Saturday, August 31, 2013

Boomer Sooner! Oklahoma University One of a Kind

When I moved to St. Louis, Missouri to attend chiropractic school, I found that the easiest way to connect with new people in a strange place was to seek out fellow diehards of college football.  It was actually pretty awesome.  By the second month of the 2005 season, I had surrounded myself with huge fans from Ohio State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Florida, and Oklahoma.  Among them, the Sooner became the other half of my dynamic sports-viewing duo.  Jeff and I racked up a lot of hours watching sports during our four years in St. Louis.  Five years removed from those days, we still talk about twice a month, with sports dominating the conversation more than healthcare or family most of the time.  The only talk that I can honestly recall from our eight years as friends that did not eventually veer to sports was the one right before my wedding when we were just idly chatting before the ceremony started.  We even managed to talk about football in the hospital before his son was born.

I went to visit Jeff in Oklahoma in 2010, spending a great weekend with him, his awesome wife, and his vacuum cleaner-loving son - yes, vacuum cleaner loving (they got the kid his own mini vacuum because, even at 18 months, he just wanted to vacuum the floor).  The trip served a dual purpose.  The obvious reason to go was to catch up with one of my closest friends.  The other obvious reason was that his home was 30-minutes from Norman, Oklahoma, where the Sooners were hosting the Florida State Seminoles in week 2 of the college football season.  Jeff scored us tickets through one of his patients.

I awoke that Saturday morning with great anticipation.  I was getting up to go to an OKLAHOMA FOOTBALL GAME.  OU is amongst the pantheon of college football destinations.  Their rich history includes 7 national championships, 5 Heisman trophy winners, a record 47-game winning streak back in the Bud Wilkinson era of the 1950s, and a post WWII era best winning percentage of .763.  Just in the BCS era alone, they've gone to three BCS title games, won the national title once, and produced two Heisman winners (plus freak of nature RB Adrian Peterson, who should have won it in 2004, in my opinion).  So, make no mistake about it, going to see the Sooners in their 82,000 seat stadium was a college football fan's dream.

Jeff's wife, Cassie, dropped us off a ways from the stadium so that we could get a feel for the atmosphere.  Much like the walk from an off campus apartment to Ohio Stadium in Columbus, our walk toward the OU campus provided the unique opportunity to take in the entirety of the Sooner Football experience.  I do not believe that you can merely take a cab to right outside of a stadium and truly get a sense of the culture.  Tens of thousands may attend the game itself, but to get the lay of the gridiron land, you've got to walk through the hundreds of thousands of tailgaters spanning a multi-mile radius.

The beautiful, albeit hot, Midwest day brought the people out in force.  This was the first place that I noticed the style of dresses and cowboy boots for women.  Apparently, it was sweeping the nation and I failed to realize it.  Allow me to reiterate the same words now that I said to my wife when I returned from my trip - the dress and cowboy boots look is 100% A-OKAY with this red blooded American male.  I told my wife it would be a good Christmas gift for me if she bought that country girl themed outfit for her

Anyhow, one of the nice things about attending an early season game is the dreamer's gleam in everyone's eyes.  OU is one of those programs that goes into nearly every season expecting to compete for the national title.  Realistic or not, the fans have that dream heading into Labor Day weekend each year.  With every win, the dream gets closer to becoming reality.  The Sooners had reason to be excited that day.  Carrying a #11 ranking with quiet expectations that they were underrated, OU fans seemed to relish the spotlight that came with 17th ranked, on-their-way-back-to-countrywide-respectability Florida State coming to town.  Each team looked at the game as a chance to gain big game experience (and hopefully a win in the process) before their conference schedules started.  Each fan base, though, saw it as an opportunity to validate and boost their national championship dreams.

People that believe their college football dreams are coming true are fun to be around.  They drink freely and happily; everybody is smiling. Oklahoma University has great accessibility to beer.  Easily the best of my tour stops to date in that department.  Beer is everywhere.  I like a school that embraces that beer and football go hand-in-hand.  One without the other is like KISS without the make up.  Bravo to Oklahoma University for having beer to the left, right, north, south, east, and west.

However...OU is the worst amongst my tour stops to date in the accessibility to bathrooms department.  Sure, there are some portables.  There's about 20 of them for 200,000 people.  Do the math.  Easy access to beer in all directions + 200,000 people + the (Chad's anger fueled) idiocy of restaurant owners not letting you use their bathrooms when you have to urinate like your life depends on it / 20 portable bathrooms = the single most sweat-inducing need to go to the bathroom in my adult life.  Jeff and I decided to go ahead and get in line to enter the stadium.  What seemed like an hour later, we then found the closest men's room, which of course had a line from there to Dallas, Texas.  Jeff kept talking to me about something, but I finally just had to tell him to be quiet.  And then immediately after he stopped talking, I realized that his talking was providing a tiny distraction, so I begged him to start talking about anything - his kid, his favorite movie, the theory of relativity - ANYTHING.  Well, you can guess what happened from there.  Think of Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own.

On my previously described scale of the three things I most desire at a college football site - place to watch football, beer, and bathrooms, OU ranks #1 in beer but dead last in bathrooms.

Me and Jeff at OU (9/11/10)

OU serves up an incredible in-stadium atmosphere.  On September 11, 2010, the fans took all of their early season enthusiasm and let it loose as the Sooner Schooner - a wagon pulled by two ponies - came dashing onto the field with crimson and cream colored muskets blasting small streams of smoke into the air.  A classy tribute to the fallen from 9/11/2001  preceded the raucous Sooner faithful getting hyped up for the opening kickoff.  Right as the game was about to get under way, the crowd erupted into a massively continuous chant of "OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH!"  I remember looking up at the sky, smelling the air, and closing my eyes behind my Aviator sunglasses.  Amidst a wave of enthusiasm surely registering on the Richter scale, I said a little prayer and thanked God for putting me in that place at that time.  When the placekicker smashed the ball toward the opposite end, the quick conclusion to the "OH!" chant came booming from the throngs of Oklahomans.  In unison, they collectively said "U!"  OU was amazing.  One of my favorites on the tour... 

The Sooners emphatically made their case for being a national title contender, throttling FSU 47-17.  They rose to as high as #3 in the country that season before sputtering at Missouri in late October.  They finished the season as the Big 12 Champions with a 12-2 record.