It was a splendid and nostalgic evening at my old stomping grounds, Panther Stadium at Midway, right up until the moment when the actual football game took a turn for the unexpected.
For one thing, it was just the right kind of September evening. Not exactly sweatshirt weather just yet, obviously. But not oppressively hot either. Really nice weather actually. That was the splendid part.
I arrived on the old campus about an hour before kickoff on Friday, in time to catch the end of a tailgate party just outside the stadium. That was the nostalgic part.
Back in the day, by which I mean the mid-1990s, my friends George and Geoff Dethlefsen and a few other guys decided we would begin tailgating before the football games. We weren't football players. We knew some of them. Some of them were friends of ours and some of us played other sports. But since we weren't football players, the logical thing for us to do seemed to be to grill hot dogs and hot links and drink soda and happily fill our bellies before we went into the stadium to watch the football.
The Dethlefsen twins saw this clearly.
We began tailgating and our tailgate party grew into something that quite a few of our fellow students enjoyed. Heck, we even made T-shirts for our second season of tailgating, which would have been in 1995, I guess. In fact, I believe they said TG '95.
We weren't constricted to home games either. Oh yes, we took our show on the road. Once upon a time, we tailgated at Belton and then watched our buddies on the football team lose to the rival Tigers.
As we drove away from the stadium, I hollered through an open car window "Our cheerleaders are still better looking than your cheerleaders." I might have been a punk, but I still think those were the days.
So when I found a group of students tailgating on Friday, it did my heart good. I'm just going to go ahead right now and claim that the Dethlefsens began a tradition that has carried on for these many years and I'm proud to be a small part of that.
And then I walked into the stadium and had the privilege to ride the elevator up to the press box with sportswriting legend Dave Campbell. He of Dave Campbell's Texas Football.
Because I spent seven football seasons on the staff of the Waco Tribune-Herald as a sportswriter, I'm fortunate to have a relationship with Mr. Campbell. So this was a chance to catch up rather than to be in awe of this giant of Texas sports pages.
Like I said, it was quite a fine evening right up until the start of the game.
Unfortunately, the Midway football team, which has ascended to heights far above those of my high school days, had an off night. It was plain to see from the first quarter that the Panthers were out of sync.
And so Belton jumped on Midway, romping to a 31-0 lead by halftime. The Tigers ultimately won, 38-21. This came in stark contrast to the newspaper prediction which pegged Midway as a two-plus-touchdown favorite.
Oh well. I'm assuming our cheerleaders are still better looking than their cheerleaders.
