He is a fantastic guy, Italian-American, and works, natch, for an Italian import business. I always see him on Wednesdays, and we always talk way more about sports than we do about wine. Just a couple of days ago we talked about baseball rumors: He'd heard the A's (he is a massive A's fan) were interested in unloading Gio Gonzalez to the Red Sox for prospects. (Which would be an absolute travesty, and I believe, really bring out the torches and pitchforks up here in beautiful Oaktown.) And I had heard that the Rangers were interested in acquiring A's free-agent, Josh Willingham. (Which is a brill move, cause then we could trade Murphy for bullpen help, yada yada yada.) We also talked about the Paterno situation and we were in complete agreement about that whole thing.
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| One of the greatest Option Quarterbacks of all-time, Steve Davis. |
Anyhoo, a few years ago, when Julian and I were talking about sports we were talking about Tedford, Cal football, the stadium upgrade, the protesters in the trees, and Big Time College Football. Julian might have thought I had some unusual things to say about all that, espec me being such a huge Sooner fan, and all. But I feel even stronger today re my feelings towards Big Time College Football (and athletics.)
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My first true Sports Love (and the one I will prob never be able to kick) is Oklahoma Sooners football. I did not really have a choice in the matter, as at the time, the Sooners lived right across the street from me, literally. My most vivid early childhood memories are of me living on Jenkins Street, with Owen Field (where the Sooners play) right across the street. I lived in the shadow of the stadium. We used to sell parking spaces in our front yard. ($1! In the early seventies!) There is even, extant, although I cannot produce it for you at this moment, a photograph of me, a four or five year old child, holding up a sign that covers my entire body, revealing just my tiny blonde head, that says, "Parking $1".
My Mum and I moved a few years later. We were still in Norman, though. And that is when I first have memories of attending Sooner football games. That would be 1975, which was a magical year for the Sooners, culminating in their fifth National Title with a 14-6 victory over Michigan on New Year's Day, 1976. I saw that game on the teevee with my Grandma in Tulsa.
Above are some highlights from that game. (One of the best College Football names ever was playing for the Sooners, Elvis Peacock. And that is 'Niners great, Dwight Hicks getting beat by Tinker Owens on the long pass.)
I saw many Sooners home games that season. I saw them destroy the Oregon Ducks 62-7, and the next week, the Big Deal was Tony Dorsett was coming to town with his Pittsburgh Panthers. This is what we did to him: (The Sooners won 46-10.)
I listened to a good portion of the Sooners win over Miami (FL) at a Mexican restaurant in Norman with my folks. I also remember that people in Norman were grumbling that the game had been too close a contest (this was nearly ten years before the Hurricanes were good.) The Sooners were home the next week but I did not attend. I listened to the game on the radio in the front room of the v tiny house Mum and I lived in on Findlay St. It was a nail-biter that included some Sooner Magic (Luck.):
Next up for the Sooners was No. 19 Colorado, who brought a 3-0 record and the nation's No. 1 offense to Norman. The vaunted Sooner wishbone offense looked abysmal against the Buffaloes, and Oklahoma surrendered a 14-point lead in the second half. Colorado closed the gap to one point with just over a minute remaining in the contest on an eight-yard touchdown pass. And even though kicker Tom Mackenzie had missed two field goals earlier in the game, CU coach Bill Mallory opted not to go for the win with a two-point conversion. Mackenzie's game-tying attempt sailed wide again, and the Sooners held on for the 21-20 victory, though they were overtaken by Ohio State in the polls.
(h/t to soonersports.com for the recap.)
Texas was next. I was with my Grandparents at the Lake House my Gramps was building all by himself. There was no electricity to the main part of the house yet, so Grandma and I listened to the game on a transistor radio. The Sooners won 24-17.
For whatever reason I have no memory of the next three games, all victories. One of those games was at home versus the Cyclones of Iowa State, and it is entirely possible I was there (or not).
The next memory I have from that season was the debacle against Kansas. That was a home game and I could have attended that game and I desperately wanted to be there but my folks would not go. I spent that day at my "other", father's side, great-grandparent's house in Mustang, OK. I heard the whole fiasco unfold from a radio in one of the guest bedrooms, by myself. I do not remember crying but I probably did. The Sooners were booed off their field after losing 23-3. (More on this later.)
I do remember crying and carrying on for hours with my poor Mother, back in Norman, a couple of days after the loss to the Jayhawks, when I learned that the Sooners had fallen to #6 in the AP Poll. My Mother is a Saint. (Thanks, Mum, for putting up with all my "stuff".)
The next week real Sooner Magic happened up in Columbia, MO. I listened to the game on the radio in front room on Findlay St. And heard the immortal "Go Joe!" call just as you will hear here in the video below:
I remember jumping up and down ecstatically, so thrilled. Even at seven years old, I knew the Sooners' season was saved.
Next up was Nebraska. And we went to that game. My most clearest memory of that game was a punt return fumble by the Cornhuskers. (Which can be seen in the video below.) The 'Huskers turned the ball over six times that game and were routed by the Sooners, 35-10.
(I also remember being scared shitless, I was seven years old, mind you, by Herbie Husker, the Nebraska mascot. He is in the video, as well. Ugh, I still get shivers looking at that guy. They have softened him up enormously over the years.)
Still, if the Sooners were to be the first team to win back to back National Titles twice, the Sooners won the Title in 1955 and 1956, part of their still unbroken record of forty-seven straight wins (that is a whole other story, best recalled in Jim Dent's v fine book, The Undefeated,) they would need help on New Year's Day, 1976.
They got it. I watched the Rose Bowl with Grandma in Tulsa.
UCLA beat Archie Griffin, Woody Hayes, and Ohio St, 23-10, in what was to be Hayes' last appearance at the Rose Bowl.
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I am generally reluctant to provide links to newspapers and magazines because I am an old-school tree killer, who believes that great newspapers and magazines should be bought and read every day. It will be a v sad day when the print media goes completely digital, a day this Luddite will forever mourn.
But, this excellent article by Taylor Branch (if a bit lawyerly written) in the October 2011 The Atlantic magazine deserves to be read in full. I will talk about the gist of the lengthy essay, and may even provide some quotes, but if you are a serious fan of Big Time College Football, it is an absolute must-read from beginning to end.
Here is the article.
I had forgotten (or, perhaps, never realized) that it was my v own beloved Sooners (and Georgia Bulldogs) that responded to the NCAA's threat of sanctions against the sixty-one Big Time Football schools that wanted to negotiate their own television contracts without the NCAA receiving and "sharing" the money as they saw fit, with an antitrust suit.
You love watching the Big 10 Network, the Longhorn Network, or over seventy-five college football games every weekend? Well, you can thank the Oklahoma Sooners. Because, although the Longhorns (and other schools) talked tough, and prob sent some v sternly worded letters to the NCAA, it was the Supreme Court decision re NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1984 that made all that possible.
Believe me, I do not necessarily believe, ultimately, that that was the right decision in the best interests of college athletics, or our nation's culture, in general. But the Supreme Court ruled correctly, despite its' possible effects on the future.
The sting the NCAA felt from the Regents decision was alleviated by the then burgeoning March Madness bonanza monster that now is the only real source of revenue the NCAA can claim. Still, after losing to the Sooners in court, the NCAA expanded their rule book exponentially, adding some of the absolutely idiotic rules that make feature headlines, or material for late-night comedians, i.e.,
NCAA officials have tried to assert their dominion—and distract attention from the larger issues—by chasing frantically after petty violations. Tom McMillen, a former member of the Knight Commission who was an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, likens these officials to traffic cops in a speed trap, who could flag down almost any passing motorist for prosecution in kangaroo court under a “maze of picayune rules.” The publicized cases have become convoluted soap operas. At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.
Despite a Nation (and a sitting President) clamoring for a National College Football Playoff, it will not happen until a group of Universities, with one of them like the Sooners, willing to put their name on a lawsuit; or an act of Congress, before we see a March Madness-stylee Football Playoff.
Because that would be the first domino. Then, it is likely possible that the NCAA would lose March Madness, too.
But the colleges are so cowed and frightened of the consequences of a revolt that they stick by their ludicrous and vastly unpopular BCS system.
(Personally, I would rather they just go back to the old system, letting the AP vote for the National Champion, with the Major Conferences returning to their past Bowl tie-ins.)
More from Mr Branch,
Thus the playoff dreamed of and hankered for by millions of football fans haunts the NCAA. “There will be some kind of playoff in college football, and it will not be run by the NCAA,” says Todd Turner, a former athletic director in four conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, and Pac-10). “If I’m at the NCAA, I have to worry that the playoff group can get basketball to break away, too.”
This danger helps explain why the NCAA steps gingerly in enforcements against powerful colleges. To alienate member colleges would be to jeopardize its own existence. Long gone are television bans and the “death penalty” sentences (commanding season-long shutdowns of offending teams) once meted out to Kentucky (1952), Southwestern Louisiana (1973), and Southern Methodist University (1987). Institutions receive mostly symbolic slaps nowadays. Real punishments fall heavily on players and on scapegoats like literacy tutors.
A deeper reason explains why, in its predicament, the NCAA has no recourse to any principle or law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing. Scholars and sportswriters yearn for grand juries to ferret out every forbidden bauble that reaches a college athlete, but the NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else? No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature—a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.
The NCAA needs to be blown up for good. Its' legal term of art, its' sacred fall back position in every case, the "student athlete", needs to be exposed for having no honest legal status. The capricious and self-serving judgements it metes out against Universities, players, faculty, etc, ... (Just look back to last season, the whole Cam Newton debacle) should be ignored or rendered toothless.
And, we as a Nation of fans, graduates, students, citizens need to take a very long look in the mirror ourselves, and ask, "Are the way things now, and, yet, to only get worse, really in the best interests of the Universities, athletes, students, and common welfare of our Nation as a whole?" (Remember, this is coming from about the most die-hard Sooner football fan there is.)
Does anyone really believe that the Penn St scandal was swept under the rug because Paterno built a library?
One voice of sanity amidst a mob:
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My parents moved to the Bay Area a couple of years before I did. They have since moved hither and yon, traversing two continents, (and v smartly) spending near the whole Bush 43 Administration, living in Switzerland. I am still here.
Still living in Austin at the time, I went to spend Xmas and New Year's with my parents in Berkeley.
On New Year's Eve I listened to the Cal Bears play the Wyoming Cowboys in the Copper Bowl on the radio.
It was the first Bowl Appearance for Cal since 1979. The Bears finished the 1990 season with seven wins, four losses, and a draw, one of those victories a narrow win over Wyoming. Being a fanatical Sooner supporter, I cannot tell you how surprised I was listening to the post game interviews with players and coaches. Those kids were filled with such joy and humility. The Cal radio folks were legitimately proud of the team, the University, and the city of Berkeley. Growing up in Oklahoma, following the Sooners, this was something new and different I was experiencing, where the University's priorities were not completely out of synch re athletics and higher learning. It was, in a word, refreshing.
I can bloody well tell you, that when the Sooners (or Longhorns or USC or Notre Dame) finish a season with four losses and a narrow win in a v modest Bowl there is no joy in the locker room like that. As soon as the mics are turned off, the radio folks are most likely debating if the Head Coach or Athletic Director should be canned. Or how many coordinators will be let go.
And this college football junkie went right back to his junk the following night and watched with great relish, Notre Dame lose to Colorado in the Orange Bowl:
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And, finally, that is what I expressed to Julian a few years ago. Did Cal, under Jeff Tedford really want to become a Big Time College Football Institution? Did they really want to ruin their v pretty, modest little stadium, nestled in the Berkeley hills? Did they really want their campus overrun by unscrupulous boosters and predatory agents? Did they really want to slip in to bed with Corporations like Nike (who have retained their deal with Penn St, despite the recent scandal)? Did they truly want to become so competitive with schools like USC that players would be tempted to use steroids, hoping it could land them jobs in the NFL? Would they be willing to demolish regional rivalries, switching Conferences at a whim, in pursuit of Teevee Lucre? Did they want to establish, "A University the football team can be proud of"? (That is a very famous quote from OU President, George Lynn Cross, to the Oklahoma State Senate, but it applies to nearly all the Big Time College Football Schools.)
I might not have a choice. I will probably be a Sooner/Big Time College Football junkie the rest of my life.
And this is what Sooner junkies all too often look like: (The following quote is from Barry Switzer's book, Bootlegger's Boy, regarding that loss to Kansas in 1975 that I spoke of earlier.)
I was standing beside Steve Davis late in the game, and we heard the boos starting.
Here was a kid who had quarterbacked at Oklahoma for three years and had never been beaten in twenty-nine games, and now some of the home fans were booing him.
The clock was ticking down and it was inevitable that we were going to lose the ball game by twenty damn points, and nobody in the world hurt worse than Steve did. It was hard to believe that our fans would boo the whole bunch of us, who had had such success.
I put my arm around Steve on the sideline and told him, "These people we hear are really insignificant. We can't let them influence us or anything we have to do. These people are just molecules in the universe."
Ardent Henry
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