17 May Another Saturday at Memorial Stadium
My family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska when I was six years old, a few years into Tom Osborne’s tenure as the head coach of the University of Nebraska football team. That was just about the time that people were beginning to grumble that Osborne was only winning nine or ten games a year, which was a real letdown after Bob Devaney’s back-to-back national championships. Starting the next year, I probably went to one or two home games a year – either going with my dad, who, as a faculty member, had first pick at season tickets, or going with one of my youth sports teams that “won” passes through some contest or another. One year, my grade school PE class even went to the annual Red-White Spring Game (i.e. over-hyped scrimmage) as a “field trip.” Such was life in Nebraska in those days.
When I was 14, I stopped going to games with my dad – not because I didn’t want to go, mind you, but because I was fortunate enough to get a job as a vendor/hawker, walking up and down the East Stadium steps all game, selling Coca-Cola. Even though the novelty of the job wore off pretty quickly, I hawked Cokes to thirsty faculty and drunk students (who were mixing, natch), six home games a year for all four years of high school – except when those games conflicted with my own football games.
After high school, I quit going to Nebraska football games, largely because, as a college student, I’d found a new passion, going to basketball games at Allen Field House. I resumed going to roughly a game per season with my dad when I was in graduate school and again after a dozen-year detour to Washington D.C.
In other words, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve spent a LOT of time in Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium.
I haven’t been there, though, in five years, not since my dad got sick and then passed away. Nebraska football isn’t what it used to be, but the Huskers still sell out every home game (an ongoing record), and they don’t just let faculty tickets pass on to the next-of-kin. But I’m going back tomorrow.
I’ve witnessed many great things at Memorial Stadium: undefeated teams, two Heisman trophy winners, the best team never to win a national title, three teams that actually DID win national titles, the launch of Bill Calahan’s disastrous reign, Bo Pelini’s triumphant return, and so on. Nothing on that list, however, is anywhere near as spectacular as what I will witness there tomorrow. Tomorrow, the little girl pictured above will graduate from the University, with a degree in Classics. Of course, she doesn’t look quite like that anymore. She looks like the girl pictured below.
Only weirdly obsessed readers would recall this, but I have written about that little girl young lady in these pages twice before, once almost five years ago when we made her first college visit (to Iowa State, where she did NOT go. Sorry, Daren.), and once last summer, when I wrote the following:
I remember quite vividly the precise moment her personality changed. It was just after she received that blackbelt. She had always been shy, quiet, passive, and often bullied. Unlike her contemporaries (and best friend) at the martial arts “academy,” she had never been to a Taekwondo tournament but decided to compete in her first one. It was the tournament put on by our own school, meaning that there was no travel involved, so…why not? She knew she was good at her forms, her weapons forms, and especially at sparring, so she (and we) figured she’d do well.
She didn’t.
Tournament Taekwondo is different from classroom Taekwondo, and the people who compete in Taekwondo tournaments regularly are like people who compete in anything regularly, that is to say, they’re competitive. She finished last in the forms competition and last in weapons forms. In the sparring ring, where we all figured she’d do much better, she nevertheless lost and lost quickly.
As I looked across the ring at her, sitting next to her best friend, who was a tournament regular and had fared much better, I could see one lone tear dripping down her face. It’s not just that she’d been beaten. She was beaten. It was excruciating.
And then…
One of the judges in her ring (Blackbelt Girls, 13 and under) made a request. “We have one girl here who is a second-degree blackbelt and who has no one to spar,” he said. “We’re looking for one of you first-degree blackbelts to volunteer to go up a level and spar with her.” One hand shot up immediately, my daughter’s.
Taekwondo tournaments have their own decorum, their own set of unwritten but universally understood rules. And among these is that there is no cheering, no yelling, no hooting and hollering when points are scored in sparring. Still, I couldn’t help but shout out an extremely enthusiastic “YES!” when my “beaten” daughter knocked the second-degree blackbelt on her backside the first (of two) times, on her way to winning the match 5-0.
Immediately – and, I swear, visibly – her face, her eyes swelled with peace, with easy and tranquil confidence. The lone tear was long gone, as was the “beaten” little girl. She knew right away who she was.
In 8th grade, three boys sat in the back of one of her classes and constantly harassed one of her friends, calling her all sorts of terrible names, saying incredibly unkind things, and generally disturbing the class and making everyone uncomfortable. Finally, one day, in the midst of especially vulgar bullying, my daughter – sitting next to her friend – stood up, turned around to the boys, and told them to “Shut the **** up!” They did. For the rest of the semester.
When she was a junior in high school, she was walking down the hall with another friend, who was being followed and harassed by a boy who, again, was calling her awful names and saying awful things. This time, the boy tried to grab the girl. My daughter swung around immediately and kicked him. In the head. Knocking him to the ground. When a teacher who had witnessed the whole thing asked her if she was going to apologize for kicking a guy in the head hard enough to knock him down, she responded, “I don’t think so.” Slightly taken aback, he nodded and said, “OK.”
That’s my girl.
As you may have guessed, I’m pretty proud of her – just as I am of my boys. Not that I can take any credit for it. They’re all good kids, and the lovely and talented Mrs. Soukup did a helluva job with them. In any case, I’ve never been prouder than I will be tomorrow as we sit in Memorial Stadium – a place I practically grew up in — watching her graduate.
I only wish that my dad – and my mom, who went to most of the rest of the home football games with him – could be there as well, sitting in the same seats they sat in for more than 40 years.
