An Arkansas sports writer takes stock
Most of my time writing for this newspaper was as a card-carrying member of what I often refer to in print as Razorback Nation.
For many of those years, I contributed to the University of Arkansas athletic program and obtained a ticket for each Razorback home game (though no more). Before getting paid for turning out living, breathing journalism, I was in residence at most Fayetteville and Little Rock games. Yes, I was present for the Miracle at Markham and, three years before taking this job, when Arkansas quarterback Ron Calgagni got clotheslined on the far sideline (no call) against Texas, whose best player that afternoon, in a 13-9 Longhorn victory, won the Heisman Trophy (chap named Earl Campbell).
My folks were privileged to buy season tickets (home and away) in my youth, allowing me to watch three consecutive Razorback victories over Texas at Austin, even if missing a local Punt, Pass & Kick competition. And also to scream bloody murder one day at Lubbock when Jon Brittenum, that quarterbackin’ man, was denied forward progress into the end zone for a touchdown that might have blown open a game at Texas Tech and sent the Hogs back to the Cotton Bowl as undisputed Southwest Conference champion three years running.
Not everyone my age, I knew then, was as fortunate. Consequently, I gladly took several high-school classmates to their first Razorback game. Even if James Street would not let his team lose that day in Fayetteville when Richard Nixon watched from the 50yard line, Dec. 6, 1969, (the Big Shootout, No. 1 Texas over No. 2 Arkansas 15-14) remains a red-letter day in my sports life, one that readers have allowed me to write about endlessly, though the score never changes.
Age, financial constraints and marital responsibilities, not to mention the rising price of gasoline and Arkansas’ affiliation with the Southeastern Conference, which in time formed its own TV network just for folks who couldn’t attend every game, have turned me into more of a homebody.
Walking up Razorback Road in Fayetteville or parking on the former War Memorial Park golf course in Little Rock no longer brings the same charge. Mostly, I find relief knowing that when the game ends, I no longer need to stick around to write about it, that with all the pertinent information at hand, I can produce an adequate report.
To my credit, I have been seldom called a shill by readers or fellow colleagues, two groups whose opinion I take especially seriously. From Lou Holtz onward, Arkansas kept hiring high-profile coaches whose deeds occasionally required knuckle-wrapping, or more, in print. Though I do not consider it my right to ask for a coach’s job, I remember not being exactly neutral when the subject was Bret Bielema or Chad Morris.
The landscape, not just that in the SEC or college football, has changed. Fewer and fewer daily newspapers honor our profession. I wonder if an aspiring Arkansas sports writer even thinks much about what he or she should know about Razorback athletics or, if that person lives in this town, Oaklawn.
All I know is that from adolescence, I wished to sit around the Algonquin Round Table around which Arkansas sports was discussed. My cup overflowed with role models — among them Orville Henry, Wally Hall, Jim Bailey, Nate Allen and Bob Holt on Little Rock newspapers and Harry King with the state Associated Press. Writers with lesser circulation but also with something to say included the Texarkana Gazette dream team of Johnny Green,
James Williams and Louie Avery (the only living member) and Jim Harris of Pine Bluff, the late David McCollum of Conway, Grant Hall of Fayetteville, the late J.E. Dunlap of Harrison and Fort Smith colleagues David Yarbrough, Gary Smith, Bruce Stanton and Scott Faldon.
Some of us are still around, hopefully with living, breathing journalism for our readers’ benefit. We succeed, in the words of an old-timer, merely if we afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted — all the while spelling the names right and getting our facts straight but never shying away from what might be an unpopular opinion.