The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is serializing the new book from Blant Hurt, who has been been thrilled, tantalized and tormented by his favorite college football team, the Arkansas Razorbacks, over the past 50 years. Selections from his book will be published weekly through Nov. 15.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blant Hurt is a graduate of the University of Arkansas and lives in Jonesboro. “Not the Seasons I Expected” is his third book. He is also the author of “The Awkward Ozarker,” a memoir, and “Healer’s Twilight,” a novel. Visit www.blanthurt.com to purchase his works.
NINTH INSTALLMENT
LOST OPPORTUNITY
The most crushing losses are those that come after I’ve felt that I had earned the right to experience a signature victory. It’s all about the build-up. Over the past three years under Bobby Petrino, the Razorbacks had shown steady improvement, with his first season at 5-7, his second at 7-6, and, now, in his third, a 5-0 start. Fayetteville was electric as top-ranked Alabama rolled in.
On Friday night, I had dinner with my father at Bordino’s, one of the best restaurants on Dickson Street and always a tough place to get a table on football weekends. Fortunately, my father and a friend of his, Larry Palmer, a manager at J.B. Hunt, had an arrangement best described as you-scratch-my-back-and-I’llscratch-yours.
Each December, Larry spent a week in Northeast Arkansas duck hunting with my dad at his hunting club in the rice fields near Weiner. It was a gentleman’s club with a simple hut that hunters used for changing into wader-boots, yet the surrounding woods were steeped in waterfowling glory. President Jimmy Carter had even hunted there. As the gold morning light slanted through the barren timber and a light south wind rippled across the waist-deep water, the ducks, thick as gnats, would cup their wings as they dropped into the hole. The shotguns were like thunder. My grandfather once turned to my father and said, “Boy, this ain’t huntin’! This is murder!”
As payback for all this, Larry Palmer hosted my dad on football weekends in Fayetteville and secured dinner reservations at Bordino’s, where he knew the owner. On this eve of the Alabama game, the packed dining room was charged with optimism that the Hogs had a real chance to beat the Crimson Tide. My silver-haired father sat beside his wife and chatted with old friends from around the state, including a stooped older ex-Hog player in a jaunty red sport coat. It felt like all of us were in our own private club, a kind of moveable gated community for Razorback fans.
After dinner, I stopped by George’s Majestic Lounge for some live music, then drove north to the Embassy Suites, where, as it happened, the Crimson Tide football team was also overnighting.
On the morning of the game, I went downstairs for breakfast, and it was at the coffee station that I saw Nick Saban: He was just across the red velvet dividing rope, so close I could’ve shaken his hand. I lingered, stealing glances at him. My first impression was that Saban was fairly short, inspiring since I shared his condition. Then the thought occurred that I should somehow engage him in conversation, or just do something to get his attention since this was as close as I’d ever come to the legendary football coach. Quick, what could I say? But my chance slipped away as Saban disappeared into the bowels of the hotel.
It was just past noon when I got to Razorback Stadium, and cars already filled the surrounding parking lots. The tailgating was cranked up in earnest and soon the Hog players, unrecognizable without their numbered uniforms, spilled out of the buses and walked through the cheering fans to the locker room in the Broyles Center. I heard the drumbeat from the Razorback band as game time approached. I was jacked for the 2:30 kickoff (as arranged by CBS, naturally).
The Porkers drew first blood on a touchdown pass to tailback Ronnie Wingo. Arkansas coach Bobby Petri-no had a reputation as a master play caller. On numerous occasions over the last three seasons, I’d watched a successful play and then, with delight, said to myself, “How in the world did So-and-So get so wide open?!” This pass to Wingo, on a wheel route, was just such a play. He brushed off a late-arriving defender and, when he crossed the goal line, thereupon ensued the loudest noise I’ve ever experienced at any college football game. It was later measured at 117 decibels, literally like standing in front of the revving engine of a jet aircraft. The stands vibrated beneath my feet. I worried that they would cave in like some rickety risers in a Third World Country. I envisioned a headline in the London newspapers, “Stadium Collapses in the Backwoods of the Ozark Mountains, Killings Hundreds, Injuring Thousands.”
Early in the fourth quarter, I looked up at the scoreboard — Arkansas 20, Alabama 14 — and thought that if this score held up, I could later say, “I was there,” just as I’d witnessed the triumph over top-ranked Texas back in 1981. To bank such a memory would salve many of my accumulated football wounds, and my longing for such a healing was so deep that if it meant the Hogs would hold the Crimson Tide scoreless over the next 13 minutes, I just might have agreed to have my left pinkie toe amputated.
But the Hogs’ lead didn’t hold up. At six foot seven, quarterback Ryan Mallett was as talented as he was tall — in the huddle, he looked like a ninth-grader standing among sixth-graders. But Saban was a master at exploiting weakness in opponents. The previous summer, Mallett, a rowdy sort, had been arrested on Dickson Street for public intoxication, and down the stretch of this game he threw two interceptions.
I lingered in my seat, too drained to deal with the hordes that crowded the exits. I stared once more at the scoreboard, then glanced back at the press box, then looked up into the fading gray sky. I don’t know what I was looking for. Solace, I guess. What crushed me was that I knew this Razorback team was really good. This opportunity to beat Alabama had been years in the making, yet high-stakes games like this inevitably turn on a few key plays. It all happens quickly, in only a matter of minutes. A play here, a play there, then it’s done forever.
In the immediate aftermath of any loss, I typically find ways to minimize what’s just happened. I tell myself that it’s not such a big deal in the grand scheme of life, that I don’t really care about Razorback football that much anyway, that, when you get right down to it, my team is nothing more than a random assemblage of 21-year-olds who just happen to wear Arkansas Razorback jerseys. Like water spilled on a patch of dirt, it takes time for any loss to fully soak in.
But no matter how I tried to rationalize this loss, the sting was immediate. Already I wondered how, or when, it could be avenged. We would play Bama again next year, of course. But, hellfire, we could never beat a Nick Saban-coached team down in Tuscaloosa. The next best shot was when the Crimson Tide returned to Fayetteville. But two seasons was an eternity in football years, and even then any redemptive victory was unlikely.
Razorback Stadium had mostly emptied out. But as I walked to the exit, a zany thought popped into my mind, and I chastised myself for not having been more aggressive that morning at Embassy Suites. I could’ve done something, anything, to get inside Nick Saban’s head and throw him off his game. After all, he was such a mercurial, hair-trigger coach, apt to lose it over the slightest provocation. I could’ve spilled a cup of hot coffee and scalded him, or coughed with my mouth full of chamomile tea and accidentally-on-purpose spat in his face. “Oh my gosh, Coach Saban, I’m soooo sorry. Can I get you some paper towels, or maybe a can of hairspray?” I could’ve done any number of things to somehow affect a game the Razorbacks could just as easily have won.
SHUGGIE BOWL
FEVER
Two months after the loss to Alabama, the Razorbacks faced sixth-ranked LSU, a bid to the Sugar Bowl on the line. With the Hogs leading 31-20 in the fourth quarter, I made a move that could’ve proved disastrous had the Razorbacks choked away this game — I phoned the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans to book several rooms that required non-refundable deposits, including a room for my father and his wife. This hotel was on Bourbon Street, and I wanted to make it as easy as possible for my dad to participate in all the upcoming fun. He was 71, and I wasn’t sure if the Razorbacks would ever get back to the Sugar Bowl during what remained of his life. Or mine either, for that matter.
The Hogs’ 2011 trip to New Orleans to face Ohio State unleashed three decades of pent-up demand, as Razorback fans descended on the Crescent City in droves. Susanne and I had married six months before, and our crew included most of our family members, including my sister, who, invoking another of her endearing childhood malapropisms, called this the Shuggie Bowl. (When she was 11, as we’d flown over the Atlantic, Mallory had asked Dad if it was the Specific Ocean.)
In the lead-up to the game, our days were full: beignets and chicory coffee at Café Dumond, duck sandwiches for lunch at Bayona Restaurant, obligatory pilgrimages to Pat O’Brien’s. Hour-by-hour, drink-by-drink, sumptuous-meal-by-sumptuous-meal, the momentum of the occasion built. No telling how many times I bellied up to the bar at Napoleon House, even for a mid-afternoon iced tea and a package of Zapp’s Potato Chips. Meanwhile, I, along with my stepchildren, John and Emily, became well acquainted with the piano player in the back room of Laffite’s Blacksmith Shop, a popular bar.
I dined with my father one night at Mr. B’s Bistro and we sat at the table where, according to the plaque on the wall, Bill Clinton had sat on September 5, 2002, and September 1, 2004, respectively. This delighted my dad, who was proud to have been a big supporter of Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. He had even served as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1992, the token entrepreneur among a caucus comprised mostly of members of the teachers’ unions.
Just across from Mr. B’s Bistro was the Carousel Bar, where I met a friend from Harvard Business School, a lifelong fan of Ohio State. Through the tall windows that looked out onto Royal Street, I saw hordes of Razorback fans, my kith and kin, marauding about. My friend and I finally nabbed two prime seats, and as we slowly spun around the grand bar he noted with a tone of weary superiority that, as an Ohio State fan, he’d been to numerous high-profile bowl venues in recent years — Miami, Phoenix, Pasadena — but New Orleans was easily the best venue for a bowl game. He loved it, and I did too. Another Sazerac, please!
Lord help me if the Razorback players were having half as much fun as I was. Fortunately, Coach Bobby Petrino was the consummate disciplinarian. The previous year, Arkansas had gone to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis and when three players missed a curfew, he’d sent them back to Fayetteville the next morning on a Greyhound bus. Message sent.
The night before kickoff, the French Quarter was off the leash, the crowd so thick I could barely bull my way down Bourbon Street. From the balconies, red-clad women tossed beads on us revelers below. Most of us in the mosh pit were Arkansas fans, and with go-cups in hand we were pretty much sauced. In a Saturnalian gesture, I wore a tri-cornered pirate hat I’d bought at a consignment store near Jackson Square, and amid the garish neon signs and frolicking fun I felt the long-simmering passion of Razorback fandom course through my Sazerac-clogged veins. It was a fever dream, like bobbing in an ocean of euphoria.
In typical Razorback fashion, the way the game unfolded inflicted a fair amount of everlasting agony. Early on, the Hogs were down 21-7. Then a comeback. With four minutes left and down just 24-20, the Porkers blocked an Ohio State punt. The football just lay there on the turf, waiting for Julian Horton to scoop it up and run into the end zone for the winning score. There was no one around. He had a clear and brief path to the end zone. But Julian Horton didn’t scoop. He didn’t score. Julian Horton just fell on the ground and covered the football.
This would qualify as a disaster only if the Hogs failed to score the go-ahead touchdown. Then Ryan Mallet threw an interception. All of this happened down on our end of the field, as my posse watched from the second row of the upper deck of the Superdome.
After the game, the hoodoo moon was out, and our walk back to the French Quarter had the air of a funeral procession.
*
As unbalanced as I was in the wake of this Sugar Bowl loss, it seemed that my stepson John took it even harder. He and I had become closer over the past year. He needed a father — two years before his father had died at age 48 — and I was blessed to have him as a stepson. And while his sense of life was as different from mine as was his mother’s, easily the most passionate of our shared interests was Razorback football.
As the months passed, John kept bringing up the Sugar Bowl loss, and I wondered why he couldn’t let it go (the notion of my urging perspective on any young fan is rich, I admit). Then I realized why: As a Razorback fan, John had no experience of winning The Big One. Born in 1987, he wasn’t clued in to Razorback football until he was 10 years old or so. By this time, Arkansas had long ago made its fateful move to the SEC. When John was 11, Clint Stoerner had sunk a real chance at a Dynasty Year with his so-called Hand of God fumble at Tennessee. So, there was that. In 2006, the Hogs’ 10-game win streak had ended with three losses, including Reggie Fish blowing the SEC Championship Game with a pull-your-hair-out play against Florida. Then, in the season just past, the Hogs were unable to hold onto their fourth-quarter lead against Alabama. Whenever it had been time for the Razorbacks to meet the moment, the moment had proved too big. For John, all of it was just one disappointment after another, the latest being this Sugar Bowl letdown.
What was remarkable about the younger generation of Razorback fans like John was how they continued to sustain their passion at all. The glory days of 1964 and 1965, the excitement of The Big Shootout, Lou Holtz’s epic Orange Bowl triumph, the five consecutive seasons of at least nine wins under Ken Hatfield — these triumphs were to them what World War II battles were to me: events I knew to be expressions of American greatness, yet so far removed from my personal experience that it was all just bathed in a sepia-toned glaze.
As a young fan, nostalgia, the love of your home state, your father’s raising, your grandfather’s abiding passion can take you only so far. To confirm that all the effort to be a fan is worth it, we all need the occasional fuel of memorable big-time wins. Such triumphs don’t have to come often, but like the rains that sustain life itself, they must come. That’s where John was, and there was nothing I could say to pull him out of it.