READERS and sports fans from all over Southern California have responded with praise for our two-part series by Staff Writer Gabe Lacques on the thorny issues facing the Rose Bowl that ran in Sunday's and Monday's papers.

"Venerable" is the adjective usually trotted out when describing the stadium, and being venerable is the Rose Bowl's blessing and its curse.

Seventy-eight years is not ancient on the scale of the Roman Colosseum, which is still more or less extant after millennia.

But in the fickle modern world, it's a very long time indeed. As the series noted, venues less than half its age, such as Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, have been raised and then razed while the old place, home to the Granddaddy of All Bowl Games, soldiers on.

But since its conception by William Leishman in the early 1920s; its design, modeled on the Yale Bowl, by Myron Hunt; its naming, instantly coined by a Pasadena Star-News sports writer, on first opening, the Rose Bowl has constantly been home to much more than the most hallowed college football game of the year.

Arroyo Seco-area neighbors know that better than most anyone else. The traffic carrying up to 90,000 fans would be hard to miss anywhere. And since the canyon near Pasadena's western border is not only a place of great natural beauty but nature's most perfect bottleneck, the traffic can go on all day.

Sometimes, through the smoke of nostalgia, Southern Californians think that only in yesteryear was the Rose Bowl used more often than each New Year's Day.

Reader Doug Noble, who has left the area and sees the paper on our Web site, writes: "I was born in Pasadena in 1938 and spent the first two decades of my life there. There was something always going on at the Rose Bowl. PJC, and then PCC, played their home games there, along with CIT. I graduated at the Rose Bowl three times: McKinley Jr. High, PHS and PCC. I cut school to go to the circus in the Rose Bowl parking lot and sat with my ears covered during numerous Fourth of July fireworks shows at the Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl IS Pasadena. Don't give in to the complainers."

Loud as some of the naysayers can be, the fact is that "the complainers" -- at least those who would severely restrict stadium usage -- have long ago lost the battle and the war.

Even when a 1980s City Council passed a law limiting use to 12 "major" events a year, the ordinance was never once adhered to, as the council left loopholes.

The hugely popular monthly swap meet. Super Bowls galore. Both men's and women's World Cup finals, along with the Olympics. The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. The annual Muir-PHS Turkey Tussle. UCLA Bruins home games. MLS soccer from the Galaxy. And those Fourth of July fireworks get better every year.

The fact is, the Rose Bowl continues to have an incredible variety of uses in every season. Far from seeing it as a white elephant, Pasadenans recognize the value of their treasure and have recently shouldered the burden of $34 million in bonds to build luxury boxes, new press facilities and new seats. Even if some debt is sometimes forgiven; if Brookside Golf Course greens fees have to go to the stadium instead of elsewhere in the arroyo parks; if the stadium no longer is expected to contribute to the city's General Fund, Pasadenans know that their stadium is of incalculable value to their city and to Southern California.

In order to continue that value, the Rose Bowl must be properly maintained. Never can it become a joke, a place where the toilets flood, employing a staff of two, as the Orange Bowl in South Florida has.

At the same time, the kind of money advocates for a National Football League team here claim would be needed to give the stadium a real face lift -- $200 to $300 million -- is money that doesn't exist, and that shouldn't be raised or spent. It could never be repaid.

The gently sloping bowl of old is precisely the kind of place in which the contemporary NFL doesn't want to see its 21st-century gladiators do battle. It wants compact stadia where every seat and skybox seem to hang above the field. The Rose Bowl can never be that.

What it can be is an even better version of what it is: a living historical monument where even 'N Sync is eager to play; a resource for the world and the nation as well as its city and neighborhood; a publicly owned stadium run by an entrepreneurial board charged with making the most of the beloved Rose Bowl.

-- Both its closest neighbors, who have been well-served by City Hall and police efforts to mitigate noise and traffic impacts, and the fans who love to fill it can happily live with that.

Rose Bowl - Thorny Issues  |  Pasadena could learn from Orange Bowl  |  Rosy world of politics