You never knew my grandpa—not like you know me. Of course, like time, like death itself, you don’t really know me at all. You, as an unfeeling participant—though an event in and of itself—don’t care.
But I know you.
My grandpa saw you every year once you got on television, and listened to you on radio before that, but I don’t think he cared much about you or your work: he cared about beating teams in bright red and burnt orange.
If I simply try to imagine you when he was ten years old—using the same age as when I first saw you—the first meeting he would’ve paid attention would’ve likely been over radio, the Oklahoma A&M Aggies beating the absolute shit out of the Oklahoma Sooners in Norman, 47-0 in 1945. (Welcome home from the war, everybody!)
After that, my grandpa didn’t have much to worry about when it came to cheering on his Sooners against the Pokes[1]. OSU didn’t win another game between the two until 1965. OSU wouldn’t win as many as two straight in the rivalry until 1997-1998, games that neither side really counts being that OU sucked at the time.
Of course, part of the issue with this rivalry is that OU has spent very little time sucking in the past hundred years. Oklahoma has had exactly one losing season since the year 2000, and it happened last year. OSU, on the other hand, was pretty bad for most of the twentieth century, during most of which games pitting Oklahoma State vs. Oklahoma weren’t any more competitive or interesting than games featuring either of the state schools versus Tulsa are now.
I recently took a peek at a recording of the 1988 game, which is widely regarded as one of the best of them all, featuring Charles Thompson as OU’s quarterback and Mike Gundy at the helm for OSU alongside a couple of decent athletes named Hart Lee Dykes and Barry Sanders. One of the things that struck me most, watching the broadcast (featuring a middle-aged and, at least to me, extremely irritating Lee Corso), was how when OU scored the first and second touchdowns at then-Lewis Field, there was applause from the crowd. Not mild applause but serious noise, almost as loud as if the home team had scored.
If you, Bedlam, have changed, this is one way: you generally no longer make much noise on the wrong field.
Trouble is, they say—both the ones who know and the ones who decide—soon, after this year that is, you might stop making any noise at all.
*
You did not mark my grandpa’s door, but you marked mine. And I know your name. I don’t really recall him ever using yours.
I first got a good glimpse of you, strangely enough, on a Sunday, November 26, 2000. I’d been promised for some reason that Saturday as a grandchild to go deer hunting that day, all day, with my papa, my mother’s father, who never gave two shits about anything to do with a ball. He’s arguably been better for it—and worse for it, never having known either the highs or the lows to do with the work of such beasts as yourself. He and I went hunting all day; my other grandfather, the one you never knew, who at least knew who you were, taped the game for me and saved the VCR. Strangely enough this tape was handed off to me the next day at church, where I told everyone not to tell me the score.
It was a good game, everyone said. A really good game. I should’ve known something about the knowing smiles behind what they said: it still seems to me both an example of the occasional kindness possible in that community where I was born and raised that no one laughed. That whole church service I could barely contain myself. I wore orange. I waited. Afterward my father’s father gave me the tape. My family went to my papa’s house for lunch—the grandfather I’d been with all day before. We ate. I could barely eat. I could barely contain myself. My dad, an OSU grad, who knew what had happened and still managed not to say anything to his ten-year-old son, sensibly left me to my very first sight of you, my first Bedlam, which I watched while my sportsless grandparents on my mother’s side slept their Sunday naps.
And then, good god, evil god, devil god that you are, you gave me hope! Through most of four quarters I watched as my Cowboys struggled against that juggernaut squad of eventually National Title-winning Sooners assembled against them, against whom they’d been given no chance. The Cowboys were 3-7 going into that game. OU had a perfect record. I’d watched all of OU’s games with my father’s father because all of them were televised, and that team, led by Josh Heupel and Derrick Strait and Rocky Calmus, were terrifically exciting to watch (that, too, I must confess, was the only year I pulled for the southern-half of you, Bedlam: I didn’t know any better). Those 2000 Sooners were beyond good: they were amazing.
OSU was only on TV a few times that year, the first of the millennium: I listened to most of the Cowboys’ games on the radio, 106.1 FM, a country station out of Idabel, a town a full ninety minutes away. And then, with crazy hope, stupid hope, I watched—watched!—as OSU stymied the Sooners—I gazed with rapt eyes as it all came down to one drive, the Pokes down 12-7—until the end of the fourth. The final drive. Wherein I watched Aso Pogi’s last second throw fall uncaught by Marcellus Rivers in the endzone. I watched myself run out of the house, alone, distraught: destroyed.
I knew then that I’d hate the Sooners forever.
*
And then came the sheer joy of 2001, which everyone of at least a certain age knows about: Rashaun Woods, that ball thrown perfectly by Josh Fields, that first OSU fade which Fields himself and Zac Robinson and Dez Bryant and Brandon Weedon and Justin Blackmon would go on to perfect, a play the Pokes would spend much of the next two decades magnificently exploiting against a multitude of foes. (People tend to forget, I think mostly because of the brilliance of that play, that that Oklahoma team was still in contention for the BCS title game. Instead, Rashaun Woods and Josh Fields said No. No you aren’t.) How could a young wearer of orange not fall in love?
It was easy. You, Bedlam, were beautiful, and stylish, and you, like the vengeance that the Old Testament says belongeth to the Lord: you were sweet.
And then you blessed us again, with not so much the sheer joy of the previous year but absolute ecstasy, pleasure upon pleasure, Rashaun Woods running wild against one of the best defensive backs in the nation, Derrick Strait, humiliating that unanimous All-American Sooner with touchdown after touchdown. Dear Lord.
(Rashaun’s still open. If there is an afterlife—which I doubt, in part because of you, Bedlam—I hope to run beside him there on the eternal turf of Lewis Field.)
The final score of 38-28 belies the fact that at one point it was 38-6. In the eternity of that golden afternoon, on November 24, 2001, I ran all the way around my grandfather’s weird crimson-painted split-level house yelling my damn head off. Take that, Grandpa. Take that, Bedlam!
But of course 2003 rolled around and you, Bedlam, decided to get into game shape. Get back into proper Bedlam form. You heard Les Miles before that game declare that one of the two teams in the contest to follow was the best team in the nation, and the other was a damn good football team, and, well, you decided to have a little laugh at his expense, or a big laugh, at the expense of all of us in orange. After all, all of us dyed-in-the-wool Pokes all know that you, when you’re alone—and even in public, because you’re something of an exhibitionist—you, Bedlam, like to wear crimson.
The score that year hurt me. 52-9. I was twelve and I had believed this sort of thing was part of the past. How wrong I was. I heard the OU student section chanting OS-U-SUCK! As I heard it—as can hear it now, writing this the day before the so-called final Bedlam in November 2023—I knew, again, that I would never, ever, come across an entity I would hate so much as Oklahoma Football.
I went to school the next day and everyone razzed me: I was one of two OSU fans in a class of twenty. I still had pride and didn’t give in: I knew that none of those kid’s dads had played at OU. None of them ever broke into tears over a game. My dad was a Poke, and I was a Poke. I wasn’t about to switch sides.
One thing I did not know to do then, mostly because of my Southern Baptist raising, although I now think it would’ve been appropriate, at least on the playground: I did not tell all those kids to go fuck themselves. A huge missed opportunity.
I’m now telling you, fifth and sixth grade friends who gave me shit after the 2003 Bedlam: Go fuck yourselves!
(You know who you are, and by now you certainly know how to do it.)
*
After ’03 came the close ones. The 38-35 game in 2004 is rarely remembered, even less-so the 27-21 game in 2006. For myself, when I reached college-age in ‘08 I left the state and went to the Pacific Northwest and watched the 2008 61-41 game in the grandparents’ house of a friend, just outside of Corvallis, Oregon, while his whole family feasted on the Dungeness crabs we’d caught and killed that day. (Everyone downstairs was watching that years iteration of the Oregon-Oregon State Civil War while I suffered at the top of the house, watching Sam Bradford do his worst, the Oregoners below me munching on crab-legs.)
I knew I’d never stop hating you. And yet I couldn’t quit you, either—even though you definitely don’t bring out the best in me as a writer. The prose here sounds like a bad goddamn country song.
I had no idea it would be nine years after that second Rashaun Woods game before you deigned to smile on me again. 2011 arrived and I did not know what to do with myself.
*
In some ways, I blame you for bringing me back to the state: after I finished college, I couldn’t think of a better place to do grad school than in Stilly.
In my last year in Stillwater, there came the infamous episode of Tyreek Hill and punt-it-again-Bob. I spent the whole afternoon at the old Stonewall Bar (now defaced and disarranged) nursing one beer and going through an entire pack of cigarettes. By the time Tyreek caught that second punt, no one in in the Wall was watching. By the time he crossed the OU five-yard-line, everyone in Stillwater was.
*
I could make complaints, Bedlam. Nearly froze to death in Boone Pickens Stadium in 2013. Or at least felt a bit like I was going to, with that kickoff temp of three degrees Fahrenheit. I shivered through three quarters until you enlisted your darkest ally (a demonic entity named Blake Bell, whose name I still shudder to speak). I didn’t throw any turkey legs in the aftermath, though I will admit to wanting to. Really, I felt too dead inside after that game to do anything. That was one of the worst football-related days I can recall, aside from the first time I met you, all the way back in 2000. I was cold as I’d ever voluntarily been, walking out of BPS, listening to certified or uncertified idiots yell BOOMER. Yuck.
Then again, I can’t say I’ve always hated you in defeat. I couldn’t help but enjoy the 2012 game, even though it included the first appearance of that beast named Blake Bell. (This was the last of your games I watched with my grandpa in his right mind or any mind: I did not then know this would be the case.) Nor can I say that I hated the appearance you made in in 2017, the 62-52 debacle. I always wished Baker Mayfield was on our sideline. I’ve always interpreted the hatred that man incurred from other Pokes fans as jealousy. (After all, I know you, Bedlam, would’ve taken a one-for-one trade of Mason Rudolph-for-Baker. If offered the opportunity I certainly would have.)
You also gave me one of my most pleasant Bedlam nights, even in a loss, in 2018. It felt something like a gift. I managed to snag a single ticket for fifty bucks on the Friday before in Tulsa and made the trip the next day to see you in Norman, in a game no one thought the Pokes had a chance in, when Mike Gundy finally really rolled the dice, and the Pokes lost 47-48. I wasn’t unhappy that night. It was too fun. That night, even though you provided your usual result, you shined.
*
And then of course was 2021, after we knew you were headed south and east for good, packing your better-branded bags as you went. How good it was to beat you, to overcome you that year, after you left us high and dry, knowing the colors you wear, to see that dumbass and possibly worst barbecue chef in the world, Lincoln Riley, wearing your final ignominy, on that November night. It was so sweet—as sweet as that 2002 win.
We had you. We crushed you. You were, for a moment, ours.
*
The hardest thing is to say goodbye.
I don’t want to say goodbye.
You, Bedlam, which in a sense, obviously, is a way of describing that fierce and utterly unreplaceable rivalry between those who wear orange and those who wear red, is why I love this sport, why I have given so many hours to it for twenty-four years running, often knowing there were better ways to spend my Saturdays, my Fridays, my Thursdays, my hours spent reading about how my Pokes were doing, always keeping an eye to you, Bedlam.
And yet, here we are. That 2021 game exorcised some demons. My grandpa, who you never knew, is five years gone.
Deep-down, I believe you, Bedlam, are being killed by a combination of greed and cowardice—but that’s for another time. I do believe you’ll come back: eventually and on your own time. When all these hurt feelings are gone. I find that regrettable and hope sounder and less money-driven minds will come to their senses before those of us who know and care about our shared history are all either dead or too demented to care.
Still, I will miss you. I will miss reading Berry Tramel about you, and Jenni Carlson, and Bill Haisten, and Guerin Emig, and all the other writers you’ve inspired. I will miss the apprehension of Bedlam-week of all my orange-wearing friends, both those still with us and those who are already gone.
I hate that my seven-year-old son, bar some drastic stroke of sanity by the administrations of both schools, may not know you. After all, I would never have cared about you had you not entered my life on account of my dad and my grandpa nearly two-and-a-half decades ago.
If you find all of that sentimental, let me remind you that you, Bedlam, are an asshole. The worst kind of guest. You could be better. For instance, you could show up next year on time.
I’ll make you dinner if and when you do.
[1] I’d like to hear perhaps unkindly add that like most OU fans, he didn’t have a degree from that particular university which calls Norman, Oklahoma home.