Editorial
Front Page - Friday, April 30, 2010
Are We There Yet?
Life’s ups and downs
Jay Edwards
I remember a brief moment in the small kitchen of the house on Vandeventer Avenue in Fayetteville that I shared with three friends during those last days of college life. There was an old calendar pinned up on the wall, probably there to cover some hole. For some reason I flipped over the December page and found the next one there that read – January 1980. I remember how strange that number looked to me – like some futuristic foreboding of adulthood. I knew the time had almost come for us to move out of that house and begin our working careers, which the previous five or six years had surely prepared us for – not.
I stared at the calendar a while longer until dropping the page back into the final few weeks of the safe seventies. There was still a little time left.
Weeks later, after the calendar permanently turned, those same roommates and I began the new decade in the Superdome in New Orleans, where we watched the Razorbacks, valiantly yet unsuccessfully, try and stop Major Ogilvie and his Crimson Tide teammates in the Sugar Bowl. It was a match of Lou Holtz, the all-time master of the upset, and his speedy overachieving Hogs, against the powerful Crimson Tide, and their legendary coach who many believed could walk on water. The Tide won 23-9, finished 12-0, and Bear Bryant had his sixth national championship.
After that game, The Bear would coach for two more seasons. He died just 28 days after retiring.
We had decided to go to that Sugar Bowl in style, after one of us found a great rental deal on a Winnebago. It was not only cheap, but also a very comfortable way to travel.
Unfortunately we parked it that first night down a darkened French Quarter alley, only returning to a broken window and a missing bottle of Johnnie Walker. That was all the intruders took. Surely they hailed from Alabama.
The night before the big game on New Year’s Eve, we had forgotten about our vandalized RV. The French Quarter was ablaze with cardinal and white, as some of football’s most intense fans brought their loud party to the South’s party city. Hog calls echoed through the bars and balconies of Vieux Carre, as the unflinching Bama faithful strolled the tight brick streets with cool confidence. They knew what they had.
After the game, we left New Orleans much quieter than we had come.
Back home in Fayetteville, David French, the finder of the great Winnebago deal, was driving the large RV up the side-winding hill of Highway 71, that delivers you to the top of downtown Fayetteville. As he drove there came another motorist who was urgently trying to get his attention. David could see through the plastic and duct tape repaired window that the people below were insistent, so he pulled into a grocery store parking lot.
Once out on the pavement, the angry motorist and his wife began loudly accusing French of stealing their Winnebago. However, clean cut and innocent looking, he was finally able to convince them he hadn’t stolen the RV; and they followed him to the place where we’d rented it.
As it turned out, the angry couple was right, sort of. They had left the RV with a man for repairs while they were out of town, and he decided to pick up a few extra hundred by renting it out to some college kids for their road trip to New Orleans.
We would read about this and more of his shenanigans in the paper a few days later. The lead story from that same paper was about President Carter’s $1.5 billion in loans to bail out Chrysler Corporation. Some shenanigans were grander than others it seemed.
I would return to New Orleans later that year for my honeymoon. It was the last days of August, near the end of what is still remembered as Little Rock’s hottest summer.
The Crescent City was calmer on that second visit – more of a newlywed atmosphere. I was able to see the Razorbacks play another big game that second trip, albeit on TV. The Hogs were opening their season on Labor Day night, against archrival Texas. But we would lose that game as well, 23-17; and after only one game our season seemed over.
It kind of was, as 1980 shaped into a very forgettable football year; low-lighted by a midseason loss to Rice in Little Rock. Come on Lou – Rice?
That’s how life is I guess – one minute your 10-1, and in the Sugar Bowl against Bear Bryant and one of his all-time great teams – and a year later you’re 6-5, tangling with Tulane in Birmingham.
No wonder football fans drink.
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