Bowling them over: Orange Bowl Executive Director Keith Tribble smashes sales records and the color line - first African American head of a major post-season college football game

Black Enterprise, July, 1994 by Cornelius F. Foote, Jr.

By the time Keith R. Tribble celebrated his first anniversary as executive director of the Orange Bowl Committee last month, he had already scored the biggest accomplishment of his career--six months earlier. But the excitement and satisfaction Tribble gained from that success--achieved in the running of his first Orange Bowl Festival held in Miami last New Year's Day--still echoes through everything he does. And no wonder.

The 60th Annual Orange Bowl boasted the nation's top two teams, Florida State University and the University of Nebraska. When the four-hour sellout battle was over, Florida State's Seminoles had won their first national championship, the Orange Bowl attendance record had been smashed and the televised game had delivered NBC top bowl ratings of 17.8 with a 31 share, outdoing the Rose, Cotton and Sugar Bowls and making Federal Express, its title sponsor for the fifth consecutive year, very happy indeed.

Furthermore, more corporate sponsorships were sold than in any other year, enabling the championship schools to split the largest payout in Orange Bowl History: $8.6 million. Keith Tribble was at the root of all the planning, sales, marketing and management that drove those dollars.

At 38, Tribble is the first African-American to head a major bowl. Since his appointment, the Sugar Bowl has also hired a black director, Troy Matthews. Tribble snagged the Orange Bowl post in 1993, leaving a job as senior associate athletic director at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to return to his native South Florida. His charge: to ensure that the nation's second-most prestigious bowl (the Rose Bowl is first) is exciting, memorable and, most important, profitable for the schools and community programs that benefit from its proceeds.

This is certainly not Tribble's first foray into bowl management. A former University of Florida football player who--save for a few gray hairs--still looks the part, Tribble helped form Sunshine Festival Football Inc., in Ft. Lauderdale, in 1990. As executive director there, he inaugurated the Blockbuster Bowl, coordinating all sales, operations, marketing and media relations efforts as well as managing all pre- and post-game events. With a Florida State vs. Penn State calling card, Blockbuster marked the only time in bowl history that a first year bowl game sold out (74,000 seats). It also generated $1.6 million for each team, the largest payout for an initial bowl ever, notes Tribble.

That experience, along with an impressive 15-year background in sales, marketing and college athletic program management, sealed his coveted offer to become one of only five major college bowl directors in the United States at a salary of around $100,000.

Tribble's public relations degree and extensive South Florida ties didn't hurt, either. Nor did his being black. After years of being viewed as an exclusive event that catered to the interests of tourists and the wealthy white community, the not-for-profit Orange Bowl Committee launched several diversity initiatives in 1993 in hopes of becoming more in touch with and responsive to the needs of Miami's predominantly black and Hispanic residents. These initiatives include fresh involvement on local school boards--providing scholarships locally and through the United Negro College Fund--and expanding the committee's reach beyond Dade County into Broward and Palm Beach.

Interestingly, Tribble's appointment came just months after some of Miami's black political and business leaders led a boycott of local conventions after the city snubbed Nelson Mandela. By contrast, local black businesses such as Urban Organization Inc., No. 87 on the BE INDUSTRIAL/ SERVICE 100, and Worldwide Printing supported this year's Orange Bowl with sponsorships. For the first time, Worldwide was a vendor for the bowl, as was C & C Information, another local black firm.

Tribble says he wants to see more such relationships. He is also working to build on the success he achieved with the '94 bowl. Making his job tougher is the fact that his competition--often profit-making entities, such as Miami's popular professional sports franchises--has deeper pockets and glitzier packages to entice corporations.

Still, Tribble makes the most of what he has to work with. In '94 at least, that yielded more for the Federal Express Orange Bowl than ever before.