From 1994, Arlo & Janis gets serious. Well, not really. Or not. Really. Yesterday, I tuned in to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, and it stirred an old memory from my boyhood. It was a bit surreal. I wasn’t sure memory was serving me well, so I looked it up online, and there it was confirmed. The 1964 Liberty Bowl, featuring the Utah Utes and the West Virginia Mountaineers (one of the teams in the 2014 version), was played in Atlantic City. Indoors. So what, you ask? I’m glad you did. This was before the era of domed stadiums. The Astrodome had not yet opened. This was the first indoor college football game ever. It was played in the Atlantic City Convention Hall, a cavernous building that had hosted, among other things, a national political convention, but it was not a sports stadium. Four-inch-thick sod was brought in to build the playing surface over a concrete floor, and the end zones were shortened from the regulation 10 yards to eight. And I remembered watching that on TV. I guess it would make an impression on a young sports fan. Utah won, 32-6. The next year, the bowl moved to Memphis, where it has remained. You could look it up.
