PR Sports

Jim Garshow, who calls Skyline football games for 980 AM, has broadcasted every Emotion Bowl since 1976, and a few off-and-on before that.

He sat down with Post Register sports writer Michael Lycklama to look back at the 42-year history and to provide a few little-known, or forgotten, moments.

Live animals are nothing new to this game.

It’s a wonder Skyline didn’t retaliate by bringing in a grizzly after Idaho Falls smuggled in a live Bengal tiger on three leashes on to its sideline for the 1977 Emotion Bowl, which Idaho Falls won 10-0. Garshow remembers it as the best game of the series.

“How they got the damn tiger in there, I’ll never know,” Garshow said.

Idaho Falls coach Chuck Johnson, a ‘77 graduate of Idaho Falls, explains:

“There was a guy in Roberts who had exotic animals. When I was a junior, it was just a cub. But when I was a senior, it was a 1-year-old Bengal tiger and he was huge. He was on the sideline chewing up some teddy bears.”

Crowd control doesn’t always work

After the fans tore down the goal posts one year, the administration said, “That’s enough. We can’t have this anymore,” and told all students there would be a K-9 unit on the field to keep them from doing that again.

Once the game ended, the fans stormed the field and started jerking and pulling on the goalposts. The police officer approached the fans and the dog was barking and its ears were pinned back until it got up to the crowd.

Then it just turned around and looked at the cop like, “What do you expect me to do? Bite them all.” Just then, a kid turned around and petted the dog and his tail started wagging. The cop said “Enough of this” and just turned around.

“That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen,” Garshow said.

Pranks have changed the outcome of games

One year, a female student approached Skyline’s star middle linebacker before the game and told him another girl wanted to ask him out, handed him a milkshake and told him her name was at the bottom of the cup. He drank the shake and not long after he disappeared during the first quarter. He came in and out of the game, but he eventually had to sit out. I.F. fans had laced the milkshake with laxatives and he had to keep running back to the bathroom.

The term “Emotion Bowl” wasn’t coined until 1979

Up until 1979, the game had been known as the Upset Bowl because the underdog won every year. Except for 1978, when Garshow called it the Pneumonia Bowl because of a blizzard that hit the game.

Garshaw and a Post Register reporter on a whim referred to it as the Emotion Bowl in 1979, and the name has stuck ever since.

“We came up with the Emotion Bowl jokingly, but I started using it on the air and he started using it in the Post Register,” Garshow said. “Nobody ever bothered to change it and I didn’t know it was all that great of a thing, but there is so much emotion involved.”

Skyline didn’t have its own building when the rivalry started

The two schools split in 1966, but there was a problem. Skyline High School wasn’t built. The two decided to divide the school anyway for split sessions and divide teams.

“Skyline got the scraps as far as players were concerned,” Garshow said. “But when they played the football game, Skyline won.”

In 1967, both teams needed an extra game so the two faced off at the start of the year in addition to the traditional end-of-the-year matchup. Skyline won the first game and “that really made it hostile and they played at the end of the year — and Skyline is the underdog again — won for a third time.”

Thus, a rivalry was born.