Group bidding to return bowl game to Hawai'i

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Writer

A Mainland group has submitted an application to bring a post-season college football bowl game back to Aloha Stadium, officials said yesterday.

Global Event Management (GEM) said it has applied to the NCAA for certification of a Christmas Day game. The drive to return a Dec. 25 game came as the NCAA withdrew certification from the former Aloha Bowl, which was to have moved to San Francisco.

Ken Hoffman, executive director of the Motor City Bowl in Pontiac, Mich. and head of the GEM group, said paper work was completed last month for a new bowl. He said GEM is awaiting word from the NCAA's Football Certification Subcommittee whether it will be invited to make a presentation.

Presentations, if invited, are usually heard in January and approved or denied in April.

Hoffman said the group would like to hold its game in December 2002, but might have to target 2003 unless the NCAA agrees to waive the two-year moratorium that runs through 2002. Hoffman said he believes a 3 p.m. kickoff and resulting 8 p.m. Eastern slot would appeal both to a local audience and to a television network.

Aloha Stadium, which has played host to at least one bowl game since 1982, was left without a game when Aloha Sports Inc. pulled both the Aloha and O'ahu bowls this spring. Aloha Sports Inc. had purchased the games from Bowl Games Hawai'i on March 30, 2000.

The former O'ahu Bowl has been moved to Seattle as the Dec. 27 Seattle Bowl. But the former Aloha Bowl, which had an 18-year run in Honolulu and was scheduled to move to San Francisco's Pac Bell Park, lost its certification.

Operators of the game had shopped it to San Francisco, Anaheim and Columbia, S.C., before ultimately settling on San Francisco again.

Jane Jankowski, NCAA assistant director for public relations, said the certification recently was withdrawn. She said several changes were made from the original proposal approved by the NCAA and "the committee felt more work was needed," before it could certify the new plans.

"After putting heart and soul into it 24/7/365 from its birth, I'm sorry to see it buried," said Lenny Klompus of Bowl Games of Hawai'i. "Hopefully, there is a way that Hawai'i will once again be the host venue for two college teams as it was during our tenure."

University of Hawai'i football coach June Jones said he was "disappointed" to see the game end. "It would have been nice to have kept it here. We would have sold a lot of tickets if we had been playing in it, that's for sure."

Jankowski said the committee told Aloha Sports Inc. it "can resubmit" an application next spring. Officials of Aloha Sports Inc. were not immediately available for comment.