I brainwashed her, and I’m truly sorry … sort of

Vicki and I at the UW-Oregon game earlier this season in Husky Stadium. That was a good day, by the way.

Vicki teaches a Bible study on Friday mornings. Last week, she told her group she couldn’t be there tomorrow because she’ d be in California.

“Oh, you’re going to see your sister?” one of the women asks Vicki, who grew up in California and two of her sisters still live there.

“No, we’re going to LA to see the Washington-USC football game,” Vicki replied.

She’s a real Dawg. I mean that in a complimentary way. Vicki, like me, has become quite a fan of college football.

Looks of disbelief ensued.

Some people are surprised Vicki goes to more sporting events in a year than many women attend in a lifetime. It’s really not her fault. That’s what she signed up for when she married me.

We hadn’t been married two years when I was hired as a public relations intern for the Seattle Mariners. I had to be in the press box for all 82 games of that 1979 season. She watched several games in box seats in the Kingdome that year, but regretably spent many more evenings alone in our Capitol Hill apartment.

When we moved to Roseburg, Oregon later that year for my first full-time sportswriter job, she accompanied me to countless high-school games. She also occasionally tagged along when I made the hour-drive north to Eugene to cover University of Oregon basketball games. She sat under the basket and took pictures. There, she experienced first-hand the crazy Oregon fans that former UCLA Coach Gene Bartow once called “deranged idiots.” Some of her photos were published with my stories the next day in The News-Review.

Vicki did not grow up in a sports-minded family. Yet, she realized early in our marriage that if she wanted to spend more time with me, she had to embrace my passion for sports..

We’ve had season tickets for UW football games for 11 years. We usually go to one road game every year. We’ve been to nearly every football stadium in the soon-to-be-gone Pac-12. Last November, while spending the month in Tucson, we took in the Territorial Cup between Arizona and Arizona State. The storied Memorial Coliseum –which has hosted two Super Bowls, two Summer Olympic Games, and has been the home to the Trojans since 1923 – has long been on my bucket list.

Full disclosure here: I’m a college sports guy. My favorite day is any Saturday during the college football season. Thirty years in sports journalism soured me a bit on pro sports. I love the college, game-day atmosphere: The buildup to the game, the marching bands, the sense of excitement in the air, the rowdy student sections.

This photo I’m guessing was taken in 1968, just after the installation of artificial turf. This is the Husky Stadium I knew as a kid. The bleachers behind the east end zone are not shown here, so I’m thinking they were added shortly after. The upper south deck was built in the 1950s. The north upper deck wouldn’t be built until 1987. Everything you see here was demolished — except for the newer north upper deck — when Husky Stadium was remodeled and completed for the 2013 season.

It’s in my DNA. My dad took my brother and I to about one Husky game a year when we were young. It was a different era. Older men wearing fedora hats. The pungent scent of cigar smoke in the air. We couldn’t afford to sit in the covered upper deck. That’s where my Uncle Paul had season tickets. If you sat with him, you were obligated to sing “Bow Down to Washington” at halftime. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But he didn’t care.

My dad, brother and I sat in the cheap seats, the bleachers behind the east end zone. I still have memories of watching the backs of the USC players in front of us, and O.J. Simpson taking the pitch in the backfield, waiting patiently behind his wall of blockers, then darting to daylight for a long touchdown run. Behind the same goal post we saw the debut of legendary Husky quarterback Sonny Sixkiller, who would fire tight spirals all over the field in the Huskies’ stunning upset of heavily-favored Michigan State.

I bought these tickets last June, figuring it would be the last time UW would play in the Memorial Coliseum, hence my last chance to see a game there. Two months later, UW joined the Big Ten and will now play there every other year.

Although I’m a lifelong Husky fan, I would describe myself as a college football – and for that matter college basketball as well – purist. I follow college sports on a national scale. I’m interested in every region, every conference (even if the schools keep changing) and every team at every level. I would pay to watch a Big Sky game between Idaho and Montana. If there was a game show on the naming of college sports mascots, I swear, I would win it, hands down.

I listen to several national college football podcasts during the season. One of them is aptly named “Until Saturday.” As a follower of Jesus, I honor Sundays. “Until Saturday,” for the college football fan, means that during the week we live in this land of waiting .. of expectation … of anticipation .. for the full day of games.

I’ve never seen a college football game in Los Angeles … that is, “Until Saturday.”