Tài liệu Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan ppt

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University of Nebraska Press : Lincoln and London
Forever Red
Confessions
of a Cornhusker
Football Fan
steve smith
:
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Smith. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Typeset in Minion and designed by Richard Eckersley.
Printed by Maple-Vail, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Steve, 1970–
Forever red: confessions of a Cornhusker football fan /
Steve Smith. p. cm.
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-4310-1 (hardcover: alkaline paper)
isbn-10: 0-8032-4310-3 (hardcover: alkaline paper)
1. University of Nebraska-Lincoln – Football.
2. Nebraska Cornhuskers (Football team) 3. Football
fans – Nebraska. i. Title
gv958.u53s65 2005 796.332'63'09782293–dc22
2005004656
For my family, and my friends,
and every Red Clad Loon

who ever took a dip in The Pond

contents
Acknowledgments ix
Saturday xiii
Rosalie
The Beginning 3
High Octane 7
Busted 10
The Scapegoat and the Savior 14
Perfect 19
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Steven 22
Acceptance 25
In All Kinds of Weather 31
Shut Up and Play 35
Misery 38
Moving On 42
University
What Not to Wear 47
Higher Learning 50
Reality 53
Mad Mike and the Hopping Cop 59
Culture Club 64
Worn Down 68
Two Loves 71
Prejudice and Pride 76
Away
Iowegia 85
Fever Rising 89
At Last 92

Trouble 97
Priceless 102
Baud to the Bone 106
Blackshirts and Black Cats 110
Ode to Scott 113
The Tomfather 117
Big Red Country 122
Parity Poopers 127
Home
The Good Life 135
Flag Football 139
The Huskersphere 142
The Others 147
Good Grief 150
We Don’t Know the Words 155
Hook, Line, and Husker Nation 160
At Game’s End 166
In the Red 169
Afterword 175
One would think all this came flowing out of my obsessive fanboy
brain and straight into print without any help. Not even close. I’d like
to thank Catharine Huddle and Peter Salter for their keen eyes for
detail; Julie Koch for her no-nonsense approach and critical eye;
Kelly Steinauer, Casey Coleman, and Mary Jo Bratton for their
timely help; Ted Kooser for his valuable time and equally valuable
advice; Richard Piersol for knowing all the right people; Rob Taylor
for being one of those people; and finally, Kathy Steinauer Smith for
her love, support, enthusiasm, and patience as I paced the living
room floor and talked through these ideas for what to her must have
seemed like the millionth time. She can probably recite this book

from memory, folks.
acknowledgments
xii
xiii
You know that feeling? The one where it seems like it’s a different day
of the week than it really is? It usually occurs during the holidays or
when your work schedule gets all screwed up. You go into the office
Tuesday after Memorial Day, and you have to keep reminding your-
self that it’s not, in fact, Monday. Or worse, your boss has to remind
you. And then you think, Good grief, just how out of touch am I?
That’s what I go through pretty much every day. In my mind it al-
ways seems to be Saturday.
It starts off innocently enough. Someone will come by my desk,
perhaps, and mention what they watched on tv over the weekend.
They’ll say something about an episode of The Sopranos in which
Robert Loggia made a cameo appearance. Before they’re done my
internal monologue is already going through the paces: Robert
Loggia’s sure had some interesting parts over the years, hasn’t he? Like
when he played that growly assistant football coach in Necessary
Roughness. And that leads me to: Hey, you know who else made an
appearance in that movie? Roger Craig. And the next thing you know,
I’m at Memorial Stadium. Again. This time it’s 1981, and Roger’s
dressed in red, jetting 94 yards down the Astroturf for a touchdown,
with a pair of Florida State defenders helplessly flapping along in his
wake. The school record for longest run from scrimmage that was,
and it stood for twenty years, until Eric Crouch got 95 with that im-
possible run at Mizzou. And that gets me to consider: Who’d win in a
footrace between Crouch and Craig, if Craig were in his prime, of

course? Hmmm . . .
Eventually I come back to reality. Sometimes it’s Friday, the Husk-
ers are in town tomorrow, and the whole state is alive with anticipa-
tion. And sometimes it’s just an ordinary Wednesday in July, fall
camp is still a month away, and the whole state is dying of boredom.
So I check the clock at HuskerPedia.com, which counts down the
days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the season’s first kickoff. It’s
not moving fast enough.
About then, a tiny spark of self-awareness tells me that this is just
not how well-adjusted adults act. Well, I’m not a well-adjusted adult.
Saturday
Saturday
xiv
I’m a Nebraska fan. This is what we do. We obsess about the Huskers
– some of us more than others, and I’m among the “some of us” not
the “others.”
Nebraska fans are legendary for their devotion. You hear about
guys all the time who boast of attending 357 consecutive home
games, usually wearing the same red windbreaker and lapel-pin-cov-
ered trucker hat. These are men who spend their free time in base-
ment “war rooms” festooned in Cornhusker paraphernalia. Their
dogs are named Frazier, Osborne, or Rozier, and their Fords have
bumper stickers proclaiming Memorial Stadium the state’s third-
largest city. They go to Misty’s on Friday nights in the fall, tailgate
with their wives the next day, and frown on scheduling weddings
anytime between September and January. And when the subject of
the Memorial Stadium home game sellout streak comes up, they as-
sume the same gushy expression they had the day their children were
born. These are tried-and-true fans to be sure.
And then you’ve got people like me. I don’t need a media guide to

come up with top-of-the-head gimmes like the number of yards we
gained rushing without being stopped for a loss against New Mexico
State in ’82 (677) or which wideout holds the record for most touch-
down catches in the Spring Game (Riley Washington with three) or
why Cory Ross wore No. 22 his first two years before switching to No.
4 as a junior (he wore No. 4 through high school, but the number was
occupied by Judd Davies during Ross’s freshman and sophomore
years at Nebraska, so those years he put on No. 22, or two plus two).
I also can’t resist the urge to inject the Big Red into everyday con-
versations. Doesn’t matter what the topic is – politics, pop culture,
the economy – I can always find a way to refer to Nebraska football
and give my friends an opportunity to look at me with bewildered
amazement and/or pity. Last, I can say sincerely that of all of Martin
Scorsese’s films I like Casino best – and not because of Joe Pesci’s fake
Chicago accent, Robert DeNiro’s malleable mug, or even Sharon
Stone’s comely derriere. I like it because in the final eight seconds of
this three-hour picture, there’s a lovely, bittersweet closing scene in
which the tragic hero, sitting in his living room on a fall afternoon,
poignantly accepts his lot in life, and there, off in the background
and out of focus, Nebraska is playing on his tv. This is the kind of
thing that separates good cinema from great cinema.
I consider myself lucky that my obsession is dressed in scarlet and
Saturday
xv
cream. And I’m fortunate that through the years that fixation has
withstood occasional bouts of apathy, grief, and downright disgust.
It’s carried on through advancing age, evolving interests, expanding
worldviews, and frequent zip code changes. Seems like no matter
where I am or what I’m doing, a Saturday at Memorial Stadium is
always just a few daydreams away.

So, welcome to my world. Welcome to a place where it’s always
Saturday.

Rosalie