Holiday Bowl: Hey Culligan Man!

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 22, 1998 / 8:43 PM EDT / CBS Sportsline

Hey, Culligan man, how about a college football game?

The United States Filter Corp. will announce Thursday that it has acquired title sponsorship rights for the Holiday Bowl until 2001 and will dub it the Culligan Holiday Bowl.

Whoever is selected MVP at the Dec. 30 game at Qualcomm Stadium will be called Culligan Man of the Game, a takeoff of the bottled water company's advertising slogan.

Seriously.

"We could have some fun with that," Dick Heckmann, CEO of U.S. Filter, said Wednesday.

U.S. Filter, based in Palm Desert, announced in February an agreement to acquire Culligan Water Technologies Inc. The shareholder vote and closing of the deal was set for June 15.

"The commitment to Southern California is obvious to us," Heckmann said. "We're a Southern California company, born and bred, and it's a Southern California bowl."

After the Cotton Bowl chooses either the Western Athletic Conference champion or the Pac-10 runner-up, the Holiday Bowl gets whichever team is left and matches it against a Big 12 team.

"We really like the bowl and we like the three conferences that are eligible for it," Heckmann said."All the cities in the three conferences are cities where Culligan has a presence. And, we would like to see what we can do about continuing to help increase the stature of the bowl."

Financial terms weren't available. Each team made $1.4 million last year, when Colorado State beat Missouri 35-24.

Plymouth had been the Holiday Bowl's sponsor the last three years.

This is the first major sports sponsorship for either U.S. Filter or Culligan, Heckmann said. U.S. Filter will be a sponsor of the U.S. Senior Open in 1999.

U.S. Filter, which has annual revenue of $3.5 billion, is one of the world's largest manufacturers of water and wastewater treatment systems. Culligan is one of the world's leading manufacturers and distributors of water purification products and services.