How a local promoter launched the Liberty Bowl in Philly, then brought it out of the cold

Much to Bud Dudley’s displeasure, the temperature was 31 degrees, but the Boardwalk was sunbathed that December Saturday in Atlantic City — a lovely day for a stroll. He’d hoped for more customers to pay $10 to wander inside to watch his historic college football bowl game.

“It’s a beautiful day. I knew that would happen,” Dudley told The Inquirer’s Frank Dolson.

Ambrose F. “Bud” Dudley Jr. was a persistent and patriotic Philadelphia sports promoter who’d staged the Liberty Bowl five times at the 100,000-seat horseshoe in South Philadelphia that later was named John F. Kennedy Stadium. By 1963, attendance dwindled to 8,309.

So Dudley decided to move the 1964 Liberty Bowl indoors, to Convention Hall in Atlantic City, home of the Miss America pageant. He’d have only about 10,200 seats to sell, but a full football field could be fitted onto the floor, and ABC paid $95,000 to carry the game.

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Only 6,059 paid to watch Utah rout West Virginia on Dec. 19, 1964, 32-6. But Dudley had made sports history: It was the first indoor college football bowl game. More than a dozen bowl games will be played at indoor stadiums this year, but it was a real novelty 60 years ago.

Dudley, a St. Joseph’s Prep and Notre Dame alumnus who was in the Army Air Corps and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II, tweaked tradition by launching the Liberty Bowl in 1959 in a northern city. There were only nine bowl games that year, and all but the Liberty Bowl were played in warm places like Miami, New Orleans, and Pasadena, Calif.

He’d seen great potential in what then was called Municipal or Philadelphia Stadium. As athletic director at Villanova, he put on five popular games at the stadium known as “grocery bowls,” a ticket promotion with ACME Markets that drew more than 350,000 fans combined.

After he resigned late as AD in 1957 (partially because Villanova wanted to downsize its football program), Dudley cofounded a sports-promotion business and acquired a lease to book events at Municipal Stadium, which largely stood empty except for the Army-Navy Game. The new Walt Whitman Bridge and the possible extension of the Broad Street Line were key factors.

He put auto racing in the stadium, and the first Canadian Football League regular-season game in the U.S. was played there in 1958. Two Sundays before the Eagles’ season opener, 15,110 watched the Hamilton Tiger-Cats beat the Ottawa Rough Riders.

“He’d even promote a bull fight if he could get away with it,” Don Daniels wrote in The Inquirer.

His niece, Suzanne McGowan, a Wyndmoor native who now lives in Narberth, attended many of the events that Dudley staged at the stadium with the extended family, including the auto races, which were, she says now, “not exactly what teenage girls were dreaming about.”

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The Liberty Bowl would be so much more special not just because Dudley had put it together, but, as McGowan says: “It was a statement about patriotism, freedom, and American pride. Halftime at each game was an opportunity to proudly display U.S. allegiance, as each person attending the game was issued a small American flag, and there was a special flag-waving ceremony that was moving and traditional.”

Some 36,211 attended the first Liberty Bowl, a Penn State victory over Alabama on a 43-degree day. But attendance slid below 20,000 for the next three games, and the 1963 game, matching Mississippi State and North Carolina State on a brutal, 22-degree day, was dismal.

“When I wasn’t blocking or tackling or running around, I thought the wind was going to lift me right out of the stadium,” Mississippi State halfback Ode Burrell told The Inquirer.

Besides declaring that “Philadelphia isn’t interested in the Liberty Bowl,” Dudley dropped a hint that day that he might move the game to Convention Hall. This was all about television money, and the facility could become, as it was called, “a 100-yard TV studio.”

Convention Hall, which hosted a yearly series of indoor football games for years, was big enough for a 100-yard field but not for two full end zones, so they were trimmed to eight yards, with goalposts nailed to the stage where Miss America was crowned every year.

The field itself was a horticultural craftwork. Burlap covered the concrete floor, topped by three inches of sassafras soil and Merion bluegrass. To keep the field as green (and telegenic) as possible, the grass was watered and flooded with klieg lights seven hours a day.

“People who grow grass are coming in to see the game from all over,” Dudley told Larry Merchant, the Philadelphia Daily News sports columnist.

(He was not joking. The Houston Astros, who were about to move into the fabulous Astrodome, had commissioned a Brown University professor to scout the indoor field setup. Ray Nagel, the Utah coach, had said, “The field is hard and fast and flat — ideal footing.”)

ABC, taking over the Liberty Bowl telecast from NBC after five years, rigged Convention Hall with lights and cameras, one of which was mounted at the apex of the arched ceiling, providing viewers with “an unprecedented gull’s-eye view of proceedings,” as Red Smith wrote.

All Dudley was left to do was to get enough people without an interest in growing grass to come on in. At this Liberty Bowl, weather wouldn’t be a factor — the temperature inside would be 60 degrees and not windy, conditions for a better show from the players. Plus, Convention Hall offered comfy theater seating, not hard, wood-plank bleachers.

The $10 tickets were an issue: They were not just nearly twice the price as the Liberty Bowls held in Philadelphia, but to that point were the most expensive per-ticket price in bowl history. As a result, actual attendance was about 2,000 or 3,000 smaller than anticipated.

The matchup of Utah and West Virginia was not much help at ticket booths, either. Dudley had really wanted an Eastern team to participate; Penn State, Syracuse and Villanova had played in the first four Liberty Bowls, before the Mississippi State-N. C. State freeze-out.

Penn State won only six games in 1964. Syracuse (7-3) lost to West Virginia (7-3), the Southern Conference champion, but accepted a bid to the warm-weather Sugar Bowl, where it lost to No. 6 LSU before 65,000. Villanova (6-2) lost its last two games narrowly — and then its scheduled regular-season finale at Buffalo was wiped out because of two feet of snow.

When Dudley announced Nov. 23 that West Virginia had accepted an invitation to the bowl, he said Villanova was “very much in contention” among seven teams to be the Mountaineers’ opponent. Two days later, Dudley announced he’d picked Utah (8-2), which won its last six games to become cochampion of the Western Athletic Conference.

“I know it’s going to be different,” West Virginia coach Ray Corum told the Daily News before his team left campus, “but I don’t know what we can do about preparing for it. I guess we’ll just have a little less rough work than usual, that is all.”

The game itself turned out to be kind of a dud, with Utah rolling to a 19-0 halftime lead and a 25-6 lead after three quarters. But the playing conditions were favorable, coaches and players said afterward, and each team reportedly went home with $60,000.

“Artistically and financially, everything went perfect this year,” Dudley said postgame.

Among those who played in the game was Roy Jefferson, a Utah wide receiver who went on to play 12 NFL seasons in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington. Jefferson kicked two field goals before leaving the game with a separated shoulder.

Among those who attended the game was McGowan, then a student at Chestnut Hill College. Dudley’s five living children don’t remember the game: “We were all too young,” his daughter, Jane Sadler, said.

McGowan says: “it was strange walking along the Boardwalk to a football game. I had only been to Atlantic City for the Boardwalk rides and other amusements. My sister [Claire] remembers there was snow on the beach — I only remember it being cold, but it was very warm inside. I do not think it was very crowded, so I guess our seats were very good.”

Dudley planned to hold the 1965 Liberty Bowl again in Atlantic City. Less committed, it seemed, were local business leaders, who’d ponied up a $25,000 guarantee to Dudley for the 1964 game. This time, they offered only a $15,000 guarantee.

That was OK, Dudley said, because, according to the Atlantic City Press, ABC was pledging $100,000 to carry the 1965 game. But he also mentioned that Memphis, Atlanta, and Phoenix were interested in the Liberty Bowl. And Memphis had a new 50,000-seat stadium.

But ABC backed out of its “pledge.” The Atlantic City contingent wanted a bowl game matching two Eastern teams, which would encourage more people to visit the city — but would not be as enticing to a national television audience. They felt like Dudley had kept them hanging.

“He can’t put us in the middle of negotiations and expect us to welcome him here with open arms,” Mike Fiore, the Atlantic City committee chairman, told the Daily News.

The NCAA announced on Oct. 25, 1965, that the Liberty Bowl would be in Memphis. The game would be televised independently (PHL17 in Philadelphia). Ole Miss beat Auburn, 13-7, before 38,607. Between 1997 and 2019, the game drew at least 50,000 each year.

Dudley had thought about moving his bowl around, but he’d stay in Memphis. He died at age 88 in 2008 after an extended illness. In 2005, officials named the press box at the stadium after him. AutoZone picked up primary sponsorship of the game in 2004. Texas Tech is to play Arkansas on Friday at what is now Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium.

“It might as well have been renamed Bud’s Bowl because there wasn’t a part of the operation of the bowl that he wasn’t involved in, from team selection to corporate sponsorships to halftime shows to team hospitality to executing bowl events,” says Ron Higgins, a former Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter who wrote Dudley’s obituary.

“And he did it with a genuine warmth of somebody who had been your friend for decades, even though you may just have met. If you were a repeat team participant in the Liberty Bowl, you knew the hospitality you would receive would be unmatched, because Bud Dudley was in charge.”