GRAMBLING - Back then, even the participants couldn't have imagined how big the Bayou Classic would someday become.
"In 1974, you couldn't see into 2003," said Grambling State coach Doug Williams, a redshirt starting freshman quarterback in the inaugural game. "Playing in the Superdome. Playing for a championship. Playing in front of 75,000. It wasn't like that at that particular time."
Today, the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau reports that 200,000 people will visit the Big Easy for the 30th playing of the big game - representing an economic impact of $85 million.
"We just came along at the right time. I tell you, the Lord was in the plan," said Collie J. Nicholson, Grambling State's original sports information director from 1948-78. The Winnfield native and his wife Ophelia make their home in Shreveport.
"It was timing: Coach (Eddie) Robinson was developing all these players for pro football - and we had a marketing plan," Nicholson said. "We didn't know what it was - they didn't call it marketing, back then - but we had a concept."
The anchor for the weekend remains the football game - a 2003 sellout, as Grambling State and Southern fight to represent the Western Division in the Southwestern Athletic Conference's championship in December.
Neck-and-neck in the current standings, the two schools also have fought to a draw in New Orleans.
Late in Robinson's long tenure at GSU, Southern began to assemble what would be the Bayou Classic's longest win streak, taking eight in a row in the 1990s. Yet, the all-time record stands at 15-14, with SU now just a game ahead.
A match up so evenly matched can only gather more significance.
But the Bayou Classic is more than Xs and Os. In the three decades since its founding, the game has become a magnet for social events - including a legendary Battle of the Bands and Greek Show, a job fair, elaborate formals, a gospel brunch, countless smaller get-togethers and various sponsored business events.
"The key to this whole thing was Collie J. Nicholson," Williams said. "He had a vision. On the weekend it's played on, with Eddie Robinson and all the great coaches at Southern, it became like a family reunion."
Nicholson - also the creative mind behind successful trips by Grambling State to Yankee Stadium, the Astrodome, Soldier Field and Japan - first presented the idea to GSU President Dr. R.W.E. Jones and Robinson in 1972.
The idea grew out of a trip Nicholson took to New Orleans, where "where he and (Buddy) Young (an assistant to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle) participated in exploratory meetings headed by Dave Dixon - an innovative entrepreneur who almost single-handedly ram-rodded construction of the Superdome," said Andrew Harris, then an associate sports information director for Nicholson.
Jones' counterpart at Southern, G. Leon Netterville, is said to have had initial concerns over filling the cavernous 76,000-seat stadium at Tulane - and suggested a game to gauge fan support be held in Shreveport in 1973.
"We didn't think we'd do that many. We thought it might attract about 50,000," Nicholson said.
In retrospect, the administrators shouldn't have worried. The story goes that, in 1971, an estimated 35,000 stood at Grambling to watch these two schools battle.
So, perhaps inevitably, a sold-out game in northwestern Louisiana was followed by another in New Orleans - where 76,753 fans crammed into Tulane Stadium a year later.
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