OU86
10/9/2008, 10:21 PM
I'm sorry if I got you in a twist, but that is an Aggy post. I love my University (grad in Letters) and I love my football team, but when my fandom becomes defined by a hatred, so all encompassing that I am literally, without any hyperbole, suprised to the point of comment on a message board, to find decent and patriotic young men donning my rivals colors, then I am beyond jacked up. I have become Aggy jacked up. That kind of jacked up that throws down the upside down horns sign at a win in Washington.
I expect it from the OSU faithfull. They are by definition, Aggy jacked up. I just hate to see it from a Sooner.
Dorfman, I've been giving this a lot thought.
Here's the deal.
The only humane, rational way to enjoy your alma mater playing college football is to pay little or no attention during the offseason or duing the week leading up to the game, beyond what you might glimpse on the sports page in the bathroom, watch the game with friends, either in person or on television, smile happily and clap a little when things go well, and say "oh shoot" or "oh darn" when they don't. After the game is over, win or lose, you get on with your day and your life. It's the only sane way to live. Who allows their moods to be ruled, their happiness to depend, on the outcome of a game, just a game, like Monopoly or Parchisee, over which they have no control whatsoever, not even a little tiny bit?
You won't find that here or on any other website devoted to college football.
This isn't Leave it to Beaver; it's H.P. Lovecraft. It's about people who have willingly handed over the keys to their emotional thermostats to a group of 18-23 year olds they don't even know. In fact, many of them pay an average of $500 per game for a family of four for the privilege.
It's not rational. It's irrational. It's beyond rational.
Whether its two neighbors in Alabama discussing middle school prospects, a middle age couple traveling thousands of miles across the flat midwest each year by car instead of taking a cruise or going to Hawai'i, an old man and his grandson arguing about the relative merits of Jimmy Harris vs. Josh Heupel, or a bunch of grown men spending hours each day reading and posting on an Internet website that exists for no other reason than to make reading and posting about their team possible, this is not some economics hypothetical in which people "choose" to "allocate their resources" based on a rational perception of their "desires."
It's more like a disease. A disease that never goes away. Like malaria, or herpes, or vd, it may go into remission for a while, but it never goes away. It always, always breaks out again.
I went to my first OU game - my first two OU games - in 1970. Between then and the start of the 1988 season, I followed every game either in person, on TV, or on the radio, and then watched the playback and the coach's show. I got my dad to open a bank account at a bank that was giving away copies of Jim Weeks' book when it came out in 1974 so we could get one. I read and re-read it so many times the cover literally fell off. In college I had classes with Spencer Tillman, Buster Rhymes, and an upper division Astrophysics class with Brian Hall in the fall of 1984. I was secretly proud that Brian and I were about the same height and weight.
In the fall of 1988, I moved to Austin, Texas to attend professional school at UT. This wasn't as big of a deal then. Prior to the Big 12 and the Internet, OU/UT was a huge rivalry, but only for one week a year. People didn't give a rat's that I had gone to OU. Plus UT was down. The first couple of years I was there, they got spanked - I mean spanked - by BYU, Baylor, UH, and Texas Tech.
But the first week of football season, I realized I had a problem. Of course OU wasn't going to be on TV every week, but in Austin, pre-Big 12, pre-FSW, pre college football on ESPN, even if OU was on TV, if they were a regional game they might not be the regional game in Austin, so I'd have to drive around until I found a bar with a satellite where business was slow and they'd let me watch OU. And if there was no TV, I couldn't just flip on KTOK radio. I just had to suffer.
When we moved to Houston, the OU games were carried on an AM religious station that went off the air after dark. Night games, I just suffered. I had to listen to other games, hoping they would give a score update, which happened less and less as we got worse and worse. Otherwise, I had to wait until the 10 o'clock news.
Of course, I suffered a lot in the 90s anyway. I took to driving around in my car, or at least sitting in my car away from the house so as not to inflict my rage and agony on my wife and children. But I couldn't stop listening (since we weren't on TV much then, it was mostly listening to the radio). I can still remember listening to the 1998 TCU game on the radio in my car in our detached garage. I was just personally offended that we were going to lose to TCU, and even after we won, I was personally offended that we had to win that way against TCU. I can remember many times just staring at the TV transfixed. This couldn't be OU. Who were these guys? Other teams did this, not us. There had to be some mistake. These were imposters. How could this happen. Can I wake up now?
Around that time, I discovered the hard stuff - Internet fb bbs. Imagine a sex addict renting a room from Heidi Fleiss. I was on all the OU boards, including this one when it finally got started on the RW site, and many, many others. I remember CC&D on hornfans back then. That guy was a warrior - if posting on hornfans can be compared to war in some twisted, delusional way -racking up 1000s of posts, never getting banned, but never backing down. A one man slaughterhouse with all positions surrounded. He's mellowed considerably since then.
I knew this was unhealthy. Eventually it became undesirable. In 1999, while visiting friends in New Jersey who don't care about football, I nonetheless sat in their living room and watched the Notre Dame game while we were "visiting." I was Rain Man. I didn't want to live like this. I didn't want to be like this. I didn't want to be this. So I tried to quit.
In 2000, I determined not to watch the Texas game. I was living in Tulsa at the time. I got my haircut by a lady who didn't care about football. I ran errands for my wife. Dropping something off somewhere at a place that had the game on, I looked up and the TV was showing Major Applewhite. You could tell just from the shot UT had scored. It was the type of shot they do of the QB on the sidelines after they have come back from commercial following a score. Driving home, getting on the freeway, I broke down and turned on the radio to check the score. 42 to freakin' 7. OMG. Oh my shoot me full of adrenacrome. I had thought it would be easy. I didn't think we could beat Texas. I didn't think we could catch Texas with all their resources and now Mack Brown too. I thought if Bob Stoops had OU at 9-3 and in the Cotton Bowl after year 5, we would be doing great. 42-7? AYSM?
Needless to say, 2000 was lost. But in 2001, I spent all but the last five minutes of the Texas game playing in the park with my kids. But I also remember being in my car on the way home from the Hideawy with a take out pizza and cursing, Tourette's like, at the end of the OSU game.
2002, now back in Austin, I went to the movies on OSU day, and celebrated my son's birthday on ATM day, checking the score only once. On Texas Tech night I was with friends in the country without radio or TV access to the game. I didn't sneek out to the car to check a scoreboard show until right before bedtime, and then, only once, after I knew it had to be over.
In 2003, for the first half of the season, I watched no football, none at all. Not OU, not anybody. I didn't even know the score of any football game any where. For half the season. Finally, a fellow alum told me this might be one of great teams in history and I just HAD to watch. So I started taping the games and watching them after - after I knew the out come.
Message boards. The hard stuff. I stay away for weeks, months, many months, at a time. Yet here I am again.
Someday I may have more realistic and rational relationshilp with college football. Or not. But even if I do, the fact that I have lived through these ridiculoulsy trivial travails speaks volumes about something - what I'm not exactly sure. But even if I walk away completely and never look back, I'm still OCD; still an addict, a junkie.
Websites like this exist for no other purpose than to enable junkies like me. They are run and patronized by other junkies. We recognize and understand each other. No words are necessary. It goes without saying.
So don't ask me to be less "rabid." I can't help it, any more than an ebola virus victim can help vomitting blood all over the doctor treating them. No one would chose, after OU lost to Colorado last year, to get in their car and drive around town screaming in a blind fury like Zsa Zsa Gabor forcefully immigrated to a tin shack in Ghana without running water or electricity. No one would chose, when attending a game and something goes terribly, terribly wrong, to take off their golf cap and beat the seat in front of them in a frenzy like a wolverine on speed, regardless of whether there is someone in it. Nobody normal does that. Nobody rational does that. Nobody with even microfibre of self respect does something like that, at least in public. But I do. I'm not proud of it. But I do it.
This is me. This is us. This is what it looks like when you pull up the skull flap and peek at the unrestrained id. Frankly, I would that it were otherwise. But it isn't.
When it looked like OU's 2000 season was going to be disemboweled in College Station, I threw a Bic ball point pen clear across my living room so hard that my wall looked like a lost Jackson Pollock. My kids, who were one, three, and five then, still remember it and talk about it. It's embarrassing. But there it is. And here I am. And CC&D is still my hero.
Boomer Sooner. Thanks for listening.
I expect it from the OSU faithfull. They are by definition, Aggy jacked up. I just hate to see it from a Sooner.
Dorfman, I've been giving this a lot thought.
Here's the deal.
The only humane, rational way to enjoy your alma mater playing college football is to pay little or no attention during the offseason or duing the week leading up to the game, beyond what you might glimpse on the sports page in the bathroom, watch the game with friends, either in person or on television, smile happily and clap a little when things go well, and say "oh shoot" or "oh darn" when they don't. After the game is over, win or lose, you get on with your day and your life. It's the only sane way to live. Who allows their moods to be ruled, their happiness to depend, on the outcome of a game, just a game, like Monopoly or Parchisee, over which they have no control whatsoever, not even a little tiny bit?
You won't find that here or on any other website devoted to college football.
This isn't Leave it to Beaver; it's H.P. Lovecraft. It's about people who have willingly handed over the keys to their emotional thermostats to a group of 18-23 year olds they don't even know. In fact, many of them pay an average of $500 per game for a family of four for the privilege.
It's not rational. It's irrational. It's beyond rational.
Whether its two neighbors in Alabama discussing middle school prospects, a middle age couple traveling thousands of miles across the flat midwest each year by car instead of taking a cruise or going to Hawai'i, an old man and his grandson arguing about the relative merits of Jimmy Harris vs. Josh Heupel, or a bunch of grown men spending hours each day reading and posting on an Internet website that exists for no other reason than to make reading and posting about their team possible, this is not some economics hypothetical in which people "choose" to "allocate their resources" based on a rational perception of their "desires."
It's more like a disease. A disease that never goes away. Like malaria, or herpes, or vd, it may go into remission for a while, but it never goes away. It always, always breaks out again.
I went to my first OU game - my first two OU games - in 1970. Between then and the start of the 1988 season, I followed every game either in person, on TV, or on the radio, and then watched the playback and the coach's show. I got my dad to open a bank account at a bank that was giving away copies of Jim Weeks' book when it came out in 1974 so we could get one. I read and re-read it so many times the cover literally fell off. In college I had classes with Spencer Tillman, Buster Rhymes, and an upper division Astrophysics class with Brian Hall in the fall of 1984. I was secretly proud that Brian and I were about the same height and weight.
In the fall of 1988, I moved to Austin, Texas to attend professional school at UT. This wasn't as big of a deal then. Prior to the Big 12 and the Internet, OU/UT was a huge rivalry, but only for one week a year. People didn't give a rat's that I had gone to OU. Plus UT was down. The first couple of years I was there, they got spanked - I mean spanked - by BYU, Baylor, UH, and Texas Tech.
But the first week of football season, I realized I had a problem. Of course OU wasn't going to be on TV every week, but in Austin, pre-Big 12, pre-FSW, pre college football on ESPN, even if OU was on TV, if they were a regional game they might not be the regional game in Austin, so I'd have to drive around until I found a bar with a satellite where business was slow and they'd let me watch OU. And if there was no TV, I couldn't just flip on KTOK radio. I just had to suffer.
When we moved to Houston, the OU games were carried on an AM religious station that went off the air after dark. Night games, I just suffered. I had to listen to other games, hoping they would give a score update, which happened less and less as we got worse and worse. Otherwise, I had to wait until the 10 o'clock news.
Of course, I suffered a lot in the 90s anyway. I took to driving around in my car, or at least sitting in my car away from the house so as not to inflict my rage and agony on my wife and children. But I couldn't stop listening (since we weren't on TV much then, it was mostly listening to the radio). I can still remember listening to the 1998 TCU game on the radio in my car in our detached garage. I was just personally offended that we were going to lose to TCU, and even after we won, I was personally offended that we had to win that way against TCU. I can remember many times just staring at the TV transfixed. This couldn't be OU. Who were these guys? Other teams did this, not us. There had to be some mistake. These were imposters. How could this happen. Can I wake up now?
Around that time, I discovered the hard stuff - Internet fb bbs. Imagine a sex addict renting a room from Heidi Fleiss. I was on all the OU boards, including this one when it finally got started on the RW site, and many, many others. I remember CC&D on hornfans back then. That guy was a warrior - if posting on hornfans can be compared to war in some twisted, delusional way -racking up 1000s of posts, never getting banned, but never backing down. A one man slaughterhouse with all positions surrounded. He's mellowed considerably since then.
I knew this was unhealthy. Eventually it became undesirable. In 1999, while visiting friends in New Jersey who don't care about football, I nonetheless sat in their living room and watched the Notre Dame game while we were "visiting." I was Rain Man. I didn't want to live like this. I didn't want to be like this. I didn't want to be this. So I tried to quit.
In 2000, I determined not to watch the Texas game. I was living in Tulsa at the time. I got my haircut by a lady who didn't care about football. I ran errands for my wife. Dropping something off somewhere at a place that had the game on, I looked up and the TV was showing Major Applewhite. You could tell just from the shot UT had scored. It was the type of shot they do of the QB on the sidelines after they have come back from commercial following a score. Driving home, getting on the freeway, I broke down and turned on the radio to check the score. 42 to freakin' 7. OMG. Oh my shoot me full of adrenacrome. I had thought it would be easy. I didn't think we could beat Texas. I didn't think we could catch Texas with all their resources and now Mack Brown too. I thought if Bob Stoops had OU at 9-3 and in the Cotton Bowl after year 5, we would be doing great. 42-7? AYSM?
Needless to say, 2000 was lost. But in 2001, I spent all but the last five minutes of the Texas game playing in the park with my kids. But I also remember being in my car on the way home from the Hideawy with a take out pizza and cursing, Tourette's like, at the end of the OSU game.
2002, now back in Austin, I went to the movies on OSU day, and celebrated my son's birthday on ATM day, checking the score only once. On Texas Tech night I was with friends in the country without radio or TV access to the game. I didn't sneek out to the car to check a scoreboard show until right before bedtime, and then, only once, after I knew it had to be over.
In 2003, for the first half of the season, I watched no football, none at all. Not OU, not anybody. I didn't even know the score of any football game any where. For half the season. Finally, a fellow alum told me this might be one of great teams in history and I just HAD to watch. So I started taping the games and watching them after - after I knew the out come.
Message boards. The hard stuff. I stay away for weeks, months, many months, at a time. Yet here I am again.
Someday I may have more realistic and rational relationshilp with college football. Or not. But even if I do, the fact that I have lived through these ridiculoulsy trivial travails speaks volumes about something - what I'm not exactly sure. But even if I walk away completely and never look back, I'm still OCD; still an addict, a junkie.
Websites like this exist for no other purpose than to enable junkies like me. They are run and patronized by other junkies. We recognize and understand each other. No words are necessary. It goes without saying.
So don't ask me to be less "rabid." I can't help it, any more than an ebola virus victim can help vomitting blood all over the doctor treating them. No one would chose, after OU lost to Colorado last year, to get in their car and drive around town screaming in a blind fury like Zsa Zsa Gabor forcefully immigrated to a tin shack in Ghana without running water or electricity. No one would chose, when attending a game and something goes terribly, terribly wrong, to take off their golf cap and beat the seat in front of them in a frenzy like a wolverine on speed, regardless of whether there is someone in it. Nobody normal does that. Nobody rational does that. Nobody with even microfibre of self respect does something like that, at least in public. But I do. I'm not proud of it. But I do it.
This is me. This is us. This is what it looks like when you pull up the skull flap and peek at the unrestrained id. Frankly, I would that it were otherwise. But it isn't.
When it looked like OU's 2000 season was going to be disemboweled in College Station, I threw a Bic ball point pen clear across my living room so hard that my wall looked like a lost Jackson Pollock. My kids, who were one, three, and five then, still remember it and talk about it. It's embarrassing. But there it is. And here I am. And CC&D is still my hero.
Boomer Sooner. Thanks for listening.