In 1964, Vic Fusia was head coach of the UMass Redmen football team. Playing the best season in the program’s history, the team was invited to compete in a first-ever postseason game at the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida.
“Everyone on campus was pretty excited,” remembers Rick Cooper ’69, “even people like me who were not normally big sports fans.”
Tangerine trees were sold on campus to raise money for the trip and to generate excitement for the bowl game. Packaged inside a plastic bag inserted into a cardboard sleeve, the “tree” was no bigger than a twig, approximately four or five inches long and about as thick as a piece of string, according to Cooper.
Cooper’s mom planted his tree in a small container and, over the years, transplanted it to bigger and bigger containers as it grew. “It lived in at least five houses; two in Woburn and three more in Florida after 1976.” Sometime after 1985 it found a permanent place in his parents’ yard in Sarasota, Florida.
Despite the fact that the team lost against East Carolina, (albeit by a narrow margin: 14-13) the memory of that time lives on in the elder Coopers’ household.
In the picture above, Rick stands proudly with his full-grown tangerine tree. “My folks recently put their house up for sale and will finally have to leave the tree behind. If some UMass grad is looking for a house in the Sarasota area, we have one with a special tree!”
