TACKLING
CANCER Sports and Medicine Team Up for The Cure Bowl By Meaghan Branham
On the third Saturday every December since 2015, about 20,000 people file into the stands of Camping World Stadium for a college football game that might be easy to mistake for any other — if it weren’t for one bright pastel exception.
Here, the sea of sports fans is united by a vibrant pink, replacing what otherwise might be a crowd divided by the colors of team or sponsor allegiances. This is the AutoNation Cure Bowl, and the name says it all. This National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) game between teams from the American Athletic Conference and the Sunbelt Conference puts finding a cure for breast cancer first. The game’s history dates back to 2007, when the board of directors for the nonprofit Orlando Sports Foundation first came together to host a college bowl match-up in Orlando. Senior Director Alan Gooch and his peers wanted to be sure their bowl would bring something lasting and meaningful to the community they all loved so much. It all started when Dave Brown of ESPN called former University of Central Florida Athletic Director Keith Tribble, who had previously served as CEO of the Orange Bowl, about adding another bowl
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game to the Orlando market. One thing led to another, and former UCF football coach Alan Gooch was brought into the conversation. At an exploratory meeting, John Rhodes suggested he would like a new bowl game to raise money for breast cancer awareness. His sister, Laura Goldstein, had been diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. Gooch had entered the meeting unconvinced of a need for a third college bowl game in Orlando. Today, he looks back at how this sobering news, and the words of other women in similar fights, sparked the moment of conviction about how the bowl would be handled — and how it would help. “There were five women at the meeting with Laura, all with bandanas on their heads,” Gooch said. “I quickly learned that all five women were in the middle of undergoing chemo and fighting for their lives. They came up to me and we began talking.
