Orange Crush 
Hook’d
How a lapsed college football fan traveled to the Rose Bowl for the BCS National Championship and was born again through the joy of tailgating, face-painting, and screaming his lungs out with 94,000 fellow believers who wanted nothing more than their team to win.
Bryan says: This article would have been worth something if it had been published last month, but coming in March I fail to find its relevance for anything. (March 10th, 2010 at 9:40am)
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But the most serendipitous celebrity sighting is reported by Rives, who watched Austin golfer Tom Kite and his wife and daughter, of course in all orange, walk around a corner and bump into a man and his two sons dressed in matching crimson shirts and black-and-white houndstooth pants. The other man was fellow PGA legend Jerry Pate.
“Where else are two U.S. Open champions going to randomly run into each other?” said Rives. “You’ve got to love college football.”
4:50 p.m.: When my buddy shows up from Burbank, we make the twenty-minute walk to the stadium gates. The scalpers outside have given up hope of getting face value, but the primary concern within is buying beer and getting seated. It’s not that simple. The beer booths are chaotic, thirty-minute waits within scrums of antsy fans worried they’re going to miss kickoff. Twenty minutes into my own purchase, an interloper appears out of the corner of my eye, a guy who offers a UT fan in front $25 for a beer. The UT fan glances at the guy’s shirt. It’s red. “Wrong school,” he says. The Bama fan makes the same offer to the nearest Tide supporter.
“Dude,” says his compatriot, “this isn’t the Holiday Bowl. Get in line.”
5:35 p.m.: The threshold into a stadium—not to the outer concourse but to the space where the game is played—marks the boundary between two realities. Concession stand chatter dissolves into the creeping buzz of the crowd. If you’re walking into a basketball arena, you hear sneakers squeak on the hardwood before you see the court. If it’s a ballpark or a football stadium, you anticipate that first glimpse of impossible green, completely out of place amid the concrete and steel. You know that sight is coming and that if the stadium isn’t domed then a huge piece of sky will open up above. Yet at the instant you cross over, a twinge of disbelief hits. You’re instantly aware of tens of thousands of people stretching out in all directions around you, all focused on the Game. It’s a completely open space, but somehow impenetrable to the world outside. For the next three hours no other concern will get in here. There’s no way not to feel the excitement.
In the narrow tunnel that connects the beer booth to the Rose Bowl proper, I feel that thrill and more. Smoke from the fireworks that accompanied the anthem has settled at the far end, leaving just a sheet of white light at the end of the way. The sound of fighter jets on a low flyover rushes through the tunnel and reverberates with such force that I almost drop a beer. My buddy and I look at each other, wide-eyed and speechless.
And then we’re there. In the Rose Bowl. It feels like a walk back in time. An old-school stadium with seats that spread out, not up. No perimeter ring of luxury boxes segregating the important fans from the rest of us. UT on the field in their away-game whites and Alabama in their storied crimson. The numbers on Alabama’s helmets are the first thing I notice. That’s not a throwback uniform, the contrivance of some marketing whiz. That’s been Alabama’s look for fifty years. It’s the way they appeared in the books I read as a kid. This scene wouldn’t be too different if it was that ’82 Cotton Bowl or the ’64 Sugar Bowl.
Our seats are behind the Horns bench and even better than advertised. Nothing but orange around us. We’re two rows above Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and outgoing UT regents chairman James Huffines. And ten rows above Michael Dell. It feels like a Horns fan’s view of history.
5:50 p.m.: And then suddenly it feels like something else. After opening the game exactly as we’d hoped—stomping Bama’s first drive, not falling for a fake punt, plowing toward an early score—Colt McCoy gets up slowly from a seemingly routine hit and motions for his backup. The Alabama side cheers as Colt walks off the field, the first bit of ugliness all week. But Horns fans are too shocked to boo back. Colt’s the only quarterback they’ve known since Vince, and they’ve invested four years watching him grow to this moment. They react like parents seeing their kid helped off a Little League field.
While I text friends watching the game on TV for any official word on what’s wrong, every head on our side of the stadium turns slowly to follow Colt’s walk to the locker room. A guy behind me explains that backup Garrett Gilbert was the top QB recruit in Texas, a two-time state champion at Austin’s Lake Travis High School. Somebody else asks if anyone could imagine Matt Nordgren going in for Vince. Nobody says a word.
6:45 p.m.: The rest of the half has been a blur, the worry over Colt compounded when Mark Ingram finally starts running like this year’s Heisman winner, then made worse when his backup runs like next year’s. Rumors fly about Colt’s injury. Separated shoulder. Broken collarbone. Somebody says Huffines said that Colt broke three ribs. We try to be optimistic. The score is a manageable 17—6, and the hope is to get to halftime and regroup.
7:01 p.m.: Shovel pass? Really?
7:02 p.m.: Shovel pass. Really. 24–6.
8:07 p.m.: Gilbert looks more comfortable after throwing a couple spot-on passes that were dropped, and the crowd feeds off his confidence. They cheer the kid’s guts and the Horns’ refusal to lie down, and though nobody says the word “comeback,” nobody’s leaving either. Jordan Shipley catches a 44-yard touchdown pass. 24–13.
And then the snowball’s rolling. An onside kick . . . another Shipley touchdown
. . . a two-point conversion. Gilbert’s on fire, and so are the fans. Our section erupts in sheer pandemonium, a mosh pit of jumping and hugging and screaming. The guy in front of me dives up and over two rows of seats to kiss his ten-year-old daughter. I do more high-fiving than at any time since I coached basketball to third-graders, but with people I’ve never seen before. And every ecstatic face bears the sense of inevitability that Vince instilled. Tears are rolling and we’re all chanting, “Gil-bert! Gil-bert!” We own the Rose Bowl . . .
8:48 p.m.: . . . until we don’t. After another heroic defensive stand gets the ball back and builds the crowd noise to its loudest level of the night, reality rushes untouched around the left end and buries its helmet between Gilbert’s shoulder blades. The ball falls to the ground directly in front of us, recovered by Alabama. Three plays later Ingram punches it into the end zone. All that’s left now is the singing of the “The Eyes of Texas.”
9:30 p.m.: Levin and a couple friends are alone at the RV, silently pulling Christmas lights out of the tree. As he loads a dead keg onto the bus, Tide fans dance around a fire pit to “Ala-Freakin-Bama.” A series of texts rolls into my cell phone, all with some variant of “Everybody’s pretty down. Headed back to the hotel.”
I ask Levin what he thinks. He stops for a second, then says, “If you’re not holding your head up after the class that we showed, I’m not sure you know what football’s about.” Then he climbs on the bus and turns up Waylon Jennings.
Friday, January 8, 6:55 a.m.: The line of cars extends into the street outside the Enterprise lot at LAX, their drivers waiting for a clerk to check them in. The Horns fans look ready to be home, typing on their cell phones as though they hate to be away from the office. Somewhat unexpectedly, the expression shared by the Tide fans is one of relief. “It really looked like UT was going to pull off another miracle,” says one.
The clerk who approaches me assumes that, like every customer this morning, I was in town for the game. But since I’m still not wearing orange or red, he doesn’t know which way I rooted. I tell him UT.
“Man, I hated to see Colt go down,” he says, adding under his breath, as if he doesn’t want the Alabamans to hear, “but don’t worry. Y’all will be back.”
“Yeah, we will,” I tell him as I grab my bag and head for the airport shuttle.
See a slide show of the action in Pasadena.
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