Camping World Stadium: Orlando's Field of a Thousand Names
Near Orlando, Florida
The stadium you're passing has carried more names than most politicians and outlasted a dozen sponsorship deals. It opened in nineteen thirty-six as plain old Orlando Stadium, built by the Works Progress Administration for a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars at a time when Central Florida was still more cattle range than tourist mecca.
For decades the name kept changing. It became the Tangerine Bowl in the nineteen forties, reflecting the citrus economy that defined this corner of Florida. In the early eighties it rebranded to the Florida Citrus Bowl as orange juice money poured into Central Florida marketing. By the time the naming rights era hit, corporate sponsors would cycle through roughly every decade, producing names like the Capital One Bowl for the game played here, and, for the stadium itself, Camping World Stadium in twenty sixteen.
But the stadium's real legacy is the bowl game it has hosted for nearly eighty years. What started as the Tangerine Bowl in nineteen forty-seven became one of college football's premier New Year's Day destinations. The game rotated through different conference tie-ins and television deals, always drawing a top-tier matchup and a sellout crowd under Florida's January sun.
The stadium also made history as one of the venues for the nineteen ninety-six Olympic Games, hosting men's and women's soccer matches that summer. Boxing matches, motor sports events, and the occasional concert have also filled the seats over nine decades.
Five major expansions have reshaped the stadium, which seats roughly sixty thousand today. The most recent renovation, completed just before the two thousand sixteen NFL Pro Bowl was held here, added new seating sections, improved sight lines, and gave the exterior a contemporary look while keeping the footprint planted in the same West Colonial Drive neighborhood where WPA workers first broke ground ninety years ago.
Whatever the next naming-rights check calls it, this is still the old Tangerine Bowl at heart.
