My memories of the 1982 Texas Tech/SMU Game

I don’t think I will ever experience my heart dropping down to my feet watching that wacky play unfold. Talk about feeling the “high and low” of a game, all at once.

Thankfully – the ONLY saving grace for Texas Tech and the reason THIS play does not live in ESPN Classic College Football clips infamy is that – on the same afternoon – THE PLAY occurred in Berkeley. Cal defeated Stanford in the most famous finish in college football video clip history, including the trombone player getting whacked in the end zone.

I had the exact opposite view from NorthAustin, I was sitting in the north endzone grass. The return man ran right at me for the score. I blame myself- I was just 14 but I should have jumped down there & tackled his sorry a**.

and if I remember right, we scored to TIE the game right before that, and the crowd was estactic! looking back, we must have had the bar set pretty low.

That was the first Tech game I ever attended. The Jerry Moore years were brutal. I am glad he is having success at App St. but It was tough during those years of the early 80s.

Boy, do I remember that game. I was a junior then, at the Jones with my wife of nearly one year. (The fact that she is still with me, almost thirty years later, is testimony to her patience and good humor. But, with this game as an early example, she can’t say she didn’t have advance warning….)

A few things stand out in my mind:

- We went for the tie instead of the win; there was no overtime then. Tony1979 is right— the bar was set pretty low. I’m happy for Coach Moore’s success since, but those years were the nadir of Tech football. I know it’s silly, but I’ve always thought that SMU’s game winning miracle play had something to do with the bad karma that we engendered by playing for a tie. (SMU was a later victim of their own bad karma when the “pay-for-play” scandal broke shortly thereafter, resulting in the NCAA’s so-called “death penalty.”)

- I think 99 percent of us in Jones Stadium saw immediately what was developing on the kickoff play. Unfortunately, the Red Raiders didn’t.

- I snuck bourbon into the stadium— it was easy to do in those days— in a 20 oz Coke bottle. The game was exciting and I was freely and openly swigging from the bottle. By the 4th quarter, I was totally FUBARed. My darling wife led me out of the stadium, me draped all over her, drove us home, and unceremoniously dumped me in the bathroom where I spent the next several hours “in penitential prayer.”

It was my freshman year @ Tech and me and a few buddies from “the Zoo” (a.k.a. Wells Hall) were sitting directly across from NorthAustin, and that play will never quit playing over and over again in my mind, those were some bad times for the Red Raider Nation, but thankfully we have come along way since then, that is why I am so excited to get this new era started with TT@TT, hopefully after the game Sunday I will have a better memory of the Red Raiders and Ponies at the Jones to play over and over in my mind…and get rid of that one once and for all. And yeah it was a shame that Gabe’s pro career never got into full swing due to a car accident, he was an AWESOME player.

I sat on the “grassy knoll” at the north endzone. After Tech tied, I and my date stared to leave when Tech kicked off with that dreaded squid kick. I just stood there dumbfounded when Leach ran that thing all the way towards our end. What a terrible ending to a great game. I was basically in the same area years before when Chuck Hixon and Jerry LeVas dismantled Tech. Winning this onr Sunday could go a long way in healing those bad memories.