In Pasadena, Moving the Rose Bowl Makes For Unusual Rancor

Many people know of genteel Pasadena, Calif., if only from New Year’s Day television, waking up to the palm-tree-lined Rose Parade down Colorado Boulevard, or stirring from a football-watching stupor long enough to admire the Technicolor sunset splashed on the San Gabriel Mountains behind the Rose Bowl stadium.

In recent days, though, the community’s patrician hearts have been roused and the white gloves have come off.

The Rose Bowl Game, a jewel so treasured it has been trademarked, has been hijacked, usurped and taken away with the type of roguish disregard for tradition that might otherwise be witnessed in Pasadena only when a protected flax-leaved paperbark tree is chopped down.

The…