Hoping for a bed of roses

Jenifer Ragland

NEWPORT BEACH -- Rosalind Williams and her crew at the Newport Beach

Conference and Visitor’s Bureau are starting to notice a trend -- and

it’s not making them happy.

In fact, it may be enough to start giving them a complex.

After countless man hours and thousands of dollars spent trying to woo

alumni from The Big 12 and PAC-10 teams to stay in beautiful, sunny

Newport Beach for the Rose Bowl, it appears the city will once again come

up short.

This is the second straight year that alumni from The Big 12’s team have

chosen to stay on the Westside of Los Angeles rather than Newport Beach.

Granted, Newport officials are dealing with the same Big 12 team as last

year -- the University of Wisconsin. And for some reason, Newport and

Madtown just don’t mix.

But the bureau still has a shot at the PAC-10 team, which will be

Stanford, Oregon or Washington, depending on the outcome of this today’s

games.

However, there are a couple wild cards. First, Williams said, she doesn’t

have a guarantee from any of the teams. In fact, Washington alumni have

said if they come to the Rose Bowl, they want to stay in Santa Monica.

“The alumni directors feel that there’s a great deal of synergy to be had

for taking alumni where the team is,” Williams said.

Under a contract that the Rose Bowl Committee has with Los Angeles

tourism officials, the teams must stay in Los Angeles.

And although the players are pretty much kept under lock and key during

the week, the one activity they can partake in is the pre-game rally,

Williams said.

“When they have the rally, they like to have the teams and the coaches

come,” she said. “The few times we have had the teams stay here, each

school has only been able to bring down a couple of team players and the

head coach.”

She said several schools have repeated this rationale when turning down

Newport.

“I think until the contract [with Los Angeles] is up, we’re going to have

to rethink our focus,” Williams said.

The visitor’s bureau has tried for the past several years to secure the

lucrative Rose Bowl business.

The last time it worked was in 1997, when alumni from the University of

Michigan descended upon Newport Beach and brought with them loads of cash

that was spent at the area’s hotels, restaurants and shopping malls.

A second potential problem is that all three games this weekend are with

the teams’ archrivals -- emotional contests in which anything can happen,

regardless of point spreads.

Local business owners may want to root for Stanford as it takes on Cal.

Williams said there are guarantees Stanford alumni will stay here, but if

they do, she said the athletic director is considering bringing the

players down from Palo Alto early to stay in Newport for a few days.

However, even if the PAC-10 alumni decide to stay here, it won’t bring in

as much cash as would business from a Big 12 team.

“Because they’re on the West Coast, a lot of their fans are from Southern

California,” Williams said. “But, we’d love to have them.”