Orange Bowl Memories

U of Miami plays its last game in the OB this weekend. Several writers are doing the "what a stadium...what memories...etc.". Here's my take.

I went to the Orange Bowl in 1986 to watch the Sooners take on Penn State. What a freaking dump. And that was 21 years ago. I was a soph in college. I took a wrong turn walking to the stadium and stepped into a war zone that made this young Okie think that the Cotton Bowl was surrounded by million dollar estates. I quickly made a u-turn.

Let's see, the stadium lacked: adequate parking; bathrooms; anything remotely resembling comfortable seating; proper police coverage of the area - basically imagine the Cotton Bowl if it lacked the "overwhelming" city support to upgrade it. Sure, Thug U had quite a winning streak there, but if you've every played a national championship game on a "neutral field" that just happens to be in your foe's home stadium or home state, the memories just aren't that grand.

The Sooners have some great history in the Orange Bowl GAME, but the venue those games were played out were irrelevant. JC Watts becoming a precision passer wasn't because he was at the Orange Bowl...Keith Jackson outrunning Penn State DBs...Steve Rhodes making clutch catch after clutch catch...Roland Sales going absolutely freaking nuts and wrecking the Sooners title hopes in 78...all those memories and more were from the game, not the stadium.

I've had the pleasure of visiting some great venues for watching sports; Fenway, Wrigley, the Kingdome (yea, right), Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Husky Stadium. Those places were unique and special for having interesting designs and/or thousands of national memories. When most people think of Orange Bowl stadium, you think of a) a dump; b) one of the most corrupt college fb programs ever and their "storied run" of several national championships from 1984-2002. The Canes home advantage had more to do with the best Florida high school talent that money could buy more so than great support of fans in the area. The stadium's off campus, the folks in the immediate area couldn't afford tickets - or had to purchase tickets off the radar screen to continue to disguise income. It's not like the U has one of those, "consecutive sellout streaks" like Nebraska has (for now) or that the Stoops led Sooners have. They couldn't sell out the stadium.

The OB is nothing special as a venue, unless you count especially bad.

Finally, the game related memory of going to the OB in 1986 was that there was a guy next two me that had a son on the training staff at OU and on the training staff at the University of Tennessee. While we were beating the Nittany Lions, he was also listening to the Sugar Bowl, monitoring the Vols drumming of the Canes. If you wipe off the cobwebs of your brain, you might recall that the Jimmy Johnson led Canes has beaten the Sooners earlier that year in Norman. Jimmy spent the week in NO stumping for poll votes because the Canes were better, and the PSU-OU game was a 1 vs 2 matchup. Anyway, I guess between the Canes partying on Bourbon Street, Jimmy's constant complaining, and Tennesee being good, it all became moot as the Vols drilled the Canes that night. This all being before the days of scoreboard crawls on a Jumbotron (OB doesn't have that now, either, sure didn't 21 years ago). The dad that was next to me was ecstatic over the fortunes of the two teams he was following.