Evans “Buddy” King
Columnist
We are now well into another football season – nearing the end of high school games and the 3/4 mark of the college schedule. I think we are even nearing the midpoint of the pro season, although I am not sure it ever truly ends. It seems to move seamlessly from the regular season to the playoffs to the Super Bowl to the “NFL Draft”, to “OTA’s” (whatever they are), to summer camps, and back to another regular season.
Like most things in our country, we have evolved from too few of the games to too many. As a child, and the son of an intense sports fan, I vividly remember checking the newspaper TV supplement each Sunday to see which college game (yes, just one most weekends) would be on the air the next Saturday. If I was lucky, it was an SEC or Big 10 game (in the real Death Valley in Baton Rouge or from the banks of the Olentangy in Columbus – funny, some things never change I guess). If I was unlucky, we would have a Saturday afternoon of Holy Cross v. Colgate – the “Eastern Regional Game of the Week”.
I didn’t even know where those schools were and cared even less. Regardless, as ABC said when the games came on the air, we were getting “the color and pageantry of college football”, with just a lot less of it when we had Holy Cross v. Colgate. And we had the lovely tones of Lindsay Nelson and Chris Schenkel originally and then later Keith Jackson, all of whom rivaled the great baseball broadcasters of the era. I still remember Keith yelling, “and here come the Wolverines and there’s a lot of ‘em!”
My typical fall weekends from age four or so till I was actually playing for the Blue Demons consisted of attending CHS games under the Friday night lights, watching the (very limited) college games with my dad on Saturday afternoons, and then watching the Washington Redskins lose on Sunday afternoon. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times all three of my teams won (Tech was my main rooting interest on Saturdays).
Saturday television games were occasionally missed when the Gobblers were playing at home (two home games per year at old Miles Stadium because of its limited seating capacity and because opposing teams couldn’t find Blacksburg), or when the “VPI” team and corps of cadets traveled down the mountain to Victory Stadium (RIP, a wonderful, nostalgic part of my childhood) in Roanoke. Saturday afternoons at home also included listening to the classic tones of Frank Soden broadcasting the Gobblers’ away games from exotic venues (in my world) like Clemson, South Carolina and Wake Forest, North Carolina. In those days it was still Clemson College and Wake Forest College had not yet been bought by a tobacco company and moved to Winston-Salem.
My earliest memories of college football on TV were of sitting on the couch when I was four or five years old with my dad at the home of his great friend Charlie Edwards, just up the hill and around the corner. We didn’t have a television in those early days in my home and when we got one, we didn’t have great reception of the ABC affiliate in Bluefield for a while like Mr. Edwards did.
I begged my dad to take me with him when he started going to Charlie’s for the games. Between his work schedule and community and church activities, his “alone time” was very limited and I suspect he thought my attention span wouldn’t hold up. But as I recall, he was very impressed that I sat on the Edwards’ couch munching my popcorn and swigging Dr. Pepper (seriously, paying rapt attention to the games. At a very early age I could discuss the differences between the Wing T and the “new” I formation, and I understood the significance of the “third Saturday in October” (Alabama v. Tennessee) and knew what “clipping” was).
Obviously, this is a look back at a time when the game was simpler and purer (at least somewhat, I remember my dad saying things like, “you know, Tennessee and Oklahoma pay their players”). Please note, I am writing this column in an observational manner, not judgmental.
I think those days were just part of the evolutionary process that brought us to today’s world of NIL and the Portal and coaches’ buyouts that approach the GNP of many third world countries. Like many I suspect, I originally thought that NIL and the Portal would be the ruination of college sports and would enhance the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It may yet be, but at least in the short run, it seems to have allowed schools who have a rich follower or two to drop huge bags of money on the campus and buy a team – one season at a time though. Sustainable? We shall see.
I am okay with sharing the largesse but part of me misses the days when coaches had part time jobs in their communities (Woody Hayes at Ohio State reputedly refused to accept a salary higher than a fully tenured professor and lived with his family in faculty housing while winning Big 10 championships during that odd period when the Big 10 had 10 schools!) and when getting a full ride scholarship for a high school kid was good enough.
I knew things had changed forever last season when Penn State blew yet another game – at home to Ohio State- and many of the players ignored the long honored Nittany Lions tradition of gathering in front of the student body and singing the school’s alma mater, win or lose. Of course, in their defense, they probably didn’t remember which school they were at.
