Why I’m Still a Vince Young Fan

Football really gets started tonight for us Texas fans. Down in Austin the University of Texas is playing monster rival, Texas Tech, in a grudge match. Tech stole a victory from UT in the final seconds of the game last year, and we UT fans want revenge. So where will my husband and I be at game time? We’ll be celebrating the 60th birthday of our friend Kyle, a man whose daughter went to Texas Tech.

I’ve got my DVR set up to record the game in case our dinner hosts are cruel enough to want to direct everyone’s attention to the birthday boy and not the TV. Kyle’s a lovely man and all, but this IS Texas and this IS college football.

OK. OK. I might be a little obsessive.

This sports obsession can be traced only as far back as the football season, (also referred to as “fall”), of 2005 when my son Robert was a brand new freshman at the University of Texas in Austin. Robert spent four years in his high school marching band and I was a band mom. I chaperoned the band on the bus to football games, competitions, and on spring trips around the nation. Like many band parents, I believed a football team was there to entertain the fans before and after the halftime show.

Besides, football was confusing to me. Growing up, my brothers had all tried at times to help me understand it. I laugh out loud whenever I recall my brother John’s frustration trying to explain the concept of “downs” to me. At my son’s high school games, my husband Jim and my fellow band parent friends would explain the plays and the calls for me, but it just wouldn’t sink in.

Are you ready for some football?

If you’re wondering what this has to do with Vince Young, I’m getting to that. The first time I saw Vince play was in the 2005 Rose Bowl against the Michigan Wolverines. Robert had been accepted at the University of Texas to begin in the fall of 2005. My brothers each phoned before the game, demanding that Jim and I declare our loyalty. Jim is from Illinois and I’m from Michigan. What was there to declare? We were Big Ten fans to the core.

That night there was magic on that football field and it was all about Vince Young. Even I, a football ignoramus, recognized it. Broadcasters called it the "Texas Two-Step;" call it whatever you like, it was magical. While my brothers grieved that Michigan lost to Texas, I had a secret—I was intrigued by this Vince Young character.

In August, 2005, we moved Robert to Austin and I experienced the onset of ENS: Empty Nest Syndrome. My friends and co-workers fretted over me. “How are you?” they would cautiously inquire. Thankfully, football season started almost immediately. And there was that amazing Vince Young, dazzling me and nearly everyone else who watched him. I got into football. My husband, (who had always been into football), and I watched every game together. I grieved when Vince didn’t get the Heisman Trophy. I was acting weird, even to me.

Anyone who’s been following college football for awhile already knows how the 2005 football season ended. The University of Texas Longhorns were the national champions and beat USC in the final moments of the 2006 Rose Bowl. Once again Vince Young had cast his gridiron magic on everyone and everything. After that season, my brothers began to call me on the weekends in the fall and we would talk football. Now Jim and I long for football season the way you long for the holidays or summer vacation. And it’s possible I owe it all to Vince Young.

Jim and I both agree that getting caught up in UT football took some of the emptiness out of our syndrome that year. We felt closer to Robert watching his team play each week and then talking about the games with him on the phone. We’re calling my obsession with college football my post-midlife crisis now.

Like all University of Texas fans, I was disappointed when Vince left school early to play for the Tennessee Titans pro team. While his pro career has certainly had its challenges, I remain a fan—he’s the guy with the magic to make me love football.

Now it’s Colt McCoy and Hook ‘Em Horns! Have a great football weekend y’all!

Donna

Life Begins Again on Labor Day

By the end of August I start to feel like I live in the Land Down Under. While the northern two thirds of the nation is wishing for a few more days of glorious summer and thinking about all the things they didn’t do while the weather was good, I’m celebrating that I can finally walk outside after 9:00 AM. While people in cooler parts of the nation are thinking there’ll be no more cookouts for awhile, I’m thinking, “Crikey! I can finally stand it outside long enough to burn a couple of hotdogs on the barbie.

I was up in Michigan in early August when the temperatures soared up into the low nineties. At my hotel the clerk was boasting about their 102 degrees—with the heat index. Heat index? Down here in Texas, we don’t need no stinking heat index! It’s 102 degrees without it. We need wind chill factors! Our temperatures here in the DFW Metroplex have dipped down into the low nineties this past week. We’ll call it “plummeting” when they drop down to eighty.

“. . .to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky. . .” John Lubbock. “. . .is to be eaten alive by fire ants.” Me

If you drive through my neighborhood on an average summer day in July, August or September, you don’t hear the laughing voices of children playing in their yards; you hear the hum of air conditioners. Up north where summers are wonderful, they’re way too short, and down here where summers are brutal, they’re interminable. Since my son is all finished with school, it doesn’t matter to me anymore, but kids here are robbed. It is so unfair that during the summer, when the kids are home from school, it’s too damned hot to go outside and play. When we do get a fine summer day sometime in late October or early November, kids down here are stuck in a classroom all day.

While some of you are getting out the stadium blankets and thermoses for your football games, we’re still packing sunscreen and towels to absorb the sweat at ours. If you don’t believe me just watch one of the Big 12 or SEC college football games on TV. Those aren’t tears you see rolling down the fans’ cheeks. That’s pure sweat!

“Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December.” Anderson; Weill

As the days get shorter and minutely cooler, and the angle of the sun gives the sky a golden glow, I start to feel a surge of energy. It’s possible that the energy is actually the high I get from my allergy medicine in the fall, but I don’t care. I love the end of summer and the beginning of winter. The electric and water bills start to free fall and I finally get a reprieve from the weeds in my yard. The lawn service guys stop mowing sometime in November so I have money to spend for Christmas shopping!

With autumn just around the bend, I begin to really miss the pungent smell of just-raked leaves burning by the side of the road on a gray, November morning. Yes, it’s bad for the environment, but it’s not illegal to remember it. I also miss the taste of ice cold, just-pressed apple cider and fresh cake donuts at the cider mill in my hometown. Hmmm. And no, of course I don’t miss thawing out my car for thirty minutes before I can drive it to work early in the morning. I’m nostalgic—not insane.

Donna