The lost season

This was to have been my 38th season of doing the radio play-by-play of Ouachita Baptist University football games. The virus changed things.

Fall sports have been called off at the Great American Conference schools. I know that everyone doesn’t share my passion for small college football. I hope, though, that they have similar passions in life; things that animate them, create memories and give them reasons to anticipate the future.

I haven’t missed a Ouachita football game since 1998. The reason I missed two games that year was because I was the campaign manager for then-Gov. Mike Huckabee and didn’t feel I could be out of state during the stretch run of the campaign.

I spent a big chunk of my career working for candidates and officeholders, but I consider college football a more important part of my life than politics. It’s who I am. It’s what I — the son of a former coach and sporting goods salesman — was raised on.

Growing up within walking distance of the Ouachita and Henderson State University stadiums, the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference was what I knew when it came to college sports. Like other Arkansas boys of the era, I read Orville Henry’s coverage of the Razorbacks in the Arkansas Gazette. Unlike most of those boys, the Razorbacks weren’t my top college team. The stories I read first in the Gazette sports section were Jim Bailey’s articles on the AIC.

The memories remain vivid after all these decades. I remember the fall afternoons at A.U. Williams Field in Arkadelphia when Ouachita upset previously undefeated Arkansas Tech University teams in 1968 and 1970. I remember the Battles of the Ravine between Ouachita and Henderson that

I’ve attended through the years. What I consider the greatest small college rivalry in America finally got its due last fall when Sports

Illustrated published an eight-page spread on the series.

Irecall the road trips in my father’s Oldsmobile, its large trunk filled with sporting goods samples ranging from jerseys to shoulder pads. I remember the places where we would eat when we saw Ouachita play on the road. What’s college football without good food?

Trips to Magnolia to take on the Muleriders of what’s now Southern Arkansas University (Southern State in those days) meant a meal at the Chatterbox downtown. The owner, a Mr. Duke, knew my dad and would greet him by name. Customers could buy copies of the Magnolia Banner-News, the Shreveport Times, the Arkansas Gazette and the Texarkana Gazette from stacks next to the cash register. I loved football, food and newspapers. It just didn’t get any better than having a hearty meal and buying four papers.

Trips to Monticello to battle the Boll Weevils of what’s now the University of Arkansas at Monticello (Arkansas A&M back then) meant a foot-long hot dog at Ray’s.

Trips to Conway to play the Bears of what’s now the University of Central Arkansas (Arkansas State Teachers College and later State College of Arkansas when I was young) meant a meal at Tommy’s. Owners Tommy Paladino and Johnny DeSalvo were quail-hunting buddies of my dad, who wouldn’t dream of eating anywhere else. It was at Tommy’s where I had my first whole trout and had to be told by my father not to try to eat the head.

Trips to Searcy for games against the Bisons of Harding University meant a stop in Beebe on the way home for the Saturday night seafood buffet at Anderson’s, the forerunner of Little Rock’s Cajun’s Wharf.

Trips to Russellville to play the Wonder Boys of Arkansas Tech meant fried chicken at the Old South, though we strayed across the street for a few years when there was an AQ Chicken House in town. If Ouachita and Tech were playing an afternoon game in late October or early November, my mom would insist we take Highway 7 north from Arkadelphia to Russellville in order to look at the leaves changing colors. We would have breakfast at Sam Ann’s in the heart of the Ouachita National Forest at Hollis.

There were seven football-playing schools in the AIC in those days. I came of age after Hendrix College and what’s now the University of the Ozarks dropped the sport. Six of the seven — all except for UCA, whose enrollment grew to the point that the Bears belonged in the Southland Conference of NCAA Division I — have been together again in the GAC since 2011.

Ouachita has had 12 consecutive winning seasons (the most of any college football program in the state), has won three consecutive GAC titles and has gone undefeated in the regular season in each of the past two years. That success has allowed us to build one of the largest radio networks in NCAA Division II. As someone who has broadcast my share of losing seasons, I remind younger members of our broadcast crew to never take this golden era for granted. Savor every Saturday.

In this lost season, what I’ll miss more than the games will be the interaction with that radio crew, the folks I call my fall family. I’ll even miss the 5 a.m. departures for trips to afternoon games in Oklahoma, the stops for breakfast along the way and the dinners in small-town restaurants before checking into some Hampton Inn or Holiday Inn Express.

I normally would have spent weeks by now getting ready for the season. With the extra time I have in this year of the virus, I reread a book published in 2015 titled “The Last Season: A Father, a Son and a Lifetime of College Football.” I purchased it a few years ago when the author, Stuart Stevens, was part of the lecture series at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. Stevens and I share a past of having worked for Republican candidates and a love of college football.

Stevens grew up in Jackson, Miss., where his father was a prominent attorney. After Mitt Romney (for whom Stevens had worked) lost his presidential campaign in 2012, Stevens decided he needed to do something different. He had just turned 60 and knew he didn’t have many years left with his aging father. He vowed that the two of them would spend the 2013 season going to Ole Miss Rebel games together.

“What was stopping us from grabbing one more season together?” Stevens wrote. “What was more valuable than a chance to spend time with my parents, to steal one more season? And there’d be the games, those wonderful Saturdays that were always so perfect because they never were. Love of sports will always break your heart, but in doing so, it reminds us we have one. At this point in my life, that seemed like a worthy goal.”

Stevens noted that being with his father had always made him feel safe and now “at 60, reeling from a shattering defeat, I missed the confidence and comfort that as a boy those moments had so effortlessly provided. The games of my youth were huge spectacles: foggy nights in LSU’s Tiger Stadium, hot afternoons at Jackson Memorial Stadium, long car drives to the hills of Arkansas to face the dreaded Razorbacks.”

The stadiums where my dad and I attended games in the 1960s and 1970s were much smaller than those Stevens wrote about. But the memories are just as rich.

Stevens wrote of an Ole Miss loss to Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl at Starkville to end the 2013 regular season: “We had lost before and would again. Somehow it seemed right that it was a loss of a different sort, a political campaign, that had led me into one more season. Both had ended on cold November nights with much regret. But I was learning that at the end of the day there was the end of the day and loss awaits us all.

“There might have been a time when I thought great success could freeze time or buy a little piece of something close to immortality, but that was, I realized, vain foolishness. Like this season my father and I just had, there would always be losses, and they would always hurt, but there was still the time together and shared joys.”