You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell ya what’s crazy.™
College Football is back.
The excitement. The color. The pageantry. The tradition.
For all intents and purposes, tt started Friday night with a barn burner. Heavily favored TCU loses to Baylor. It’s a down to the wire affair that has the Wackos in Waco storming the field in a game that saw almost a 100 points scored.
Then it was Auburn surviving a major scare against Utah State in a game that the defending national champs really should have lost.
Then there was sad sack Notre Dame and South Florida surviving 2 rain delays that featured angry skies that wielded lightning and possible tornadoes. ND lost and their coach blew a gasket yelling at his kids on the sidelines.
Now I’m watching USC take on the Golden Gophers of Minnesota. The game is in the L.A. Coliseum.
The stadium grass is a brilliant green, the crowd is painted in Cardinal and Gold, Traveler is galloping around the track and Tommy Trojan is stabbing the field with his shimmering sword. The aerials are spectacular, so L.A., it’s a picture post card image ranging from the mountains of Pasadena to the pier at Santa Monica.
It makes you want to move to So Cal. Man I love it.
While I am watching this game, my son is sitting in a stadium in Tuscaloosa experiencing his first college football game as a member of the student body.
He called me to say “Dad, I’m on the goal line 3 rows up.”
The excitement in his voice was palpable. You could hear the buzz of excitement from the student section he was among.
He tells me he lined up at 9am for an 11am kickoff. He didn’t care. He was going to get his seat. He was going to shout and Yell “Roll Tide” and whatever else the Bama traditions dictate.
It made me think of my first college football experience.
My first game was #1 Oklahoma against #2 USC
It was a night game at the Coliseum with national implications. The lights were bright, the stars were out, the Good Year blimp was flying high and Keith Jackson’s voice filled the stadium.
It was an electrict first experience. The Trojans won in the final seconds and Marcus Allen was the star. He would be all season running for the Heisman, the first college back to ever rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season.
This guy was a rock star on campus. I remember Marcus Allen walking through the quad, smiling, signing autographs, then getting in a limo with OJ Simpson and 5 beautiful girls. As far as I know, OJ killed nobody in that limo. We all clapped like the goofuses we were.
What else were we going to do? We were 18 year old kids and here was a thoroughbred superstar soon to be millionaire walking in our presence.
USC football is big time. It is a football factory that has more studs than a lumber yard.
There have been many ups and downs that fill up a bucket full of personal memories.
I was at the 2005 National Championship game in Pasadena.
Vince Young played arguably the greatest game in college history and defeated a USC juggernaut lead by Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Lendale White.
I was at the Bush Push in Notre Dame where the collective breath was sucked out of the Golden Domers after the Trojans rallied late much to the hateful jeers of the Catholic faithful.
Even TD Jesus had to respect that last second win.
There are so many great memories, but the bad games provide for plenty of crazy memories as well.
I weathered a decade of terrible USC teams. Expectations were high in Troy but the teams were lack luster. We were lead by crappy signal callers like Sean Salisbury throwing to anonymous wide receivers. The coach, Ted Tollner, was a schmuck and soon the coliseum was half empty.
But empty stadiums means you can sit where you want and walk around without security intervening.
During a pre game warm up once, I was standing near the field. I remember hearing a whizzing in the air.
“What is that sound?” I thought to myself.
Then I looked up and saw Stanford #7 warming up.
Ziiiiipppp. Thwaaaap.
This quarterback’s ball made a sound unlike any I had ever heard.
It was the frequency of molecules being displaced by a pig skin exploding through the air.
Who is this Stanford QB who can bend sound waves with a football I said to myself.
By the end of the afternoon, I would know the name John Elway as he carved the 1982 Trojans into a Christmas ham.
The Trojans of the mid-80’s were just woeful.
I remember games so out of hand by half time that the crowd that remained was just bored and drunk or both.
Sometimes you had to entertain yourself. I remember going to the top of the coliseum with a “Funnelator”
That’s a funnel attached to 10 yards of surgical tubing. Two guys would hold the tube at each end of an empty row. And I would put a water balloon in the funnel and let it rip.
The coliseum was 95 degrees. People getting hit with a water balloon 30 yards aways was a good thing.
But the security force didn’t think so.
They escorted me out of the stadium.
So what did I do? I bought a scalper ticket for 2 dollars. Yes 2 dollars. And came right back in.
The security guy said; “Didn’t I just throw you out?”
We both laughed.
There were so many memories in that stadium that didn’t happen on the field.
I saw joints passed down an entire row. I watched girls flash the crowd on every first down. I saw fights that made you think “Down goes Frazier. Down goes Frazier.”
These were the days when beers were sold in college stadiums. Those days are long gone, but back then, 19 year olds were double fisting 32 oz beers. It was absolutely insane.
It is with this nostalgia that I wish my son well. He attended his first football game today as a college freshman in Tuscaloosa.
His team, on his first gameday, just like my first game days, is ranked number 2 in the nation. Bama dismantled Kent State, not exactly a football powerhouse. But the team is off and running building a new lifetime of memories.
I have a feeling he is going to love college football just like his dear old dad.
Going to a university with a major college football team is a dream.
I graduated 2 decades ago, but still, every fall the Trojans take the field I am filled with new hope, new memories and a basket of old memories that begin percolating from a long time ago.
Fight On. Roll Tide.
And that is crazy.