I was 14-years-old, laying on the floor of the living room about three feet in front of our first color television set, when Bobby Warmack made me fall in love with OU football for life.
It was 1968, the nation was in turmoil over the Vietnam War, and I don’t even remember ever watching a college football game before that night. Football was just something all the guys in the neighborhood played in the yard behind the Martin’s big, white house on the corner of 15th and Minnesota Avenue in Chickasha.
In fact, if my 63-year-old brain remembers right, I ended up watching the game that holiday night against SMU’s Mustangs out of boredom. To my teen-aged brain, it was just cool that the game was being played indoors at the famous Astrodome – a novelty at the time. That the University of Oklahoma was playing was a side benefit. I knew nothing about the win streak, Bud Wilkinson, Big Red or Boomer Sooner.
None-the-less, there I was sprawled on our wood floor, squirming with every third down, the back-and-forth with time running out.
There was some guy the announcers kept calling “The Wicked Worm,” doing his damnedest to secure an OU victory until he was sidelined with an injury. Steve Owens threw a touchdown pass. Defensive strongman Steve Zabel (one of the best football names ever) went down injured.Then there was that simple two point conversion gone awry.
I felt like my guts had been kicked out – but I was hooked.
Since that night, I’ve set through ice bowls, seen numerous Big 12 championship games and Orange Bowls. I like to think I remember almost every play of the 1971 Game of Any Century against the vaunted-but-despised Cornhuskers (Johnny Rodgers was the first athlete I ever hated).
I’ve been through the ups-and-downs of Switzer, Howard the-white-haired-bourbon-breath, and the nightmare of John Blake, when we couldn’t even kick an extra point right.
So, as I write this, my nearly 50 years of donning the crimson and cream kicks off in only a few hours.
Fake knees and a really bad back that prevent me from standing for long periods led me to surrender my season tickets a few years back. The only other time I wasn’t in that stadium was the three years I worked out of state as a journalist in Florida and Texas. Miami and Austin to be exact. Kind of ironic for a Sooner, right? I hate Miami and Austin probably more than I detest Stoolwater – and that is a lot.
And a new era now begins. Some whiz-kid named Riley is our new coach. We’ve got the latest in a line of great quarterbacks back. Questions surround our linebackers, running backs and wide receivers.
We face an opponent in the second game that is almost as famous as we are. We have a great chance of stomping the crap out of Texas in October and ruining the OSU Cowgirl’s season with a November butt-stomping.
It doesn’t just matter. IT MATTERS. It’s OU football. I’m ready.
I am just as excited as I was in 1968.
I’m a Sooner born and bred and when I die I’ll be Sooner dead. Rah Oklahoma! Rah Oklahoma. O-K-U.
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