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Overview
On any given workday, any little thing might send Steve Smith’s thoughts spinning back to Saturday—last Saturday, Saturday two weeks ago, Saturday two years ago, back into the thrilling minutiae of game day—until reality reminds him: this is not how well-adjusted adults act. Steve Smith is not a well-adjusted adult. He’s a Nebraska football fan, and this is his rollicking account of what it’s like to be one of those legendary enthusiasts whose passion for the Cornhuskers is at once irresistible and hilarious.
A journey into an obsessed Nebraska fan’s soul, Forever Red immerses readers in the mad, mad world of Husker football fandom—where wearing the scarlet-and-cream Huskers gear has its own peculiar rules; where displaced followers act as the program’s ambassadors, finding Husker subculture beyond the pale; and where the team’s performance can barely keep pace with its followers’ expectations but sometimes exceeds their wildest dreams.
Revised, updated, and expanded from the 2005 edition, Smith’s story of thirty-plus years following the team takes readers back to memorable game moments from 1980 up through the roller-coaster ride of recent years. Blending wit and insight, Smith offers a window on the world to the uninitiated and the fellow fanatic alike where fantasy and football meet, where dreams of glory and gritty gridiron realities forever join.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803288003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 804 KB |
About the Author
Steve Smith is an award-winning communications professional who lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Read an Excerpt
Forever Red
More Confessions of a Cornhusker Fan
By Steve Smith
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Steve SmithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8800-3
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning
Nebraska 57, Iowa 0 — September 20, 1980
So there we were, rumbling south down Highway 77 in our Chevy Impala on our way to a football game, when my dad became my hero and the Nebraska Cornhuskers my team for life.
It happened, oddly enough, over the CB radio, the best in-car entertainment in those pre–Game Boy days. The drive to Lincoln from Rosalie, our tiny town of two hundred in the northeast corner of the state, wasn't exactly jam-packed with excitement. There was the traditional pit stop at the Fremont Dairy Queen to look forward to or maybe even an interlude at the corner café in Wahoo. Thankfully, until my oldest sister had decided she was going to the university after high school, Lincoln wasn't a trip I had to endure very often. In the decades that followed — through hundreds of Big Red victories, a couple dozen losses, and thousands of dollars spent on jerseys, sweat shirts, commemorative videos, and season tickets — Lincoln would become the epicenter for nearly every emotion I had, but before 1980 it was just a really long way away. Until then the longest trip I had taken was to Sioux City, some forty miles away, to get school clothes at JCPenney. Lincoln was at least twice as far as that — far enough that we'd have to stop for gas on the way.
My sister hadn't come home to Rosalie for a visit since she left for school in mid-August. My father managed the service station along Highway 77, three miles east of town, and he worked six days a week, fifty-one weeks a year, but he figured if he was ever going to see his oldest daughter again, he was going to have to take a Saturday off, clean the grease from under his fingernails, and drive down to see her. September 20 was to be the first of what presumably would be many trips south over the next four years.
The first time, though, was special; there was something more — a bonus. Two weeks earlier Dad announced at the dinner table that he had pulled a few strings and gotten four tickets to the upcoming Nebraska-Iowa game. This was a really big deal. People from very small towns typically did not go to Husker games. Such indulgences were reserved for businessmen in Pender, the county seat, or for rich farmers. We finished the meal feeling like we had come upon a winning $84 million lottery ticket.
My dad admonished me and my middle sister, who was fourteen, against boasting openly about going — mainly because he was protective of his property, to the point of being paranoid, and didn't want anyone else to know we'd be away for an entire day. But also the crowd at Smith's Standard Station would see going to Lincoln to a game as some kind of elitist, upper-crust activity. This would not mesh well with my dad's constant labor to avoid any appearance of being different from anyone else in Rosalie. That wasn't hard because we weren't, really. Like all our neighbors, our family drove an American car, ate red meat, watched CBS, and had a blue-collar patriarch under our roof who drank Budweiser and voted a straight Republican ticket. We viewed the lifestyles of people in Lincoln and Omaha much the way people in Lincoln or Omaha probably viewed the lifestyles of people in Amsterdam or Barcelona — distant, foreign, and basically irrelevant, except maybe as a source of hypothetical interest or curiosity. Apparently that was changing, thanks to my oldest sister. When she moved to Lincoln to broaden her horizons, she forced us to broaden ours too.
This would be my first game, but the Huskers were not exactly an unknown quantity. Simply because I had been living and breathing for nine consecutive years within Nebraska's borders, I knew what the Cornhuskers were: pretty damn good, that's what. Also, I knew that their coach was the red-haired Tom Osborne and that the radio announcer yelled hilarities into his microphone when things went particularly well. The school song was "There Is No Place Like Nebraska"; I knew that one because my dad's friend had a car horn that played the tune. People wore red-and-white shirts and caps quite a bit and seemed to talk a lot about the team, even in the summer months, when the Cornhuskers weren't playing. It would be some time until I fully understood the important territory the team occupied in Nebraskans' collective consciousness, but I was old enough to feel Husker football's formidable presence and grasped the general concept that it was significant and special, that it was our thing.
As we bounced southward down the highway that Saturday morning, channel 16 on the CB picked up two Hawkeye fans, presumably also on the way to Lincoln. It was clear they liked the Hawks' chances. After all, they argued, the year before the mighty Huskers had to rely on a last-second field goal to steal a road victory. And though it was early in the season, conventional wisdom said the Hawkeyes were a better team this year. The Cornhuskers were about to be ambushed.
"Oh, baby, Big Red's gonna get beat today," one of them cackled. "Don't know what's going to hit 'em!"
Until that point my father was content to just listen in and let the poor, misguided boobs have their fun. But now they had crossed a line. He seized the mike. "Big Red get beat? Bullshit," Dad said.
What followed was a colorful radio conversation that included but was not limited to Nebraska's powerful running attack, Iowa's knockoff-Pittsburgh-Steelers uniforms, the Cornhuskers' doberman-like defense, Iowa's overrated leading rusher, and the fact that the closeness of last year's game was an accident precipitated by unforced Nebraska turnovers. I don't remember exactly how the tête-à-tête ended, except that near the end my father boldly predicted that Iowa would be lucky to score, that the game would be basically over by halftime, and that the Husker backups would be mercifully dispatched to mop up for a sizeable chunk of the second half.
And off it went — the first tiny flame of my fandom was sparked. I would love to say that it actually happened during a sepia-toned afternoon at the old ballpark while Dad and I shared a stadium dog and then mix in a few Springsteen lyrics about him tousling my hair, setting me on his lap, and telling me to take a good look around. But instead it came in the backseat of the Impala, my fourteen-year-old sister whining about my leg being on her side of the car as my dad dropped the Hammer of Thor on a couple of uppity Iowans. We still had more than an hour to go to get to Lincoln, but I'd already experienced one of the day's highlights. Plus, my anxiety over the game, which I had felt building in the pit of my stomach all morning, suddenly subsided. My father, the chief authority and influence in my life, had pronounced that the Cornhuskers were going to win, and win big. I could kick back and relax.
It didn't take long that afternoon for Nebraska to get into the end zone and to start its unavoidable beatdown of the early season opponent. In my mind's eye, I can see that first touchdown clearly: Jeff Quinn, the quarterback from Ord, takes the snap, turns, and shovels a quick pitch out to Jarvis Redwine, the swivel-hipped I-back with a quarterback's number; No. 12 gathers in the ball near the west sideline, slips past a defender, makes a clever cutback move about 5 yards past the line of scrimmage, and then gallops half the length of the field into the end zone — the south end zone, where we were sitting, sixty-five rows up. It was the first big run by a Cornhusker I-back I'd experienced, and over the years it would serve as my mental blueprint for all great Nebraska backs taking that same pitch and running to daylight and glory.
What I remember most about that first trip to Memorial Stadium, however, isn't touchdowns and tackles. It is everything else. The game was played in that jungle-style kind of heat that can make people just burst into flames. On the way into the stadium Dad bought me a balloon to release upon NU's first touchdown, and it damn near melted in the sun before I could let it fly, barely two minutes in. The band cranked out "Hail Varsity," a second, more regal school song to go along with the one I already knew. The big orange scoreboard flashed messages for businesses like First Federal Lincoln and the Monsanto Company. I had the odd sense that everyone but us had been here before, that everyone else here was from much bigger towns than we were, and that they knew the whole drill a lot better. They recognized when it was time to do the "Go Big Red (clap)! Go Big Red (clap)!" cheer, and when they did, it was in perfect unison, almost as if it were choreographed. Suddenly I felt very small.
Perhaps most, it was the bigness of it all that transfixed me — from the booming, omnipresent PA announcer to the massiveness of the press box to that low, earthy rumble that erupted into a wall of noise when Quinn or Redwine or Anthony Steels or Derrie Nelson or any other red-jerseyed wildman made a big play, giving everyone a reason to leap from their seats, release guttural noises, and punch the air. By halftime it was 35–0 on the way to 57–0, and my father's pregame pronouncement to the insolent Iowans came back: They'll be lucky to score; the game'll be over by halftime ... It had gone just as he had said it would. When it was all over, my imagination had been suitably captured — in the free moments of the days, weeks, and months that followed, that glorious, bright-red spectacle was just about the only thing I would, or could, think about.
So that's how it got started. No drawn-out application process, no lengthy deliberation, just some smack-talking from my father, overpriced parking by the Fourteenth Street railroad tracks, and one long, superlative burst of scarlet. Like the Hawkeyes, I was completely inundated with red that day.
I suppose that if it had just been an uneventful ride down to the game and Dad hadn't gotten into it with those Hawkeyes, I still would've walked away a fan, so overpowering was that first encounter with the Big Red. Two weeks later I listened as Lyell Bremser mournfully described how Quinn's fumble at the Florida State 3-yard line ended Tom Osborne's shot at an undefeated year, and it hurt — but it didn't matter. We were sitting in the parking lot of the Southern Hills Mall in Sioux City, Mom had just bought me a new red T-shirt, and I was in this for the long haul.
CHAPTER 2High Octane
Nebraska 48, Oklahoma State 7 — October 18, 1980
At a very early age, usually about the time walking and talking are under control, every child in a Devaney-fearing Nebraska home is introduced to Football Saturday. This is, one quickly learns, a holy day when everyone douses himself in red clothing — some of it faded, some of it too small for expanded midsections, but red nonetheless. Meantime, the American flags on big white houses in places like Fremont and Wayne and West Point are supplanted by red ones with big block Ns. And on Football Saturdays, you can go into any building, anywhere in the state and hear the Nebraska game on the radio.
In 1980 radio was a lifeline for Nebraskans on Football Saturday. They had four stations to choose from — it was just a few years before Bob Devaney, as the athletic director in pursuit of as many Benjamins as possible, narrowed the Cornhusker broadcasting field to one originating station in an exclusive deal — KFOR or KLIN out of Lincoln, or WOW or KFAB out of Omaha. But honestly, it didn't matter to my brood. We were a one-station family. On fall Saturdays our dials were dutifully cemented at 1110 AM, the residence of one Lyell Bremser.
By that drizzly mid-October day, Lyell was going on his forty-first year of woofing out his unique brand of play-by-play. For more than four decades, he'd repeatedly beckoned the men, women, and children to listen in. It was Bremser's turns of phrase that were repeated to roars of laughter at Sunday school the next morning.
The day Nebraska hosted 0-4 Oklahoma State, I went to work with my dad because my mom had to clerk at the Rosalie Post Office in the morning. As he often did on Saturdays, Dad took the fuel tankwagon out for a few deliveries. After five days of pounding on tires and changing farmers' oil, it was nice to have some time away from the station. Further, the tankwagon had a really good AM radio.
The first stop was a farm west of Rosalie. On a normal day there would have been plenty of things for a fourth grader to talk about with his dad: school, hunting, cars, the genius that was Kenny Rogers, and so on. But today Bremser's voice was the only one getting a workout. And in the time it took us to drive the seven miles to the first delivery, Lyell had informed us that Nebraska had, as expected, bolted into the lead over the sad-sack Cowboys. The first score was courtesy of a Jeff Quinn pass to tight end Jeff Finn.
Minutes later Bremser described one of the day's most memorable plays: Quinn drops back to pass and throws toward wingback Anthony "Slick" Steels near the goal line. But, oops, Oklahoma State's Greg Hill gets in the way at the 15 and tips the pigskin up into the air. The ball flutters toward Steels, No. 33, at the 5, but he can't gather it in, so he gives the football an underhand tap and sends it fluttering into the air again. By the time Slick reaches the 1, the ball settles in his hands for good, and he skips into the end zone, untouched, for 6 points. Touchdown, Nebraska — just like they drew it up.
As we headed north toward the next delivery, Nebraska's fortunes took a bit of a dip. The Huskers had installed an option offense, and when they weren't rumbling, they were fumbling. On successive drives NU fumbled twice then had a punt blocked. Nebraska got it together in time to stick in a late second-quarter touchdown to go up 21–0, and while that made me feel a bit better, apparently I was the only one. There was a tone in Lyell's voice that reflected what everyone else in the Cornhusker State was thinking: This thing's a lot closer than it's supposed to be, dadgummit.
Things got worse before they got better. The second half had started just as Dad was stopping the tankwagon for the fifth delivery, and sure enough, fullback Andra Franklin coughed the ball up again. When the Cowboys scored to pull within 21–7, Dad grunted, then climbed out of the cab and onto the top of the tankwagon, leaving me with Lyell.
The Cornhuskers, apparently awakened by the sight of the visiting Cowboys actually putting points on the scoreboard, pulled off the kid gloves. What followed was an onslaught that overwhelmed and crushed the Pokes. Craig Johnson with the ball — Touchdown! Roger Craig on the carry — Touchdown! Johnson takes the handoff again — Touchdown!
After each score, I climbed out of the cab and yelled gleeful updates to my father. He'd yell back, making sure he had heard me right: "Twenty-eight seven? Thirty-five seven? Forty-two seven?" By the time the last stop's tank was full, that little OSU insurrection had been quashed right quick, order had been restored, and Jimmy Johnson's pretenders were fading from the almighty Big Red's rearview mirror.
I'd eventually come to learn that this was no big deal, not really. There was one of these Husker scoring flurries every time our boys played an overmatched Big 8 team. We knew it was coming, they knew it was coming, the officials knew it was coming, Tom Osborne's pastor's chihuahua knew it was coming. It was only a matter of time — at some point the outmanned opponent's jig would be up and the thrashing would be on.
But Lyell Bremser, true to form, made it sound like he was the most shocked son of a gun in the state when the anvil finally fell, and fell hard, on the Okies. And so I was surprised by the outburst too. That was the beauty of radio. It wasn't just part of the game — it was the game. The announcer's word was law — robbed of your sight, you channeled his surprise, his anxiety, his excitement, and his indignation at a lousy call. And if Lyell Legend was surprised by a 21-point blitzkrieg, then I was too.
In a decade's time, the College Football Association would wither to dust and so would its rules restricting the number of times a school could be shown on TV each autumn. The major conferences, along with independent Notre Dame, would jockey for multimillion-dollar TV deals, meaning Nebraska's games against four-touchdown mutts like Troy State would get at least regional coverage and an 11 a.m. kickoff. But in 1980 the red-and-white world built by Lyell Bremser's nasal staccato was all we had, and in that reality, the Cornhuskers were giants that walked the earth.
Today, only the dinkiest pockets of Nebraska are without cable TV. And there, local taverns will pony up for a satellite dish so they can host community-wide watch parties. So for the big majority of Nebraskans, there's no mystery in following the Cornhuskers and certainly no room for artistic interpretation. Football Saturday has become a high-definition spectacle — football for consumption, no imagination required. I'll take it, of course, since we obsessive fans will take as much of our object of obsession as we can get. But while TV is more, it's not necessarily better.
Look no further than TV announcers. They're resigned to merely keeping the pictures on the screen company because they know their words can't do them justice. And TV's made us lazier as fans: Each week, live on our monstrous, high-definition flatscreens, the players — their mannerisms, their strengths, and more important, their flaws — are served up to us on a silver platter. And a fat lot of good it does us. TV's given us access to vast amounts of information about the game, but we aren't more knowledgeable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forever Red by Steve Smith. Copyright © 2015 Steve Smith. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Saturday,
Rosalie,
The Beginning,
High Octane,
Busted,
The Scapegoat and the Savior,
Perfect,
Are You There, God? It's Me, Steven,
Acceptance,
In All Kinds of Weather,
Shut Up and Play,
Misery,
Moving On,
University,
What Not to Wear,
Higher Learning,
Reality,
Mad Mike and the Hopping Cop,
Culture Club,
Worn Down,
Two Loves,
Prejudice and Pride,
Away,
Iowegia,
Fever Rising,
At Last,
Trouble,
Priceless,
Baud to the Bone,
Blackshirts and Black Cats,
Ode to Scott,
The Tomfather,
Big Red Country,
Parity Poopers,
Home,
The Good Life,
Flag Football,
The Huskersphere,
The Others,
Good Grief,
We Don't Know the Words,
Hook, Line, and Husker Nation,
At Game's End,
In the Red,
Boy with a Coin,
Back,
Here to Stay,
Exodus,
Enough,
Homeboi,
These Are Days,