USC Football venues - a History

Before moving on to the Little Three, I thought we'd talk a little sports to cleanse the palate. The LA Coliseum and Exposition Park give me a chance to talk about USC Football, UCLA Football, the LA Rams, the LA Chargers, the LA Dodgers, the Olympics...gee what can't I talk about. Also, what exhibitions?

It was a Uni-Watch article that got me thinking on the subject (halfway down). Fifty years ago this weekend, USC played at Cal. Yesterday, USC played at Notre Dame. And both those series' have a lot of history and help explain the USC football phenomenon.

USC in the foreground, with the Coliseum in the background. 

USC has played Cal 97 times. It's a series without a break, but some years they played twice, and both USC and Cal had forfeited a game after the fact. Which makes the math not quite perfect. The series began on October 23rd, 1915.

Cal had been playing football since 1886, USC since 1888. Cal and Stanford both dropped football in 1906, as a response to the "football crisis" debate that was raging in America, and switched to rugby.

Cal and Stanford had actually hoped to get the entire country to come to their senses and stop playing football. They only succeeded in convincing a handful of colleges and high schools in California to do so, including USC from 1911-1913. One result of switching to the "English Game" was gaining rugby contacts in British Columbia and New Zealand. The All Blacks visited twice, plaing Cal, Stanford, and USC.

However, there was great pressure on all three campuses to conform to the notion of college life being lived at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the like. There were some fringe benefits, for instance rugby was being played when USC were nicknamed the Trojans.

Oregon and Washington were playing American football, USC switched back the year before, and Cal was looking to get back in the game; Stanford was resistant. Cal and USC signed a contract to conduct a home and home series in 1915, and so in October, USC students boarded the train to go north and face to California Bruins at California Field on the Berkeley campus.

That is California Field, where Cal and USC played American Football for the first time in the modern era: 1915. You can tell I'm walking a fine line between this being a Berkeley history article and an LA history article. I'm a Cal grad, love love love my alma mater, but I'm trying to keep this to LA history. They just played at Berkeley first : ) 

Anyhow, California Field stood about where Hearst Gym does now (where College st. meets the Cal campus) and sat about 20,000. It was Cal's second stadium, but before Memorial Stadium. And that's where USC's oldest continuous rivalry began (USC first traveled up to NorCal in for a game in 1905 against Stanford, but the teams didn't play American football again until 1918). The Trojans won this game 28-10. 

When Cal traveled down to USC on November 25th, 1915, they played at Washington Park on Washington and Hill St. in Downtown LA.

As you can see, the stadium was built for baseball. The PCL LA Angeles (they'll get an entry soon) played there from 1900-1925. The whole plot of land was built up in 1887 as Chutes Park. It was a Trolley Park, a turn of the century phenomenon where small amusement parks were built at the end of streetcar lines. The amusement park part closed in 1914, the baseball grounds as seen here were put up in 1911 though the Angels played on a smaller field at Washington and Grand from the turn of the century (USC played some big games there too). 

USC had an on campus stadium, but it was really just a practice field. It was often just called "college campus" in the papers, though in 1904 it got temporary bleachers and a name; Bovard Field. Still USC played it's big games off campus, with Washington Park the venue for the Cal game in 1915. USC played three games from 1915-1917 at Washington Park, and lost them all. 

Side note about Washington Park, it was across the street from St. Vincent's College (now Loyola Marymount). 

Things kept changing though, as Cal joined Oregon, Oregon Agricultural College and Washington in the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Conference, which set rules for its members in American football, baseball, track, basketball, and crew. USC must not have liked its trip to Berkeley (or couldn't afford it) as Cal played USC in Los Angeles without a return trip from the Trojans until 1921. Stanford, after reinstating football in 1918, traveled down to USC to finish out their season. 

West coast football was rapidly changing. The Tournament of Roses in Pasadena had been going since 1902 when the organizers invited Stanford and Michigan to play in Tournament Park. At that time, East Coast football was so far ahead of the West than Michigan routed Stanford 49-0. The series was cancelled, and didn't resume until 1916 with Washington State and Brown. The West Coast started winning, and the grounds were built up. USC started playing their big games at Tournament Park in 1918 and one game in 1922 in the newly opened Rose Bowl against Cal with USC lost 12-0.  

The Rose Bowl and Memorial Coliseum were being built at the same time, and with the Rose Bowl finishing first, USC and Cal opened the stadium on October 28, 1922. Not only was this the first game in the Rose Bowl, but USC had been admitted to what now was being called the Pacific Coast Conference, and this was their first conference game. 

USC played in the Rose Bowl again that season. California won the PCC title, and thus the Rose Bowl bid, but declined. As a result, USC was invited to host Penn St. on New Years Day, a game they won 14-3 in front of a crowd of 43, 000. This was also the first ever college football game broadcast on radio in Los Angeles, on radio KHJ which had just launched in 1922. The radio station was owned by the Los Angeles Times. 

The Rose Bowl Game put the California Schools on the map. I mentioned that reinstating American football was a desire to take part in the typical American college life. Well, with increasing crowds, USC, Cal, and the Rose Bowl game all began building stadiums in the model of the Yale Bowl. A large amount of earth is gathered, and then a hole is dug out for the bowl. In the case of USC and the Rose Bowl, when you walk in at street level, there's the dug out bowl, and then there's the upper bowl. Cal is similar, except it was built into a hill such that the East side seats have to walk up a hill to the top of the stadium and then walk down. 

USC played it's first game at Memorial Stadium on Oct 6th. 1923 against Pomona College. Both USC and Cal dedicated their stadiums to those who died during World War 1. You see, while I was blathering about reinstating football, there was a war on!

The area the Coliseum was built on was an agricultural expo until 1910. There used to be a horse racing track where the rose garden is now; when USC started producing influential families they were having none of that gambling nonsense. 

The University of California and it's branches, as a government entity, owns the land it's campus sits on and as a result was able to build a stadium on campus land that the university owns. That's part of the reason why Cal refused to consider alternate sites during the treesitter crisis. USC on the other hand, as a private school sits on annexed Los Angeles land, and it was the city (in conjunction with the county and the state) that built Memorial Stadium. When Los Angeles was awarded the 1932 Olympics, Memorial Stadium was upgraded for that purpose. Stanford was able to annex their campus into their own city. Everyone's different. 

Football was a boom sport in 1920's California. Between 1921-1923, Stanford, Cal, the Rose Bowl Game, and Los Angeles (USC) all opened up large bowl stadiums and would soon attract crowds in the high 70,000s. 

I haven't mentioned UCLA at all. University of California, Southern Branch, didn't play football until 1919. They stuck with small schools like Loyola and Occidental. They played Stanford once in 1925 and lost 82-0. However, they were granted admission to the PCC in 1928, started using Memorial as their home stadium, and started playing USC in 1929. USC had already gotten Notre Dame to come out by train in 1926 to start that annual rivalry. The game was the second highest attended of the year (the NorCal schools still brought a bigger crowd), but the return leg was held at Chicago's Soldier Field and was played in front of 120,000. 

Anyhow, in 1961, USC-Cal (played in Berkeley at Memorial Stadium) looked like this. 

While the series has been lopsided in USC's favor, it's a longstanding pairing that has taken all the California football programs to the heights they're at now (And built all their stadiums in the span of three years).

Of course, by 1961, Memorial Stadium was also hosting the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL (which moved there from Cleveland) and for one year the Los Angeles Chargers of the new AFL. Pro football in  LA is going to have to be another article for another day (since it's minor league history involves another venue : )