12TH INSTALLMENT
HABITS OF THE HEART
After the dismal 2017 football season was finally over, my old friend Jimbo Osment and I traveled to Hot Springs for a guys’ getaway. We met up with Bob Childress and Neal Harrington, our grade school chums. Friendships between males can be difficult to nourish and sustain — at least mine have been. Only in recent years had the four us gotten together with any regularity, but whenever we did, our connection was immediate.
On Saturday morning, all of us piled into Bob’s car, our destination an event celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the legendary 573-foot home run Babe Ruth had hit in 1918, back when practically all major league baseball teams held spring practice in Hot Springs. Legend had it that the Babe’s colossal blast had landed in the pond at the Arkansas Alligator Farm & Petting Zoo, which, amazingly, was still there. On the way to the event, we laughed at old stories no one else would’ve thought were funny, while Jimbo held forth with his off-angle observations.
At the site of the former Majestic Field, a small yet enthusiastic crowd had gathered near what once had been home plate, and among the celebrants I spotted the craggy face of Rick Schaeffer, a radio personality and former Razorback sports information director. During each football season, I listened to “Drive Time Sports,” the call-in radio show Schaeffer co-hosted, where he served as Chief Hogsplainer, the analyst-in-residence, who, no matter the performance of the Razorbacks, never quit pumping out optimism. “Things will get better as… Pump. Pump. Pump.” “The Hogs have a great opportunity to… Pump. Pump. Pump.” “Yes, but you need to consider this… Pump. Pump. Pump.”
Schaeffer never overreacted and never went to the dark side. He could find a silver lining in any cloud crossing the red-tinged Razorback sky. Some among the Razorback cognoscenti considered him hopelessly Pollyanna-ish, and the wags on Hogville mockingly called him Sunshine Rick. Once, I’d even heard Schaeffer himself say, on-air, “It makes some people sick that I’m so optimistic.” But over the years I had come to admire his habitually-rosy outlook, the essence of which was what fans think is so easy, so obvious, so achievable if only they were in charge, is quite difficult no matter who’s in charge. To all the armchair quarterbacks and keyboard critics, Schaeffer’s consistent message was just slow your roll, come up for air, be mature, think positive.
When I spotted Rick Schaeffer in the crowd, I felt the urge to go over and pump some Razorback sunshine with him. “Say, Rick, did you see that Fayetteville was just named the ‘Best Place to Live’ in the SEC for the third straight year? Don’t you think this is just the edge the Hogs need to recruit with the big dogs in the SEC?” But I held off while Babe Ruth’s great-grandson rambled on about how the Babe grew up in an orphanage in Baltimore, and how he was a rough youngster “only slightly varnished by civilization.” When I finally turned back around, Sunshine Rick was gone.
With Bret Bielema’s dismissal, Arkansas had undertaken yet another coaching search. Lord, what an ordeal this always was. In terms of hard-to-swallow compromises, the process of any coaching search was not unlike what I’d gone through when I hit puberty and initially set my sights on Raquel Welch, only to work my way down from there.
Chad Morris of SMU was hardly my first pick as the Hogs’ new coach. Predictably, though, the more I learned about him, especially his reputed ability to recruit in the state of Texas, the more reasons I found to believe Arkansas had made the perfect hire. Pump. Pump. Pump. Golly, was it even possible that in his first season, Morris could somehow repeat Houston Nutt’s feat of winning the first eight games? Pump. Pump. Pump.
*
Chad Morris went 2-10 in his first year, the worst Razorback season since 1952. But headed into Morris’ second season, there was some optimism. It didn’t last long, however, as the Hogs lost at home to lowly San Jose State. Despite a 2-4 start, on the weekend of my 59th birthday, I headed for Fayetteville.
Among the many fruits of winning is the buzz that surrounds each game. There’s a palpable charge of energy in the air and every fan can feel it. Conversely, when chronic losing sets in, any game-related energy must be summoned from tangential sources. The timing of this game against Auburn was a major plus, as this was the only home game in October and there was a lot to like about the October weather in the Ozarks. Moreover, back in the summer when my optimism had been pumped, I’d made non-cancellable reservations at Carnall Hall for this game weekend, and Susanne and I had made plans to meet up with our children and their spouses and our granddaughter. It was to be a great family time together. So there we all sat in the bright sunshine at Razorback Stadium, ready for yet another 11 o’clock kickoff.
Auburn quickly jumped out to a 17-0 lead. Then, with 5:29 left in the second quarter, a timeout was called and a procession ensued in the north end zone, as about 35 white men in their early 70s trundled out single file. This was what remained of the 1969 Arkansas Razorbacks, the team that had played in The Big Shootout half a century before. These old white men stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the goal line, facing the direction in which President Nixon’s helicopter had landed on that cold, damp day of December 6, 1969. The end zone where they stood also happened to be where Bill Montgomery’s fateful pass had been intercepted with 10:34 left in that game. Towering behind them was the north end zone complex, newly expanded at a cost of $160 million, with its luxury suites and loge boxes. The top story of this complex was among the choice spots from which to watch any game. This was where the parents of prized recruits were often hosted, and I couldn’t help but notice that virtually every person on the top level of the complex was black. Of course, no black players had been on either team in The Big Shootout, long hailed as the last college football game of consequence in which every player was white.
During the timeout, the public address announcer recounted the exploits of this 1969 Razorback team, after which there was scattered applause from the relatively sparse crowd and then these 35 or so older men walked off the field single file.
I glanced at my phone: Already, it had gone viral. Earlier in the second quarter — at the 12:53 mark to be exact — the Hogs had attempted a fake punt, a play so lame in its design, so half-hearted in its execution, so comedic in its result (an interception by Auburn) that I had literally laughed out loud when it was replayed on the huge video screen that dominated the stadium. Now this travesty of a play was being touted on YouTube as “The Worst Fake Punt in Human History.”
I wondered what the members of the 1969 Razorback football team thought about this farcical play. The team they loved, the football program they’d helped build, was clowning itself. The downward spiral of the Razorbacks was reaching historic proportions: In the seven-plus seasons since Bobby Petrino had wrecked his motorcycle on April Fool’s Day of 2012, the Hogs had gone 13-46 in SEC play, including dropping their last 14 straight. Despite my determination to remain optimistic, if this losing trend persisted, and there was no end to it in sight, I would inevitably lapse into the self-pitying lament that this was unfair to
me because I didn’t have that many Razorback football seasons left. For several years, I had been fighting off just such a moan, the football fan’s version of the poet’s wail that life is short and getting shorter.
Amid such epic losing, I had become more nostalgic. After all, what else was there to hold onto but past glory? That very morning I had set out early to find where Bill Montgomery’s name was etched into the sidewalk on the UA campus, and finally, on the north side of Mullins Library, I’d found it. Remarkably, his name was only about 300 yards ahead on the same stretch of sidewalk where my name was etched. Per the tradition of Senior Walk, every past graduate of the U of A, myself included, had their full name spelled out in the sidewalk — typically their legal name as recorded by the university’s registrar. But the name etched here in the sidewalk simply read “Bill Montgomery,” his football name so to speak, the name fans knew him by.
As I’d stood there, an older couple approached and feeling triumphant for having hunted up Bill Montgomery’s name, I blurted out, “Does the name Bill Montgomery mean anything to you?”
The couple slowed as I pointed down at the sidewalk. “He was my childhood hero,” I had gushed, sounding every bit like some geezer fan obsessed with Elvis Pressley. “I was nine years old in 1969.”
“I was nine years old in 1969, too,” the lady said, before they moved on.
*
On Sunday morning, the day after Auburn had clobbered the Hogs 51-10, I walked from Carnall Hall to the Dickson Street Bookshop, where I went to the aisle with used books pertaining to the state of Arkansas and its history, and it was there that I found a well-worn copy of a book by J. Neal Blanton titled, “Game of the Century: Texas vs. Arkansas, December, 1969: An Absorbing Analysis of the most exciting week in college football history.” While Susanne patiently waited, I took the book to the front counter, where the hipster at the cash register regarded me as though I were insane to be spending $85 on any book about football. But I had to have it.
Emerging from the bookshop into the crisp weather, Susanne and I walked across the street to Bordino’s. The restaurant was busy, though hardly as crowded as it had been on Friday or Saturday night. We sat in the front bar and I placed the book on the table where anyone who walked by could see it. The waiter took our brunch order for Eggs Benedict and house-made corned beef hash, then disappeared. A few minutes later, he returned with two glasses of orange juice.
“Is that a book about The Game of the Century?” he said, bending slightly to study the cover.
“It is,” I said. “I just bought it.” “What a cool memento.”
“I know,” I said. “They had the team from 1969 here in Fayetteville this weekend, and you’d have thought one of those players would’ve found this old book at the bookstore and bought it.”
“Maybe one of those players dropped it off,” the waiter said with a shrug. “The sad state of Arkansas football.”
“Good point,” I replied. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
While Susanne and I sipped our orange juice, I thumbed through the pages of the book. It was well done, even if larded with arcane details such as a photograph of Razorback players performing calisthenics before Monday practice of that long-ago week. But then at the end of the book there was a chapter titled, “Post Game,” and as I read it I came across a paragraph about a girl in the Texas band — the same girl I had seen repeatedly, maddeningly, on TV 50 years before. I could still see her face as the Texas comeback had unfolded, and I recalled how her emotions during the final moments of The Big Shootout had been the mirror opposite of mine. For half a century I had wondered just who in the hell this girl was, and in my darker moments of fandom I had harbored a subversive desire to get back at her, to somehow make her atone for the happiness she’d felt that day.
And, now, here in this book’s final pages were these lines: “One member of the Longhorn band, Marilyn Edwards, a freshman clarinetist from Austin, had been seen by millions of Americans. An ABC-TV cameraman zoomed in on the beautiful brunette countless times during the latter half of the game; her expressions told the game story to television viewers with more impact than words. And after the game a final camera shot showed her in a state of complete delight.”