Posted on: Saturday, June 4, 2005

Hula Bowl's hopes rest on return to Honolulu

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Hula Bowl will leave Maui after eight years and return to Honolulu for its 60th anniversary game in what might be its last chance to stay in the state of its birth.

The college football all-star game, Hawai'i's longest-running sports attraction, will be played Jan. 21 at Aloha Stadium with a 2 p.m. kickoff.

"We looked at a couple of other places, but the main thing was taking the Hula Bowl out of Hawai'i didn't make sense at this time," said Mark Salmans, the game's president and chief operating officer. "So, we thought we'd give it another go and see if people want to get behind it and want to keep it here."

Plagued by declining attendance, there had been fears the Hula Bowl might immediately follow the lead of the East-West Shrine Game, the nation's oldest all-star football game, which announced in April that it was leaving the San Francisco Bay Area after 80 years for San Antonio. Hula Bowl officials said they had also looked at San Antonio and San Diego.

Salmans said the game had a turnstile attendance of "about 12,000" for its last game — only about half of whom paid full price due to two-for-one sales and giveaways. He said the game, "about broke even."

Salmans said the move was based "mainly on economics. We need a bigger base of people to come to the game. Aloha Stadium is one of the major reasons why it is coming back. If we're going to make it work, we felt like we ought to give it a chance back here."

Salmans said, "If we could get 30,000 in the stands, the first year, I'd be happy."

Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa said: "I don't think it is going to be missed much at all. If they think they can make a go on O'ahu, that's fine by me. They should take every opportunity they can."

The Hula Bowl once was the strongest attraction in the state, regularly drawing crowds above 40,000 at Aloha Stadium. But faced with competition from a lineup that included the Pro Bowl and college football bowl games such as the Aloha Bowl, crowds of less than half of capacity rattled around in 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium.

Lenny and Marcia Klompus believed the game would find a stronger following and look more attractive to television partner ESPN in the smaller 18,000-seat War Memorial Stadium on Maui, where the game moved in 1998.

But after they sold it to former television executive Dick Schaller in 2002 the game began to decline. "Once people get used to something being there all the time, then it (the excitement) just kind of wears off," Salmans said.

"The Klompuses were geniuses when it came to doing things (promotionally)," Arakawa said. "Since then it has not done too well."

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.