IS UT READY FOR IT TO MEAN MORE?
7/29/2022
by Larry Carlson ( lc13@txstate.edu )
Professor Larry Carlson interviewing Randy McEachern in 1977
I will say this. It's gonna be loud when Texas and Alabama tee it up in Darrell K Royal - Texas Memorial Stadium on a crispy, not crisp, early autumn morning in the not-too-distant future.
It was very loud when I was in the stands one sweltering September night three years ago as UT hosted LSU in what was supposed to be part one of a home-and-home arrangement. I actually thought that, at times, it was as loud as I've heard Texas fans in many years.
In the end, it didn't matter. The Texas defense, having boasted all week about its "DBU" status, could not make a play on a long 3rd-and-17. Game, set and match to Joe Burrow and LSU.
Raucous home crowds across the country can seem like difference makers at times, causing offsides penalties and signal-calling confusion or creating a daunting atmosphere.
Even if the upcoming 2022 model of Longhorn football evolves into a showy Lamborghini or a sleek Aston Martin, rather than the sputtering Ford Pinto it has resembled for a dozen long years, it's not just the team that needs to get better.
While Texas is at this point not in the same league -- literally and figuratively -- as Alabama, Georgia, and other squads that will push you around, take your cafeteria card, and eat your lunch, neither is its tailgating or game-time aura in the same universe as top programs in the SEC.
Texas fans, there is work to do.
The tailgating at Texas, boasted about by many, is more hat than cattle.
But we Texans do like to brag. And Austin itself is often hyperbolic about how good things are.
Kinda like that whole "Live Music Capital of the World" deal. Hmmm. Some music critics have noted correctly that the last time anybody from Austin had a Billboard hit song, it was 1986, That's when a quirky band called Timbuk3 made the airwaves with a novelty-esque tune called "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades." The song title was longer than the band's time in the limelight and certainly did not foretell UT's football fortunes.
The Horns of '86 became UT's first losing football team in thirty years., then turned in two more losing records in the next three seasons. Fans required Stevie Wonder-style shades to hide behind.
Apologies for that musical distraction. But the tailgating at Texas needs improving. Part of the problem has to do with the scarcity of open green spaces. For a place with so many tree-huggers, asphalt and concrete are the prevailing flora. As hippie earth child Joni Mitchell sang long ago, "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot. Oooh, lot, lot, lot, lot." There I go with the music. Sorry, again.
Full disclosure: I haven't witnessed tailgating festivities at the majority of the SEC schools, but I have spent remarkable afternoons and evenings for thirty to forty games amid the pandemonium at LSU, Alabama, Ole Miss and Arkansas. Fans in those locales remind me of that joke about what goes into a breakfast of ham and eggs. The hen who lays those eggs, like Texas fans, is involved. But the pig, like SEC fanatics responsible for the ham, is downright committed.
Speaking of such, I've seen LSU boosters lined up in RVs on Thursdays, anticipating their entry into the Tiger Stadium parking areas. And I''ve seen committed pigs being roasted in the ground outside "Death Valley," as a Cajun twist on Hawaiian luau cuisine.
For plenty of reasons, I think LSU can retire the trophy for best overall football setting in the South and therefore the nation. Hordes of good folks who like to be just a little bit inhospitable to fans of visiting teams, constantly chanting "Tigah bait, Tigah bait" at people not dressed in purple and gold. (Note: People from Aw-barn, the Aggies of the Deep South, always think they're clever and sly when they yell back, "Yeah, go Tigers." Haha. The joke is usually on Aw-barn. It got so loud at one Tigers-Tigers cage-fight in Baton Rouge that the noise registered on university seismographs. "The Earthquake Game," as it came to be known, was in 1988, one year before my first experience at Tiger Stadium, and LSU upset a fourth-ranked Auburn team.
So hell yeah, it's loud there. Especially for night games, when most ticket-holders (and sometimes an additional 80-thousand fans outside the stadium) have had 48 hours to work on their thirsts and get in the mood for some football. Do the LSU Police have a problem with that, as security types might in Austin?
"If we see somebody dat ain't havin' faw-un," one such officer drawled when I interviewed him some years ago, "...we jes' go find out why, and we get it fixed." Simple enough. Bottoms up.
For now, I don't need to detail the glories of the settings and the intimidating atmosphere at Alabama or Arkansas (where Texas players have been known to keep their helmets on at all times to ward off emptied bottles of moonshine or Jim Beam). Nor must I remind you that it's in good, expected form for gents to wear khakis and ties and for women to wear party dresses and heels, before entering the area of candelabras and fine tailgate dining at Ole Miss's vaunted "Grove." Have another julep, Dahlin'.
It's time for Texas fans to do some traveling and scouting, in order to up their tailgating game. No need to go off-roading and check things at College Station. Naturally, UT is still far ahead of A&M when it comes to tailgating. Many maroon tents in vast parking lots do not a glorious ambience make.
But there's ample room for improvement and innovation at the Forty Acres, good things to emulate and tweak in a custom way. Perhaps a quick flight to Atlanta and short drive to Athens to take a peek "Between The Hedges" is the ticket for you. Or a direct flight to Orlando could set up a drive of just two hours to visit "The Swamp" at Gainesville. The destinations of Baton Rouge, Tuscaloosa and Oxford make for alluring road trips to witness the recommended way to tailgate.
The major attitudinal overhaul necessary, though, is inside the stadium. I recall my Dad (UT '47) shaking his head and cussing some fellow Longhorn backers when we'd attend games back in the '60s. "Gol-darn (not really) sunza-bleeps (not really) people getting here in the second quarter and leaving in the third," he would grouse.
Mack Brown was more genteel several decades later when he preached, "Come Early, Be Loud, Stay Late, Wear (Burnt) Orange." Still, in this writer's book, UT's home games in the Mack era were never intimidating. Full houses, yes. Great teams, yes. But most visiting teams and their fans saw visits to Texas as entertaining and glitz, certainly nothing approaching a gantlet to be run, an ordeal to survive.
Maybe it's through the burnt orange glasses of kid-dom for me, but late-arriving socialites notwithstanding, i can recall plenty of wildly noisy Texas crowds in sold out, 65-thousand-seat Memorial Stadium, especially during big, close games. Lots of thunderous "We're number one" chants, along with frenzied "Go, Horns, go" bellowing during big drives. Cow bells were even still in vogue and allowed.
What topped the charts in the way of intimidating scene-setting was a regular pre-game offering, long before the Horns decided to follow the lead of trashy programs like Miami's (and ultimately everyone else's) and enter the field through blasts of smoke. I cannot be the last person to recall chill bumps sprouting when the players who had taken a short walk from the locker room and climbed stairs to the field level, then snaked out, emerging to the crowd as they ran through narrow lines of a student service group.
The Longhorns joined the crowd and sang "The Eyes of Texas" with an almost religious fervor. There they were, horns up, warriors in burnt orange, staring down the opposing team forced to mill around and watch from just across the field. That's when there was a home field advantage. That's when Texas went eight years and spare change between home losses. Of course, Texas also won six consecutive conference titles in that same span. Now UT has settled for six conference crowns in the last forty years. So there's that.
Starting this fall, the Horns' on-field performances must begin to greatly improve and rise from the alarming dozen years that yielded ten losses to OU, eight to Oklahoma State, seven to TCU, six to Baylor, and five to West Virginia. Those ruffians over in the SEC are playing chess, armed with switchblades and brass knucks, while the Big XII dudes who have been bullying Texas are playing Candyland.
And for UT tailgaters, McConaughey wannabes, and Joe Fan types, know this: Old couches and new pellet grills in lots near the Capitol won't instantly qualify for tailgating honorable mention. Cutesy, family-friendly Bevo Boulevard doesn't intimidate anyone. Family photos on the Jumbotron and WWE wrestling-style announcers don't add anything. Consistently loud, rowdy student sections would. But forging a team that begins to consistently beat teams it should, that wins fourth-quarter gut checks, is absolutely an essential baby-step back to big-time relevance.
