I Do Love the Football

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alabama crimson tide, bear bryant, college football, georgia bulldogs, herschel walker, southern miss, west point lake

For me, Labor Day weekend always means the start of football. Every few years or so, pro football will kick off its regular season on the Sunday before the holiday but, more often than not, Labor Day is exclusively tied to college football. Tomorrow and Sunday will bring an unusually tasty menu of big games between traditional powers: Alabama vs USC, Clemson vs Auburn, Texas vs. Notre Dame. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

My love for college football started when I was 11 years old. That was 1982, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy-winning season, so I naturally became a devoted Georgia Bulldogs fan. Nobody told me at the time that the Bulldogs would not return to the Sugar Bowl for another 20 years after that season. Maybe I would have chosen to root for Alabama if I had been able to peer into the future.

As the years passed, my football obsession grew. On Labor Day weekend of 1984, my father and I were invited to go water skiing on a friend’s boat at West Point Lake. I didn’t want to go. It was the start of college football, and I intended to plop myself on the downstairs couch, eat popcorn and watch games all day. I finally agreed to go to the lake after my dad dug up a tiny little transistor radio so that I could listen to the action of the Georgia-Southern Miss game.

The Bulldogs had a young, inexperienced offense that year, and Southern Miss was pretty good. The game was back-and-forth between the two teams. As we rode in the boat, watching my friend glide in and out of our wake on his slalom ski, I held the radio to my ear and sweated out the final minutes of the 26-19 Georgia win. I remember that the Dawgs’ Kevin Butler (who went on the play for the 1985 Chicago Bears) kicked four field goals in that game. I went home that day sunburned and happy.

Looking back, it probably seemed odd that a 13-year-old boy would prefer to listen to a football game on the radio rather than swim, water-ski and wrestle on the lake’s muddy shore with his friend. Even now I have to shake my head at the number of gorgeous fall afternoons I spent indoors watching football games on TV, regardless of whether the action was SEC, Big Ten, ACC or the NFL. At a time when I was crossing that uncomfortable void between boyhood and adolescence, televised football and other sports were something I could count on every weekend. I might be carrying a D-minus average in Algebra, I might be afraid to talk to the girl sitting in front of me in seventh period, but there was always a chance the Georgia would rise up and beat Auburn on Saturday afternoon (they usually didn’t, though).

Football doesn’t mean as much to me now as it did then, but I still enjoy watching the games, even with all the money, corruption and other negative things swirling around big-time athletics. As the great Alabama coach Bear Bryant once growled, “I do love the football.”

I Can’t Quit You, Mizzou

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college, college football, fifth down game, football, gamecocks, missouri, my life, south carolina, tigers

It was a happy night for Carolina.

Immediately after Missouri’s horrific, deplorable 27-24 loss last night to South Carolina, in which the Tigers blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead, then gave up a touchdown on 4th down and 15, then botched a chip-shot field goal that would have tied the game in overtime, I received a text message from one of my best friends from college.

“I quit,” my friend wrote. “I’m serious. I’m not watching, listening, or caring ever again.”

I wish I could say the same, as last night’s debacle will surely join many other infamous, heartbreaking defeats in Mizzou sports history. Unfortunately, I am hooked on the Tigers permanently, and there’s a part of me that feels strangely proud to have survived so many ridiculously devastating defeats (for a rundown on some of the bigger ones, see my post here from last spring). I imagine that fans of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Browns and other star-crossed sports teams feel much the same way. Even the followers of the victorious South Carolina Gamecocks can relate to our pain – their team has only won one conference football championship in its 100-plus year history.

Being a Mizzou fan is tough. It’s like falling in love with a woman who wears a lot of glitter and knows the name of every bartender in the metro area. It’s fun for a while, but you know she’s going to eventually break your heart.

“I liked it better when we were regularly getting thumped by Iowa State,” my friend went on to text. “At least I didn’t get my hopes up.”

Defeats like the one last night take me back to one of my first experiences with Missouri’s version of Lady Luck. It was the notorious Fifth Down Game of 1990, and I would like to say that I was there in the Faurot Field stands that sunny October afternoon, screaming at the officials. I would like to say that, but the fact is that I chose that weekend to attend a church conference in Overland Park, Kansas, with a group called Campus Crusaders for Christ. Me and my devout friends had taken a couple of cars from the DoubleTree Hotel to dinner that Saturday afternoon. When we arrived at the parking lot of Fuddruckers, two guys got out of the other car and asked if we were listening to the Colorado game.

We huddled around one of the car radios and listened breathlessly as Tiger announcer Bill Wilkerson called the game’s final, frenzied minute. When Colorado quarterback Charles Johnson surged toward the end zone on the last play, Wilkerson screamed, “They stopped him! They stopped him!… Wait! They’re signaling touchdown! No! No! No! No! No!”

If Christian boys had been prone to cussing, there would have been a lot of expletives flying around Overland Park that night. Some of the words might have sounded a lot like “Fuddruckers.” Instead, we sadly filed into the restaurant and lined up for the burger buffet. “Man, if we had won that game, we would have been three-and-two,” one of my friends said. “Can you imagine that? Three-and-two!”

We didn’t know about the fifth down controversy until the next morning (here’s an excellent article about the whole thing from ESPN.com). We drove past Faurot Field on our way back to campus that Sunday afternoon and saw that the stadium had been trashed – both sets of goalposts were torn down. For weeks afterward, Missouri students wore T-shirts defiantly proclaiming Tigers 31, Buffaloes 27, the “real” score of the game. I quit Campus Crusaders later on that fall. Maybe it was because nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Maybe it was because my involvement in the group caused me to miss the most historic sports moment of my college career.

I’m a lot older now, and the games don’t affect me nearly as much. I’m only depressed for about a 24-hour period after one of the Tigers’ signature defeats. Still, as I watched that last field goal attempt sail into the black night and bounce off of the left upright, I jumped up and down and channeled Bill Wilkerson from that Colorado game:

No! No! No! No! No!

A Dawg Fan’s Loss of Innocence

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childhood, civil war, college football, dawgs, football, georgia bulldogs, herschel walker, joe paterno, larry munson, penn state, sugar bowl, william faulkner

William Faulkner once famously wrote that, for every Southern boy, “there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.” He was referring to the Battle of Gettysburg shortly before Pickett’s Charge, when there was still a wisp of hope for the Southern cause. What happened after that was complete disaster but, up until that moment, there was still a chance at victory.

Southern boys of Faulkner’s generation might have still felt a connection to that chivalrous and doomed moment for the South. But for Southern boys my age, that loss of innocence most likely came when their favorite college football came close to lasting glory, but failed.

For me, that moment was the evening of January 1, 1983. The University of Georgia was playing Penn State in the Sugar Bowl for the National Championship. Penn State started out strong, building a 20-3 lead shortly before halftime. But the Bulldogs rallied. With a little more than four minutes to go in the game, Herschel Walker plunged into the end zone to cut Penn State’s lead to 27-23, the last touchdown he would score in his legendary college career. I perched on the edge of our sofa, staring intently at our 20-inch RCA television, willing Penn State to give the ball back. Georgia was going to win the game. All they had to do was force a punt, punch in another score and win the national title for the second time in three years. They had always won in the short time I had been a rabid Dawgs fan. Sometimes it came in miraculous fashion, but Georgia always won. Tonight would be no different. As Faulkner might have put it, “the brigades were in position, the guns were laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags were already loosened…”

At least Sports Illustrated was happy about it.

Herschel never got the ball back. Penn State finally punted with four seconds to go, and the game was over. Joe Paterno, about whom we know so much more today than we did back then, got the victory ride. The Yankees had whupped us again. Less than a month later, Herschel skipped his senior year to play for the USFL, and Bear Bryant was dead. It was a bitter, depressing winter for college football fans in the South.

When you’re a kid and you start paying attention to sports, the tendency is to follow whatever team is having the most success at the time (unless, of course, your parents goad you into rooting for their sad-sack alma mater). For me, the team to follow was Georgia, which had the best player in college football and which lost only four games over a four-year span in the early 1980s. Most of the games weren’t on TV in those days, but Georgia had a brilliant, growling radio announcer named Larry Munson who made every snap vividly intense, and who was at his best when the “Junkyard Dogs” defense had to make a play to seal the win (“Hunker down, you guys,” he once urged them on four straight plays against Auburn. On that day, the Dawgs did exactly that).

The Sugar Bowl against Penn State was one of those awakenings all young sports fans have when they realize their favorite team is not invincible. The next year, there would be an even more painful 13-7 home loss to Auburn, the first defeat between the hedges of Sanford Stadium in more the four years.

Herschel was Superman without the cape (because he didn’t need one).

Georgia would go on to have some good teams and even a couple of great ones, but it would never be quite the same after that. Three decades later, the Dawgs have yet to return to the national championship game. They were one play away last year, almost upsetting Alabama in the final seconds. Maybe this season it will finally happen again. Georgia has another great running back, and lots of experience on both sides of the ball.

At any rate, the start of college football is something I always look forward to this time of year. In October, my own sad-sack alma mater, Missouri, will take on the Dawgs at Sanford Stadium. I’ll root for the Tigers, but a part of me will remember the ghosts of autumn Saturdays past, when the most important thing in my world was the Dawgs hunkering down and finding a way to win.

The Many Trials of a Mizzou Fan

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college basketball, college football, humor, kansas, missouri, mizzou, sports

Nebraska’s infamous (and illegal) kicked-ball play against Missouri.

Four nights ago, the University of Missouri’s basketball team enjoyed a thoroughly impressive 93-63 thumping of its new rival, Arkansas, on the hardwood. The win was big because it came against Missouri’s former coach, Mike Anderson, who left Columbia two years prior in the dead of night without so much as a farewell text to his players.

So it was a nice, score-settling victory, which makes me nervous because it means the Tigers will almost certainly lose their next, even bigger game at Tennessee today. And not just because Tennessee is pretty good and Missouri has struggled on the road this season. It’s because following a big win with a wrenching, heart-gouging loss is what the Tigers do. It is their thing, as certain for Missouri as snow storms in the middle of March.

To paraphrase a famous Star Wars droid, we Missouri fans were made to suffer. It is our lot in life. I got my first taste of this as a college freshman. I was an out-of-state student and mostly unfamiliar with Mizzou’s sports traditions, or lack thereof. The football team at the time was very bad, mired in the middle of 13 straight losing seasons. But the basketball team, led by stars like Doug Smith and Anthony Peeler, was a force. The Tigers beat Kansas twice with the nation’s number one ranking on the line. They seemed primed for their first Final Four appearance when things fell apart. There were late-season losses to Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Colorado (really? Colorado?). Peeler went into a shooting slump and his teammates couldn’t seem to pick up the slack.

Still, there was optimism as my dorm mates and I headed to the basement rec room of Hatch Hall to watch the Tigers take on unheralded Northern Iowa in an early afternoon NCAA tournament game. Two hours later, after the Panthers scored a last-second bucket to upset the 3rd-seeded Tigers, my friends and I trudged to the upstairs cafeteria to eat our lunch in stony silence. It was the last day of school before spring break, but you would have thought that three more months of winter had just set in.

That was a painful indoctrination, to be followed by several other soul-crunching Tiger defeats like the 5th Down Game against Colorado, the 1997 “Flea-Kicker” loss to Nebraska and Tyus Edney’s coast-to-coast drive and shot to beat Missouri in a 1995 March Madness game. There’s nothing I can say about these contests that hasn’t been written a hundred times before. Yes, they sucked. And, yes, I remember them all very well.

Angry Missouri students tear down goalposts after losing 5th Down Game

Those were milestone defeats. But there were smaller, equally bizarre losses in between that also ate away at this Mizzou fan’s cast iron heart. During my senior year in 1992, the Colorado Buffalos returned to Columbia for the first time since they needed five downs to beat the Tigers on the last play of the 1990 game. The ’92 rematch was going to be the biggest football game for Missouri in a generation: national television, a first-ever night game at Faurot Field, free admission for any student who wished to attend… It was a sneak peek at big-time football for Missouri. And maybe that was why a cold front blew in just moments before kickoff and blasted freezing rain on the stadium for the entire game. It was early October, but it felt like the middle of February and most fans had retreated to their cars by halftime. The Tigers put up a fight. Down 6-0 late, they got the ball deep in Buffalo territory. A winning touchdown seemed eminent before the ball slipped from quarterback Phil Johnson’s hands and into the arms of a Colorado defender. “Missouri luck,” a friend muttered to me as we stood shivering in the student section.

Tyrus Edney’s game-winning shot for UCLA

There’s been bad luck, or bad judgment, off the field as well. In 1989, Missouri passed on an opportunity to hire Bill Snyder as its football coach. Snyder went down the road instead and turned Kansas State into a national power. Perhaps making up for that mistake, Missouri hired a different Snyder – Duke assistant Quin Snyder – as its basketball coach in 1999. It chose him over a young Tulsa coach named Bill Self, who would go on to lead Kansas to a national championship and enjoy many, many lopsided wins over the Tigers along the way. Missouri luck.

Despite this inglorious history, I remain a proud Mizzou fan. After all, it’s where I went to school and formed some of my closest friendships. And, while the Tigers haven’t loaded up their trophy case with conference championships over the years, they are competitive in both football and basketball, which keeps things interesting from September through March. I sometimes feel sorry for Kansas or Kentucky fans, who usually have nothing to cheer about until Midnight Madness. And don’t they get a little bored with all that basketball success, all those McDonald’s All-Americans churning out championship after championship? Wouldn’t that get a little dull? I’m asking the question because I have no idea if it would or not. That level of sports greatness would be as foreign to me as a day trip to Jupiter.

Also, suffering through Missouri’s pain means that success, when it comes, is especially surprising and sweet. I’ll never forget the football Tigers beating Kansas at Arrowhead Stadium in 2007 and getting the nation’s number one ranking. For a week. There was another great football win over Oklahoma in 2010 – followed by a dispiriting loss to Nebraska. And last year’s basketball season was nothing short of glorious. The Tigers went 30-5 and won their last three Big 12 games to win the conference tournament championship before a noisy, partisan crowd in Kansas City.

There have been a few good sports moments for Ol’ Mizzou.

Of course, they followed that up with a shocking loss to Norfolk State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. But by now, I should have seen that coming. It is my lot in life as a Tigers fan, always waiting for that other boot to come crashing down.