The Skyline Newspaper

Cartoon: Created and designed by Jonathan Smith, Sul Ross Senior

Football Silly? SR Silliness Seems Sensibly Crazy And Successful

Steve Lang
News And Publications

"Oh my stars/my Linda's gone to Mars/and I wonder if she'll bring me something home." - John Prine

I happily call Sul Ross State University football business as unusual.

After all, in 2007, gridiron gourmets could count the number of collegiate teams boasting a 59-year-old linebacker, a head coach who blended John Prine lyrics into his motivational addresses, a guitar-picking poet coaching the offensive line, and a horse doctor (actually Ph.D. in equine science) who served as a volunteer secondary coach on one finger.

It all happened right here, and The Alpine Avalanche, KVLF Radio, CNN, NBC, ABC, ESPN, Fox, Inside Edition, Texas Monthly, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sports Illustrated, US News and World Report and a cast of thousands of fans were on hand to see it.

By official standards, 10,713 rooters attended four Lobo home games, and that doesn't count dozens of tail-gaters who jumped up and down waving beverages and fajitas each time Sul Ross scored. During my first years at Sul Ross, tail-gaters just across the line from the Jackson Field boundaries - also numbering in the dozens - often rivaled the number of spectators in the stands.

In addition, 11,430 fans watched Sul Ross play six road games. All told, the season mark of 22,143 about matches the crowd who attended the Rolling Stones concert in Denver's Pepsi Center on Thanksgiving Night 2005, but we're talking Division III football here. And that's not bad.

Why all these statistics? I list them because of a lack of interest in the number of tons of bauxite exported by Yugoslavia in 1949 or speculation on how long it will take Venice, Italy, to be totally submerged at its present annual sinking rate of one inch.

Sul Ross football has become - and I hope will remain - flat-out fun. I realize that in Texas, fun and football seldom show up in the same sentence. If football would have brought this much fun to me in high school, I still would not have continued, because you cannot make a flute play like a tuba, either in sound or size. And a turtle will not beat a rabbit in a timed 40-yard dash.

I would have laughed much harder, however.

I was privileged to share the camaraderie on the practice sidelines. Hang out with a 59-year-old fitness guru who could still bench press Volkswagens; a runingback who includes me in his touchdown Mojo; a defensive back who calls me Joe Paterno's clone; an offensive lineman who loves theatre; a free-spirited defensive lineman considering other cultural pursuits both artistic and adventurous after tossing opposing ball-carriers; and a quarterback who wears camouflaged cleats to express his joy of hunting and you gain insight into Division III, non-scholarship football.

It's supposed to be fun! Student-athletes compete for the fun and love of it!

Sul Ross football is not Friday Night Lights and thank goodness for that. I might consider coaching high school football in Texas or anywhere else only if there were no openings as a research associate in a testing lab to develop more absorbent kitty litter. I'm already taking medication for coronary ailments, more than sufficient punishment for the rare moments over nearly 58 years that I have taken myself seriously.

Give me Lobo football, or give me an enema that will purge all frenzy for watching this silly game taken all too seriously. Few other places than Alpine exist where one can bask in the sunshine of November afternoons, as opposed to the years I spent bundled in long johns, parka, Russian fur hat and pack-boots, keeping a camera warm against my chest between snapshots of numbed, half-frozen gridders slipping, sliding and seldom gliding on concrete-like turf, sometimes piling into my own chilled anatomy.

In remembrance of those insane days, I quote the Cincinnati Bengals player asked for his reaction to a packed stadium on a 59-degree-below-zero-windchill-factor afternoon:

"It reflects the failure of our educational system."

Sul Ross football merits a passing grade, however, for, in the words of Mr. Prine, "It's a big old goofy world," at least when referring to the Bar-SR-Bar brand of football silly.

Steve Lang has passed the same number of kidney stones as touchdowns - 0.

Potential And The Promise Of Childhood

By David Johnson
Skyline Contributor

Just before Thanksgiving, my sister had a baby girl. She was 8 pounds, 2 ounces, and 20 inches long. You don't care, but we're all very proud. We already loved my sister, but both sides of the family have already latched on to my niece with an almost obsessive devotion and derive almost endless enjoyment from her. Of course we have.

We, as adult human beings, love children.

Really, we love childhood and youth in general. Barring some awful past catastrophe, most of us look backward toward our own childhoods with a sense of nostalgia, faint or severe, depending less on what it was then than on our current situations. It exists in our minds as a pleasant time, and the same feeling of Regret that pervades realizing that it's gone is echoed in its sibling Joy we feel when we see the young who are still able to experience it, doing the same activities we once did, or at the very least, behaving with the same reckless, oblivious enthusiasm we once had.

As I said, we love children. Certain individuals may claim not to, some may even feel genuine bitterness, but by and large, we do love them. For a race that can agree on so very few things, why is it that we agree on this, especially when, objectively speaking, it is so utterly unreasonable?

After all, what is a teenager but a miserable, self-absorbed, egotistical, whiny, awkward, and acne-ridden jerk?
What is a child but an even more self-absorbed, stupid, ignorant, physically helpless, dirty mass of trouble?
What is a baby but a completely self-absorbed bundle of needs, recognizing its own existence barely, and feeling no love or appreciation for the sacrifices its parents and caretakers have made and make on a daily basis?

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is, but not much of one. These faults exist, but children are forgiven because they can't help it, they don't know any better, or simply "because they're young."

And rightfully so. An infant a month old doesn't vomit on your shoulder out of spite, and as soon as it might or is capable of understanding, such behavior would get a stern scolding. But the point is not that they deserve to be described as "miserable" or "needy" and are accepted despite it, but that we forgive all of this and love them beyond all reason.

Why?

I have heard the biological explanation, and, in short, it goes something like this: humans are hard-wired to love babies. Their proportions are something we find adorable, which is why Betty Boop is cute and not ghastly, Hello Kitty is a world-wide phenomenon, and giant pandas are "Aww"-inspiring, not "Ahh"-inspiring like their cousins, grizzly bears.

I'm sure this is true. Mothers have to have some neurological programming to keep their offspring, otherwise all laws and social standards to the contrary, they'd likely drown them in the nearest body of water considering everything those offspring are going to put them through in the following years, and indeed, it's much easier to abort a clump of cells or a seahorse inside you than something with short limbs, a big head, eyes, nose, and a mouth.

Ultimately, though, this explanation does not suffice. There does exist a large portion of our society which finds abortions at any stage positively abhorrent, and though they call themselves "Pro-Life," I dare say the vast majority care next to nothing for human life in general. By this I mean you won't see them opposing the execution of a man on death row or taking a pacifist stance on foreign policy. You also won't see most of them caring one way or the other about someone pulling the plug of a comatose amnesiac.

It isn't the destruction of human life they find so abhorrent, it's the destruction of human potential.

To be sure, they would never frame their arguments in such a way. To be sure, they would never admit to this, even to themselves. But to be even surer, this is the reality.

Just as with children who have been born, it is not what they are that makes us love or care for them, but what they might one day be.

What reason has a mother to feel sorry for a stillborn child except that she suffered so much and gained nothing in return? Even a three-year-old: what could it have possibly done during its life of any real meaning? But in both cases, the child's death will cause mourning, not of the life it had, but of the life it had before it.
Potential is a glorious thing, and to see the death of potential is far more upsetting than death itself.

We mourn the old because of what they were; we miss them. I don't deny this aspect of death. But for the elderly, those we have the most experiences with, there's a "rightness" to it. However much Granny May meant to us, when she dies at the age of 89, no matter what of, it is relatively easy to accept. Who will seriously say, "She had so much life left to live"?

What I'll say next will sound cold, but I say it bluntly and only mean it to prove my point: when you hear of the deaths of two infants, one severely mentally retarded, and one by all accounts healthy, who are you saddest for?

You are probably saying, "I am sad for the death of both equally," and you are certainly lying. You could very well be sad for both, but we see potential in one that we do not see in the other. One would require a lifetime of attention, of needs, of financial and physical support. In effect, a child that never grows out of childhood.
And in our most honest of moments, we would breathe a sigh of relief for the family of this child, but also for the child itself. Meanwhile we would mourn the life the other child might have had, what it might have become and contributed to the world. And we will imagine the best possibilities, obviously.

If that is not enough, let me return to my previous example of the amnesiac in a coma. When given no hope of recovery, taking such a person off of life support is generally accepted. But as the Terry Schiavo case proved, if there appears the chance for recovery, what a furor is created! And if our amnesiac was believed to awaken from his coma within nine months and from there make a full recovery of motion and capacity for knowledge over the next twenty years, how barbaric would we consider the spouse or parent who killed him then? "Murder!" we would cry, "murder!" And we would be right, but only because potential had been murdered.

Why do we look back fondly on our own childhoods? Certainly ignorance plays a part. People who remember in great detail the "Leave It To Beaver" picturesque days of community trust so strong that kids could walk anywhere they went without fear and families left their doors unlocked tend to forget about race riots, the place of women in society, and the very real threat of total nuclear destruction of our species. I remember "ThunderCats" and "Legends of the Hidden Temple," not Rodney King or Persian Gulf I. Of course it's better than when I see and understand the significance of planes striking the Twin Towers and soldiers dying in Iraq. But kids growing up today will look back on these days as "the good ol'" ones eventually. However, even if they were more aware, it wouldn't really matter because the same thing we see in them, and find reason to forgive in them (potential,) is what they feel themselves and take for granted.

When you are young, your entire life is ahead of you. When you are very young, this is almost literally true, and even as a teenager, it is practically true because you have so few concrete memories behind you. You are in the immortal stream of youth which fills you with a uniqueness and invincibility that doesn't leave much time for nostalgic reflection.

Even at 13, I think there is still the lingering lie you've been told your whole life: that you might be the smartest or strongest or fastest or in some way the best person ever to be born. But there is a large difference between being 5'6" at the age of thirteen and expecting to grow another foot or so, and being twenty and still that same 5'6".

By twenty, I do not mean to say all of a person's potential is dried up, but at the very least, I do mean to say all of a person's talent has been more or less realized. You will not be getting any smarter, even though we assume you'll learn more. Your knowledge will grow, but you probably won't (except in girth). You may pick up an instrument, find the artist in you, or the mathematician, but it would be a remarkable thing for a twenty-year-old, previously showing no signs of such talent, to excel in that field.

There is still more to do with your life, of course, but the important thing is that, unlike before, there is not much more to be. To be a child and to have open to you all of these paths is wonderful thing, but as our futures and potential futures grow ever narrower, we can console our own losses with the promise held in the face of every child coming after us. And if they, through no real fault of their own, break the promises we made for them - of them - that's no problem; we will make the same promises for and of those who follow them, too.

There's a movie that came out fairly recently called "Children of Men." The setting is a typical not-too-distant-future dystopia, with the wrinkle that the human race has become infertile, and no children have been born for nearly two decades. Without the hope of future generations, hope in general seems to quickly die.
Civilization falls apart. Not because individuals are dying and no more will be born, not because the species Homo sapiens is going extinct or no more souls will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but because human potential is dead and no more promises can be made with any chance of fulfillment. No one is there for anyone to have faith in.

What could be more frightening?

My sister recently had a baby. My niece will likely not be a great and important person in the typical way we measure such things, a genius, an inventor, a sports star, a physicist, novelist, or cancer researcher. But for now, she can be anything in the world she wants to be, anything all of the people she doesn't even recognize right now imagine her to be. I secretly make her that promise, that the world has no limits and she will be the most glorious human child to have walked the earth since the Son of Man. And at least for right now, being able to make the promise is more important to me than what actually happens after.

Letters

Dear Editor,

"Had Enough? Vote Democrat." I've noticed this bumper sticker more and more as of late and especially after the last Democratic debate. My question is, who has not had enough?

Look America, please do not be naïve enough to believe that simply voting for the Democratic candidate in the next election will bring about significant change. Supposedly, in November 2006 the American public resoundingly voted to change the dynamics of our political agenda. How much has changed for the better in the past year? I submit to you very, very little.

Since Nov. 1, 2006, at least 1,021 more American troops have sacrificed their lives for the cause of American ideals and corporatism in the Middle East, nearly 20% of our citizens have no health insurance, Gulf Coast residents continue to fight our government for aid following the devastation of hurricanes two years ago, increasing numbers of home owners are having their houses foreclosed on as they simply cannot make the payments, etc. And all of this while we spend $10 billion each month in Iraq.

If you truly have had enough of the rhetoric, and supposedly the majority of Americans have, I urge you to do more than "Vote Democrat." That is simply not enough. Indeed, as Ghandi implored, "we must be the change we wish to see in the world."

Clarence Russeau
justUS

Dear Editor,

Democracy, Tom Craddick style:
"The importance of this legislation and the crowded condition of the calendars in both houses create an emergency and an imperative public necessity that the constitutional rule requiring bills to be read on three several days in each house be suspended, and this rule is hereby suspended, and that this Act take effect and be in force from and after its passage, and it is so enacted."

This is a verbatim section from HB 2115, the legislation creating La Entrada al Pacifico.
Emergency? Suspend Texas' constitutional rules? For a bill proposing a highway?

It's obvious that La Entrada's backers don't mind playing fast and loose with the rules, from the chilling section above to the wildly inaccurate truck numbers they proposed for TXDOT's use. Add to that their millions in taxpayer funding and years of lobbying and political back scratching, and the phrase "resistance is futile" can't help but leap to mind.

Last week, however, the Alpine City Council took an important step toward giving our region the power not only to resist La Entrada, but to join together to make sure that the Big Bend doesn't get run over by TXDOT or MOTRAN.

The proposed Big Bend Sub-Regional Planning Commission is an effective way for local towns and counties to have an equal voice with TXDOT, in a context where state and federal statutes require state agencies to work on a government to government basis with regional planning commissions.

Please urge your Big Bend area city council and/or county commissioners to look into and join the Big Bend Sub-Regional Planning Commission. It gives them a way to make sure that local issues, from pollution to property rights, get fair consideration when the state comes calling.

MOTRAN can't take our future unless we let them.

Sincerely,
Peter A. Smyke

Dear Editor,

This past Tuesday, November 20th, the Alpine City Council approved a motion - the first step in the formation of the Big Bend Regional Planning Commission, as defined by Chapter 391 of the Texas Local Government Code. As such "the purpose of this chapter is to encourage and permit local governmental units to join and cooperate to improve the health, safety, and general welfare of their residents and plan for the future development of communities, areas, and regions so that" among other things "the planning of transportation systems is improved."

The proponents of this Commission believe this would grant our communities a somewhat equal footing vis a vis TxDOT when it comes to planning related to the designated trade corridor known as La Entrada al Pacifico. Taken at face value, the Commission sounds like a vehicle for our tri-county region to respond more effectively to the shared concerns in our community.

Having said this, there are many questions regarding the necessity to form yet another political entity to compete with those that are currently in place. So as the idea moves forward, one would hope the proponents will publish a clear outline of the structure and scope of commission they envision. In other words, what is your plan exactly?

Particularly since the chapter that allows for the formation of such an entity clearly states that "a participating governmental unit may appropriate funds to a commission for the costs and expenses required in the performance of its purposes."

It's great to see our local government taking action to enhance our standing at the state and federal level; however, the devil is in the details. Let's hear from the proponents and those that oppose the creation of such a Commission, and allow the public to have a voice in the planning process.

José Aguayo

Dear Editor,

I would personally like to commend Alpine citizens and council members for proposing and supporting the agenda of the Big Bend Regional Planning Commission at last week's city council meeting.

Under Chapter 391 of the Local Government. Code, such a commission can be created to focus and represent the concerns of localized governments. The BBRPC would have the power to demand information and cooperation from federal and/or state entities as an official subdivision of the state.

Considering the effects of the proposed La Entrada al Pacifico trade corridor (HWY 67/90) on the Big Bend region, there is an urgency to demand that TxDot and MOTRAN take into strong consideration the concerns of Big Bend residents in future plans. I strongly urge the surrounding counties, cities, schools, and citizens of Big Bend to support this commission, and help create an entity that directly represents our property rights, environmental concerns, tax dollars, and any concerns of the people of the Big Bend.

In a time when the federal and state governments are becoming so far removed from the will of the people they represent, Texas citizens have a rare opportunity to restore power and voice back to where it belongs, with We The People.

I urge all citizens who are concerned about the future of Big Bend in the shadow of La Entrada, to attend city council meetings, talk to their commissioners, and become informed of the issues, so we can work together to preserve the beauty of our home. STOP LA ENTRADA AL PACIFICO!

For more information, visit www.stopthetrucks.org, or www.revivacollective.org.

Molly Walker