Ex-bowl director soon to reveal ‘other opportunity’
Tina Kunzer-Murphy remembers standing on the roof of the Sam Boyd Stadium press box with Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief Rossi Ralenkotter, before one of the early Las Vegas Bowls, when they spotted a solitary car coming up Russell Road.
Mind you, this was long before Bronco Mendenhall's arrival as football coach at Brigham Young, long before a succession of sellouts would transform our afterthought of a bowl game, once called the California Raisin Bowl for cryin' out loud, into an unabashed success.
Long before Kellen Moore and Boise State, long before Brent Musburger and ESPN in prime time. Long before ticket scalpers on Russell Road.
It was getting much too close to kickoff, and Kunzer-Murphy and Ralenkotter had begun to wonder if anybody was coming. So their spirits were lifted upon spotting this solitary motor vehicle on Russell Road.
Perhaps there might even be a minor traffic jam, because back in those days Metro never sent a man to patrol the intersections on Boulder Highway - ingress and egress never were issues at the Las Vegas Bowl.
If enough cars motored up Russell Road, perhaps it wouldn't look so bad when the TV cameras panned the stadium before breaking for a commercial. That's what Kunzer-Murphy was thinking. She saw a solitary car, and it morphed into visions of Hail Mary passes being completed.
Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris were driving down Russell Road. Frenchy Fuqua was in the back seat.
And then the car turned right instead of left.
"It was going to the soccer fields," Kunzer-Murphy said.
She told that story over iced coffee on Friday morning, because it was much too early for a Michelob Ultra.
Two days earlier, she had resigned as executive director of MAACO Bowl Las Vegas, a position she had held since 2001, a couple of years after ESPN Regional, for whom she worked, purchased the game's rights.
When she quit, it came as a bigger surprise than the year Wyoming beat UCLA, even if UCLA's coach had been fired. Again.
Surely, there was more to it than "pursuing other opportunities," which is what a lot of people say when they resign and there is more to it.
I remembered my first newspaper job, when this highly successful high school basketball coach from one of those New Mexico tumbleweed communities said he would be resigning, effective immediately, to pursue other opportunities.
Later, I learned the other opportunity was to run a Texaco filling station on the highway into town. It had been his father's business, and his father was ill.
Tina Kunzer-Murphy is not resigning to operate a Texaco station. She's not sick, she's not dying. That's what David Humm, her fellow Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame inductee, wanted to know when he called after the news got out.
Surely there was more to it. I hammered away for more than two hours at the coffee shop, the way Oregon State's Steven Jackson of Las Vegas hammered away on New Mexico in Las Vegas Bowl XII when he scored five touchdowns.
She said there was nothing more to it, other than the other opportunity she has been pursuing didn't develop as quickly as she thought it might.
When it does, she said, I will understand and David Humm will understand. And Bobby Bowden will understand, too.
As chair of the Football Bowl Association, Kunzer-Murphy traveled to New Orleans in January to present the avuncular Florida State coaching legend with the Champions Award at the Alabama-Louisiana State BCS championship game. As they walked off the field, Bowden asked Kunzer-Murphy to stop a minute, by the tunnel.
He craned his neck and looked all around the stadium, which was reverberating with the passion of college football. Pom-pons were fluttering. Fight songs were being played.
Bowden turned to the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas executive director, a 59-year-old woman, a pioneer in her own right among the men who smoke fat cigars and collect fat paychecks as bowl directors.
"Isn't this something?" Bowden said, a warm smile washing over the lines on his face.
He wanted to take a step back, to soak it all in. Football coaches rarely take a step back to soak it all in.
A couple of weeks later, when Tina Kunzer-Murphy thought ahead to the drastic changes that are coming to college football, and how they will impact the bowl system - and, perhaps, how difficult it's going to be sell out Sam Boyd Stadium now that BYU and Bronco Mendenhall are gone, and Boise State is leaving, and whatever 6-6 team the Pac-12 or 16 or 24 will send simply doesn't have its heart in it as much as she did - it just seemed like the right time to pursue another opportunity.
She thought about Bobby Bowden taking a step back to soak it all in, and of that solitary car headed up Russell Road.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.