

“Before we became one of the top 20 markets in the United States, the bowl game was one of the earliest forms of tourism in Orlando,” explains Steve Hogan, the CEO of Florida Citrus Sports. “It’s really amazing when you look back at the socio-economic impact the bowl game has had.”

The Tangerine Bowl began humbly and charitably in sleepy Central Florida when the local Elks Lodge was looking for a way to raise money for its children’s hospital in Umatilla. As the bowl evolved and grew and city and civic leaders saw its benefits, Florida Citrus Sports was formed to run the game.

In many ways, the Tangerine Bowl was Orlando’s claim to fame back in the day, and through the years it has adapted to the shifting sands of college football economics. With innovative leaders like the great Chuck Rohe, Tom Mickle and now Hogan, it has thrived while so many other bowls have died. It became the first bowl game with a corporate sponsor — The Florida Department of Citrus — and is now the seventh-oldest bowl game in the country. It has managed to stay relevant because Rohe had the foresight more than 30 years ago to tie the game to college football’s two most powerful conferences — the SEC and the Big Ten.

The Citrus Bowl has played host to local legends like a neighborhood dog named Leo who ran on the field and interrupted the Ohio State-Alabama game in 2005.

And national legends like Bobby Bowden, Steve Spurrier, Joe Paterno, Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh, who all coached in the game. And Nick Saban not only coached the game, he played in it as a 5-foot-6 defensive back for Kent State in 1972 (and his defensive teammate was Jack Lambert, the Hall-of-Fame linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers).

Bo Jackson ran wild here, as did Fred Taylor and Eddie George. Doug Flutie played here two years before his famous Hail Mary. Tim Tebow and Danny Wuerffel played in the game. Tennessee’s Peyton Manning showed early flashes of greatness in an orange jersey and became the butt of Spurrier’s famous joke: “You can’t spell Citrus without UT.”

Georgia Tech won a national championship here in 1991. Morgan State became the first historically black college ever invited to play in a major bowl game here in 1966 when the team’s future Pro Football Hall of Famer Willie Lanier won the game’s MVP award. “It was a turning point for black universities,” team captain James Phillips would say later.

Perhaps that 1966 game was a way of making amends for what happened in 1958 when the Tangerine Bowl invited the University of Buffalo to play in the game, but with one condition: The Bulls would have to leave their two black players — Willie Evans and Mike Wilson — behind. At the time, the Tangerine Bowl stadium was managed by the Orlando High School Athletic Association, which forbade integrated teams to play in their facility.

In a show of solidarity, the Bulls’ white players voted unanimously not to play in the game as a protest against racism. As Evans would tell me decades later, his “teammates drew a line in the sand that I have never forgotten.”

More than a half-century later in 2009, then-Orange County mayor Rich Crotty saw an ESPN documentary on the 1958 Buffalo team and commissioned Florida Citrus Sports to invite the remaining members of the Buffalo team to Orlando for an all-expenses-paid weeklong “bowl week” celebration to make up for the one they missed 51 years earlier.

See what I mean? This bowl game and this stadium has been a microcosm of our history — both good and bad — for generations. Anybody who grew up in Orlando — or Florida, for that matter — probably has memories created by the Citrus Bowl or the stadium itself.

The first bowl game I ever attended as a teenager was the 1980 Tangerine Bowl and I can still remember the Maryland running back — Charlie Wysocki — who ran roughshod over the Florida Gators defense.

The first real concert I ever attended was a Rock Super Bowl in 1978 at the Tangerine Bowl featuring the likes of the Steve Miller Band and Jimmy Buffett. The Rolling Stones played here. Led Zeppelin. Fleetwood Mac. ZZ Topp. Aerosmith. The Eagles. Garth Brooks. Waylon Jennings. Merle Haggard. And what about the great Charley Pride?

The stadium provided a home for UCF when it didn’t have one, and the same goes for Orlando City.

Who will ever forget when a sellout crowd of 62,000 fans piled into the stadium for City’s inaugural MLS match against New York City FC? Or a few nights after the Pulse shooting when 40,000 fans packed into the Citrus Bowl as the community came together at an emotionally charged Orlando City match.

Former Orlando City coach Adrian Heath, his voice cracking, told me before the match: “The people in this city have never let us down when we’ve needed them and maybe they need us a little bit right now.”

We could go on and on about what the bowl game and the stadium have meant to Orlando. The first neutral-site college football game was played here. World Cup games have been played here. Pro Bowls and NFL preseason games have been played here. And, soon, hopefully, the Jacksonville Jaguars will be playing an entire season here in 2027.

In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King gave a speech on the pitcher’s mound at the adjoining baseball stadium (Tinker Field) in which he called for “Integration now.” Tinker Field is gone, but a commemorative history plaza has been built in the shadows of the stadium.

Across the street, Florida Citrus Sports donated millions of dollars for the renovation of Lake Lorna Doone Park, where the first integrated Little League Baseball game in the South was played in 1955.

All of this history and heritage exist because some philanthropic members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks wanted to raise money for a local children’s hospital all those years ago.

“Whether you’re new to Orlando or have been here your whole life, I think we should all take a minute to learn the history of where we live,” Hogan says. “When you take a stroll down memory lane, you’ll realize that we’ve got a pretty cool history.”

Indeed we do.

Happy anniversary, Citrus Bowl.

Thanks for the memories.

Thanks for the legends and the laughter, the tailgates and the touchdowns, the milestones and the music, the cheers and the beers, the heartbreaks and the healing.

Even now — 80 years later — you remain both a time capsule and a torchbearer for our community.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen