It is a pleasant evening on my patio tonight, as the setting sun casts shadows through the sycamore’s canopy onto my Bermuda backyard where two squirrels chase each other from one end to the other.
All that sounds good. A nice fall weekend ahead here in Norman, Oklahoma.
Except every year on this evening, for the past 30 years in a row, I have not been here.
I have been in Los Colinas, Texas at a high-rise hotel with several hundred other people dressed in similar crimson garb reuniting friendships forged each eve of the best college football game ever played: Oklahoma-Texas game at Fair Park in Dallas.
But not this weekend. Not this year.
The year to forget — the COVID 19 year.
There is a football season this year?
About 20,000 fans will be in the Cotton Bowl for kickoff on Saturday at 11 a.m.
Not me. I decided over the summer that I would skip the Red River Rivalry weekend for the first time in more than three decades, because it would just not be the same.
There is no fair at Fair Park this weekend. There will not be crowds packed around the stadium, between the corny dog stands and the pig barn. There will be no Pride of Oklahoma marching through the fans on the way to the tunnel that connects the fairgrounds to the football turf.
There will not be that conflict between Longhorn fans and Sooners at the 50-yard line mark of the stands — the place where yells confront scowls and vica versa — and the eruption of sounds is unceasing, because at any given moment half the packed stadium is happy and half are sad.
No not this year. To attend the big game this year would not be the same.
Sorry, Coach Riley, you gotta do this one without me. But, I made the decision to avoid going on this trip because of family and friends.
Almost every trip to Big D for this game has been one with my kids, my grandkids, my best friends and my colleagues. Each experience has been unique. It’s been a road trip, a camping trip and a cruise trip of sorts all in one, culminated by the excitement of a hard fought ball game and half the time ending in celebration at the local Texas steakhouse, or decompressing at the hotel room to room service pizza.
Somewhere in there we’ve played putt-putt, road go-carts and of course played catch between cheerleaders entertaining Sooner fans on the back lawn of the Omni Mandalay on the night before the game.
I remember my then 12-year old son Alex showing his future lawyer skills by dressing down a heckling adult Longhorn fan at Sunday morning breakfast following a loss.
And my football buddy Mason having breakfast before the game with Sooner great Joe Washington.
And grandson Hunter and his friends getting the full treatment of Bevo Burgers in Marietta and paper football games at Dallas’ Humperdinks on Friday, then hitting the Midway on Saturday to see how many coupons could be lost tossing basketballs in under-sized goals.
And my granddaughter Hannah fashionably cheering on the team coming out of the tunnel to the roaring crowd at the Cotton Bowl.
It just didn’t seem right to even suggest such a trip and risk exposing all those friends and family to possible infection of a virus that has run amuck in the country, and is particularly at its peak this October in Texas.
I will root on my Sooners while watching the TV on Saturday at 11 a.m. I’m a lousy, surly and grumpy old man fan when watching OU football on TV. I can’t do it with a group, or I’m likely to yell and scream at someone else for not being as intensely fixated on the game as I. I dislike casual fans. I dislike OU fans who don’t treat it like it’s the most important thing on Saturday.
(At games I’m calm and collected, feeling somewhat in control of the situation).
Call me nuts, but that’s the way it is. And (as Methodists will say), forever shall be.
This year might be one to just right off as that odd down year for the Sooners, who enter the game with two losses. It is a rebuilding year — a realization few of us want to accept. But it is.
And maybe its easier to accept this odd year of COVID 19, where nothing seems right with the world.
Of course I will still shout and yell from my living room, instead of from some nose bleed end zone seat I’ve found on StubHub on Thursday.
So, on this Friday night, I sit here. In my backyard.
I can hear the song from the bell chimes of the student union from campus a mile away.
It is playing Boomer Sooner.
Beat the hell out of Texas.
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