Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 24, 2010
Are we there yet?
Bear of a weekend
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 said – 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 prepared us so well for.
I stared at the calendar awhile 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 master of the upset, and his overachieving Hogs, against the powerful Crimson Tide, and their legendary coach, who many still believe could walk on water. The Bama won 23-9, finished 12-0, and Paul Bryant had his sixth national championship.
The Bear would coach for two more seasons. He died just 28 days after retiring.
My friends and I decided to go to the game in style after one of us found a great rental deal on a Winnebago. It was not only cheap, but also the most comfortable way to travel.
Unfortunately we parked it that first night down a darkened French Quarter alley, and when we returned to it later we found a broken window and a missing bottle of scotch. That was all the intruders took. Surely they hailed from the “Heart of Dixie.”
The night before the big game, New Year’s Eve, we had forgotten about our vandalized RV. The French Quarter was ablaze with cardinal and white, as football’s most intense fans converged on the world’s party town. Hog calls echoed through the bars and balconies of the Vieux Carre, as the unflinching Bama faithful strolled the tight brick streets with cool confidence. They knew what they had.
After the game, we drove away from New Orleans much quieter than we arrived. Back in Fayetteville, David French, the finder of the great Winnebago deal, was driving the large RV up the part of hilly Highway 71 that delivers you to the top of downtown.
Suddenly below him to his
left was another motorist who was urgently trying to get his attention. David could see through the plastic and duct tape repair job 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 him of stealing their Winnebago. Clean cut and honest-faced French was finally able to convince them of his innocence, and they proceeded to the establishment where we had rented the “stolen property.”
As it turned out, the angry couple was sort of right. They had left their 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.
Was that wrong? We read about the crook and more of his shenanigans in the paper a few days later. The lead story from that issue 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. The city was calmer that visit – more of a honeymoon atmosphere. But the Hogs were in another big game, even if it was on TV. They kicked off the season Labor Day night against archrival Texas. But we would lose then as well, 23-17, and after only one game the season seemed over.
The year 1980 was to become a very forgettable football year, low-lighted by a midseason loss to Rice in Little Rock.
That’s how life is, I guess, – one minute your 10-1, in the Sugar Bowl against Bear Bryant and one of his all-time great teams; a year later you’re 6-5, battling Tulane in Birmingham.
Tomorrow, another great Alabama team will be in Fay-etteville. Like so many faithful I’ll be heading there tonight. There won’t be a Winnebago for this trip; just a tired old Caddy, carrying me to another big game, another shot at glory, which never grows old.
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