Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
DNA OF A FANATIC
Despite a thrilling 31-7 mid-season win over arch-rival Texas, the 1971 Razorbacks were relegated to the lesser Liberty Bowl in Memphis, which presented an opportunity for my father and me to take a road trip. It was a great chance for us to be together. My dad was a busy man, with a talent for spotting opportunity. Years before, while working at my grandfather’s John Deere dealership in Jonesboro, he’d noticed that the coffin-sized tool boxes of the kind mounted behind the cab of a pickup truck were hot sellers. So Dad ordered a few from the manufacturer, loaded up my mother’s wood-paneled Ford Country Squire Station Wagon with them (two in the back and two on the roof), and drove around Craighead County selling them to farmers. Emboldened by his initial success, he took a gamble and ordered 100 more tool boxes. When they arrived, my grandfather, who’d fronted most of the money, said, “Okay, you little snot, you wanted ’em, now you’d better sell ’em.” So my father traveled all over the Mid-South hawking these tool boxes. After this scrappy beginning, he launched a company called Stor-All Tool Box.
I had been to Memphis many times, but usually with my mother and sister. Those visits, more like scavenger hunts, were for the purpose of buying things that were unavailable in a small town like Jonesboro. How well I remember those trips, piled into my mother’s wood-paneled station wagon with Mother smoking a cigarette (a habit she later quit), my sister and I roaming freely throughout the car because no one wore seatbelts in those days. We crossed the flat Arkansas delta and then, suddenly, the ragged skyline of the River City came into sight. Crossing the long bridge, the water below coursing in great swirls of brown wash, was like being transported into another world.
Our usual first stop, at my urging, was James Davis, a well-known haberdashery, where the neatly folded boys’ shirts were stacked in a wall of wooden cubbyholes. Locating the one marked with my size, I pulled out every shirt and chose my favorites, which I then presented to Mother. She would tell me I could only have three shirts and even that was pushing it, but she was ultimately fighting a losing battle: My father was well dressed, and my grandfather was a veritable clotheshorse.
After lunch at Britling’s Cafeteria on Poplar Avenue, we would resume our shopping at department stores like Goldsmith’s and Julius Lewis. Later, we would hit Seessell’s Supermarket for date bread, French horns, and chocolate éclairs, and then we would double back for a stop at Mednikow’s Jewelers. By this time it would be getting dark and my sister and I would be getting cranky, so to placate us Mother would take us to TGI Friday’s in Overton Square for fried shrimp dipped in cherry sauce. On the drive back to Jonesboro, Mallory would fall asleep under the glow of the car’s dashboard and I would tell Mom that I was never going back to Memphis with her ever again. But inevitably, as Christmas drew closer, I would rethink that position.
This December trip to Memphis with my father, however, was no mere pre-Christmas shopping excursion. He and I were headed to a Razorback post-season bowl game against Tennessee. It would be a game my dad would never forget—the game in which his son’s once-private fanaticism first showed its rabid face in public.
The night was cold and misty, and the brooding atmosphere in Liberty Bowl Stadium evoked what I imagined to be the feeling of war. My pulse quickened when the Razorback players charged the field like a white-clad army. I’ve always easily surrendered to the grandeur, pageantry, and formality of college football. No other sport offers quite the same sense of scale and drama and clash, and at any game involving the Arkansas Razorbacks, I’ve also always—since this Liberty Bowl game against the Tennessee Volunteers—had a problem with self-control.
It happened late in the fourth quarter, when, with the Hogs up 13-7, Arkansas running back Jon Richardson fumbled. The fumble happened on the far sideline, but I swear I saw a Razorback player (specifically, number 74) rise from the pile with the football cradled to his chest. He handed the ball over to the referee, who promptly awarded possession to Tennessee.
At which point I snapped like The Incredible Hulk.
I stood on my seat and booed and stomped. My squeaky 11-year-old voice carried to all those around us as I, incredulous, implored my father to make sense of what had just happened. “They can’t give the ball to Tennessee! Can they? Huh? Huh? How can the referee do that? This isn’t right! Can’t somebody do something?”
I brayed and brayed. I would not let it go. (I have never let it go.)
By this point, my father was less interested in what had happened on the field than in what was happening right beside him. Even he was taken aback by my sustained outrage. Yet he did nothing to deter me — didn’t even offer a calming pat on the back. He just let my berserker fit play out, regarding my tantrum with eyebrows raised and perhaps—as I’ve gathered during his many retellings of this story through the years—some kind of twisted pride.
As fans, it’s interesting to ponder just what influences our behavior. How much of what we do owes to nature? How much is due to nurture? My dad has always been a moderate man. He drinks a bit, but never overdrinks. He likes good food, but seldom overeats. He rarely ever uses a bad word. Yet, like his mostly-Irish mother and two younger brothers, he can get hot when his temper is stirred. Growing up, I remember Dad’s ongoing war on mosquitos. Each summer, as these pests swept in from the flooded rice fields that encircled Jonesboro, Dad would say, “So many mosquitos, they fly in formation!” Inevitably, over the course of any summer, my sister or I would carelessly leave the screen door ajar, and each time the house became infested with mosquitos my dad would come unhinged. Tormented by the thought of even one mosquito in his bedroom, he would stalk it like a demon and smack it against the white ceiling with my mother’s flyswatter. Yet throughout this blatant rip-off at the Liberty Bowl, my father, the crazed mosquito hunter, kept his cool. My outrage was enough for both of us, apparently. And my anger burned even hotter when, after being gifted this fumble, the Vols scored to win the game.
Dad and I walked silently to the outer parking lot. It was late, and with the gloomy weather and the winter solstice, I felt as though it had been dark all day. The fact was, my sense of right and wrong had been deeply offended, and any lingering joy I felt in being with my father was buried beneath my disappointment over how the Hogs had been jobbed. As we crossed over the Mississippi River, the lights of Memphis receded and the sprawling cotton fields of eastern Arkansas were as black as my mood.
When I walked into our house, my mom said, “I’m so sorry, hon,” as if I’d been mugged in Memphis. Her hair was matted on one side — she had fallen asleep while waiting up for Dad and me — and the TV was still on. I doubted that she had watched the game; she’d probably heard the result on WMC’s 10 o’clock sports report with that loudmouth Jack Eaton. “Are you hungry, hon?”
“No,” I replied, even though I was indeed hungry. But I was in no mood to be agreeable. I plopped down in front of the TV. Who cared what was on? It was only five days before Christmas, always an exciting time because school was out. The previous Christmas, my mother, ever the Good Samaritan, had spiced things up by arranging for us to be joined by Darryl Hamilton, a rough-edged 15-year-old from juvenile detention down at Cummins Prison. I hadn’t asked Darryl any questions about his checkered past, though it didn’t take me long to discern that he wasn’t a Razorback fan. Despite our lack of common interests, over the course of his two-week stay I realized that the only true difference between Darryl Hamilton and me was that I had been born to a good family and he had not.
Through the doorway to the kitchen, I saw my mother and father huddled in conversation. On the wall near the refrigerator hung her flyswatter, the same one that Dad used to stalk mosquitos and Mother sometimes used to rap my sister’s bare legs. I turned down the TV and overheard Dad telling Mother about my brattish behavior during the game — how I’d stood up on my seat, my yelling, my sustained upset. He seemed more pleased than when I’d brought home top marks on my mid-year fifth-grade report card. But as he spoke, I saw a look of consternation spread across my mother’s face, and I knew she wished she’d been sitting beside me earlier that night at the Liberty Bowl with her flyswatter in her hand.
“I’m going to bed, y’all,” I called from the living room. I offered this in a conciliatory tone as I’d decided it was best to end my pout. “Night all. Nite-nite.”