The Pecan Park Eagle

"I've hated the score of 35-34 since January 1, 1979, when UH lost to Notre Dame on the frozen tundra of the Cotton Bowl on the last play of the game, after leading the Irish 34-14 with 7:20 to go. Now, after the happier result of September 17, 2011, when my Cougars came back from a 34-7 deficit late in the 3rd quarter to defeat mighty Louisiana Tech, 35-34, I can love it too." - Bill McCurdy

Heartbreak on any level is tough, but it always seem to hit hardest from those sources that hit us first in the land of long ago. As a kid growing up in the Houston East End during the post-WWII years, the Houston Buffs were my first heartbreakers. When the 1950 Buffs finished last behind the Shreveport Sports on a shot at 7th place in the last couple of days of the season, I remember crying myself to sleep the night that I listened over the radio to the Buffs losing out on their hoped for escape from the cellar. I had to cry quietly, but I cried just the same. The Buffs pain carried over with some slightly diminished power over me through the early years of the Colt .45s and Astros. I thought it was gone completely, until Houston’s losses in the NLCS to the Phillies in 1980 and to the damn Mets in 1986 came along to teach me differently.  I didn’t cry those times, but I probably should have. It hurt so bad.

Right behind the Buffs, however, I learned about an even deeper personal heartache when I lost my childhood sweetheart over something young and stupid. That one was a real seasoning experience to this thing we call “loss,” but it turned out to be an experience we almost have to go through on some level to survive some of the even steeper  trenches that await us on the various roads of life. I’m a little wiser from that one today. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

The heartbreaker I never seem to toughen to, or learn from, however, is this ancient emotional investment I have in the athletic fates of my undergraduate alma mater, The University of Houston Cougars, and, especially in the trials and tribulations of the football team. The football crossover for this baseball man is easy to trace. I grew up very near the UH campus and my dad took me to some Cougar football games from very early on, from their very first game ever played in 1946 – and I was hooked on the Coogs. From our Salad Bowl victory over Dayton in 1951, behind running back Gene Shannon and onward through  the years of QB Bobby Clatterbuck through the great era of Bill Yeoman, the Veer, Warren McVea, Paul Gibson, Elmo Wright, WIlson Whitley, the Mad Dog Defense, the 1967 pasting of Michigan State, 37-7, at East Lansing and the 30-0 rout of UT at Austin in 1976. These memories are simply delicious to the Cougar appetite for gridiron glory.

But anything that joyful, I’ve learned, bears the equivalent power to generate sorrow. On that level, it doesn’t matter if it’s your team in the big game, the woman you thought would be the joy of your life forever, or that big job or career move you hoped was going to put you on the path of “happily ever after.” If it can raise you up, it can drop you down.

How do you avoid it? Don’t go there. It’s just that simple.

Oh really? If 90% of us heeded that advice, every major commercial sport in America would shut down tomorrow, as would every major luxury mall and fine new car dealership, or must-live-here gated new homes community. We won’t do it. We won’t give up these things.  – Winning! – It’s the tiger blood in us all. We live to have our clocks wound with new and high expectation, but the rub is – even for the Steinbrenners of this world, that we also always hang around long enough to have our clocks cleaned eventually by the competitive expectation needs of someone else.

Yesterday I was watching my UH Cougars go down 34-7 to those great titans of college football, the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs. With about five minutes to go in the third quarter, on the fabled fields of Ruston, the Coogs looked down and out for good. An undefeated team from C-USA was about to get crushed by a nobody club from the WAC. No surer path to collegiate football ignominy than that exists anywhere else. I’m already thinking, “If this is the best we can do, we may as well hang it up in our pursuit of a better conference membership!”

Then it happened. The Cougars scored to make it “only” a 34-14 twenty point deficit. Then they caught fire on turnovers and new life to score 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to take their first lead , and the win, with their last score coming in the last minute and one-half of the game.

UH won, 35-34, by a margin and mark that had been my least favorite final score in the whole world  previously, thanks to Joe Montana on New Years Day 1979. Now it also instantly had become my favorite final score as a result of the Ruston Resurrection.  Like a fresh chip of crack cocaine, I had been injected again by the chemical effect of these events upon my nervous system with the wild hope that UH could overcome all odds against them on the road to Tier One status at every level of their university existence. I do believe we will get there, but that it will be equivalently as easy as that victory in football last night.

I’m pumped. But anything that can be pumped can also be deflated.

GO COOGS! EAT ‘EM UP!

Tags: heartbreakers, UH Cougars

This entry was posted on September 18, 2011 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.