Adventures in Dallas
OU-Texas is different from any other college football game, but it’s more than that. The entire week is different from anything else we experience all year. Part family reunion, part pilgrimage, part wild weekend, all wrapped in a crusade of a football game.And as far as I’m concerned, the Texas State Fair makes it what it is. Move this atmosphere to Jerry Jones’ parking lot in Arlington, and zip goes the feeling. Great game, still. Great in-stadium environment. But the rest of this goes bye-bye.
10 THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FAIR
1. Turkey legs over corn dogs. I did the pregame radio show on KREF there on the main drag, just southeast of the Cotton Bowl, and someone brought me a turkey leg. Great taste, more filling. Those monsters fill you up. I don’t know how they get them to taste so good; I’m not that big on turkey. But one turkey leg is a full meal. They are messy, no doubt, but so are the corn dogs (why are they called corny dogs?). You have to put on the mustard at the stand, which means uneven distribution, which is not good.
2. Strange sights abound. Like the women walking the miniature donkeys through the fair. They really weren’t any bigger than huge dogs. The Schooner ponies could swallow those donkeys whole.
3. The car show is the best thing going. For one, it gets you out of the elements. Usually that means the heat. Saturday, that meant the rain. But either way, looking at new cars is great entertainment.
4. I don’t know how families afford the fair. The rides cost all kinds of money; the log flume ride was $4 a head. The corn dogs $3.50. Take two kids and your wife to the fair, try to have reasonable time, and no way do you get out of there for less than $200. No wonder the fair needs OU-Texas; football brings a crowd.
5. I’ve always wanted to go through the train museum but never have taken the time. The fair also sported a traveling exhibit from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Both cost extra; not much, I assume. A dollar or two. But the way the fair already gouges you, you’re loathe to start shelling out more for non-commodities.
6. The free concert series is a great deal. OU-Texas Saturday night featured Jason Aldean, a country singer I’ve never heard of, but that doesn’t mean anything. I would rather listen to windshield wipers than country music.
7. I’ve only walked through the livestock barns once; my nephew went with us to the game and was big into FFA. My theory: You’ve smelled one pig, you’ve smelled them all.
8. The best thing about Fair Park is the art deco architecture. The buildings themselves are an exhibit.
9. The best thing about the Midway is the lights and the sound. That’s what I would miss most about OU-Texas leaving the Cotton Bowl, the serenity beyond the stadium gates.
10. Big Tex gives me the creeps.
CONFERENCE ROLL CALLS
In this crazy year of college football, let’s check in on the conference races, in order of clarity.
1. Big East: South Florida, Cincinnati and UConn all unbeaten in league and overall play. Nutty. Who knew South Florida at Connecticut would be a big game? But South Florida clearly is Big East’s best.
2. Sun Belt: Troy and Florida Atlantic likely to play for the title on Dec. 1.
3. Mountain West: BYU could be the class of the league, but a Nov. 17 game at Wyoming could be for the title. BYU already has beaten 3-1 Air Force.
4. WAC: Boise State-Hawaii on Nov. 23 the likely title game, but Fresno State could be a spoiler, and San Jose State has the league’s best coach, Dick Tomey.
5. Big Ten: Michigan-Ohio State could determine the Rose Bowl bid, but Illinois is 3-0 and still gets to play Iowa, Minnesota and Northwestern. So the Illini could crash Pasadena with an upset of either Michigan or Ohio State.
6. Conference USA: UTEP’s victory over Tulsa gives the Miners the upper hand in the West. In the East, who knows? East Carolina, Central Florida, Memphis and even staggered Southern Miss could win it.
7. Big 12: Oklahoma’s only threat in the South is Texas Tech, which gets OU in Lubbock. In the North, Missouri seems to be the best team but it could get jumbled with Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Kansas State.
8. SEC: If Florida had held on against LSU, every team would have had a conference loss. As is, LSU seems certain to win the West. The East is wide open; Florida and Georgia both are 2-2.
9. Mid-American: Crazy stat of the week. We’re virtually halfway through the season, and only one MAC team (3-2 Bowling Green) has a winning record overall. Central Michigan (3-0) seems the class of the West; Miami-Ohio, Akron and Bowling Green still unbeaten in the East.
10. Pac-10: With USC much more flawed than we ever thought, this league becomes a weekly slate of showdowns. Oregon, Cal, USC and Arizona State all are ranked in the top 13, and the only common matchup so far was that Oregon-Cal classic.
11. ACC: I’m not sold on Boston College. The Eagles (Atlantic) and Virginia (Coastal) each are 3-0 in their divisions, but five other schools (Wake Forest 2-1, Florida State 1-1 & Maryland 1-1 in the Atlantic; Virginia Tech 2-0 & Miami 1-1 in the Coastal) remain contenders. Heck, I wouldn’t rule out 2-2 Clemson.
GOOD EATS
It’s an OU-Texas tradition that we eat dinner on Friday night at Maggiano’s in Plano with my wife’s cousin and her husband, who are great friends as well as family. A lot of people have OU-Texas traditions that go back decades. I ran into David Donchin, an Oklahoma City lawyer who I’ve known for years. He saw us last year at Maggiano’s and was back again with his family.
I owe my career to David. In autumn 1978, I was a senior at Norman High School and walked into the Norman Transcript and asked sports editor Jim Weeks how I could get into the business. He gave me some good advice: go to college. But two weeks later, Weeks called me and offered me a part-time job, answering phones and covering a few events. I worked my way up from there.
This was during the oil boom, when guys could make pretty good money in the oil field, and it was hard to find someone to work for minimum wage. The Transcript job came open because a guy had quit. David Donchin.
Maggiano’s is a national Italian chain, but we don’t have them in Oklahoma. My wife and I discovered Maggiano’s in Chicago; we were walking the downtown streets, looking for a place to eat, and stumbled upon it. Great, great place. We had the full-course dinner. Two kinds of salad, fried zucchini, stuffed mushrooms, lasagna, ravioli and two kinds of chicken. It’s a wonder I’m ever in shape to cover the game the next day.
Wednesday night, we ate at one of my favorites, Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. I had the mixed grill, two skewers of grilled fish and vegetables, over dirty rice. The dirty rice could be cleaned up as far as I’m concerned, but the skewers were outstanding. Shrimp, scallops, salmon. I don’t understand the fascination with fried fish. I mean, I like fried fish and could eat it by the boatload, but grilled is far better. Good and good for you.
TRAVEL TIP OF THE WEEK
Always check your credit cards when they’re returned. For the second time in my career, I went home with someone else’s Visa. In Boulder, Colo., I had dinner with our photographers at some Italian joint, and we usually just all toss in our credit cards, since the office likes to keep expense accounts separate.
I was sitting next to photog Bryan Terry, and I was given his card and he was given mine. And we didn’t check. I discovered it the next Wednesday, the day I left for Dallas. I stopped by a bakery to pick up a birthday cake for Barry Switzer, for a photo shoot at noon. Part of my duties include courier service. I pulled out the card to pay for the cake, and I noticed the number was different. That’s because the name was different.
The gal already had run the card so I signed — my name, I’m no forger — and went on about my business. I switched out cards with Bryan in Dallas on Friday. But what a mess. This happened with me and John Helsley one time in Dallas for the Big 12 basketball tournament — at Pappedeaux’s — but we were together a day or two later when we discovered the switch.
10 BIG WINNERS FROM WEEK 6
10. Adarius Bowman & Malcolm Kelly: Our state’s two big passcatchers had big games, plus
Texas’ Limas Sweed was lost for the season to injury. Sweed kept Kelly off the all-Big 12 team in 2006. Now if Bowman and Kelly can stave off Texas Tech phenom Michael Crabtree.
9. South Carolina: The Gamecocks waxed Kentucky and find themselves a full game atop the SEC East. And they get Florida at home, on Nov. 10.
8. Central Michigan: Routed Ball State 58-38 in Muncie, Ind. What would the Chippewas do with
Nebraska?
7. Turner Gill: Buffalo came into this season with 18 wins total the previous 10 years and just eight Mid-American Conference wins since joining the league in 1999. But after a 31-10 rout of Ohio, the former Nebraska quarterback great has Buffalo 2-1 in the MAC.
6. Phil Fulmer: Tennessee seemed staggered after blowout losses to California and Florida. But the Vols routed Georgia and are back in the hunt for the SEC East; 1-1 Tennessee gets 3-0 South Carolina at home on Oct. 27.
5. Chuck Long: The OU-ex coordinator needed a victory with San Diego State, and got one with a touchdown in the final minute that beat Colorado State 24-20.
4. Tavita Pritchard: The Stanford backup quarterback had thrown three passes in his career. But starter T.C. Ostrander suffered a seizure last week, so Pritchard got the call against Southern Cal, a 40-point favorite. Pritchard struggled — 11 of 30, 149 yards — but threw a fourth-and-goal, 10-yard touchdown pass with 49 seconds left to give Stanford a 24-23 upset.
3. Mike Price: The old guy still can coach. His UTEP Miners beat Tulsa 48-47 to take command of Conference USA.
2. Butch Davis: The only Miami coach of the last 29 seasons not to win a national title but the man who helped restore the program after the scandal of the ‘90s, Davis popped his old school. North Carolina stunned Miami 33-27 to signal hope for a beleaguered program.
1. Mark Mangino: Kansas still is a basketball school, but the Jayhawks won at Kansas State (30-24) for the first time since 1989, and KU is ranked and a contender in the Big 12 North.
NO-SERVICE HOTEL
High-dollar hotels always have been a pet peeve of mine. I don’t understand what you’re paying for. I’ve always said, the more you pay for your hotel room, the fewer channels you’ll have on your hotel cable. But shoddy cable was the least of my problems at the Hilton Anatole. We stayed there Wednesday and Thursday nights because my wife coordinated a dinner function there. The rate: $184 a night. The service: pathetic.
The Internet is the new cable. At your smaller hotels — Courtyard, Fairfield, Holiday Inn Express — high-speed Internet is provided free, either wireless or Ethernet. The high-end hotels charge for the Internet, which of course is all backwards. But OK. I can accept that. I bought the Internet and worked much of Wednesday evening. Then my wife tried to hook up her laptop, and no dice. Turns out your Internet purchase, $10 a day, is good for only one computer. You want to use two computers, it’s two charges.
But the problems didn’t stop there. The Anatole turned into the Amityville. For one thing, parking. You pay to park, either valet or self-park. Sometimes, I understand that. If you’re in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, where a little slab of concrete indeed is worth $20 a day, where real estate, even as small as parking spaces, has tangible value, where they build parking garages straight up because that’s cheaper than the land. Or if you’re downtown, where people and buildings are bunched. I understand paying to park in downtown Dallas or downtown Kansas City or downtown Oklahoma City.
But the Anatole is not in downtown Dallas. It’s a few miles north of downtown, sitting on a huge acreage because it’s a huge hotel, and it’s surrounded by land. Yet I’m charged to park to stay there. That’s no different than a movie theater charging me to park. And yes, it is different than a major-league franchise charging me to park, because they’ve got a monopoly. You want to see the NFL, you can’t go to Frisco or Arlington or Duncanville. You have to go to Irving. If I want to stay at an upscale hotel, I don’t have to stay at the Anatole. I’ve got dozens of other options. If I want to stay at a nice hotel, I’ve got hundreds of options. Only a fool pays to park on the Texas prairie. Call me a fool.
But it gets worse. The first morning we were there, 6:52 a.m., I hear a knock at the door. I sort of rouse up, then I hear someone coming in. I’m fumbling at the drawer, trying to grab some clothes to put on, and I yell out, who’s there. “Security,” the guy says. “You didn’t answer your wakeup call.” That’s very good service, that the hotel would send someone to manually wake us. Very good service IF WE HAD REQUESTED A WAKEUP CALL. But we didn’t. And we never got a good answer as to why they decided room 787 needed a wakeup call.
Friday morning, we moved over to Las Colinas, the Courtyard by Marriott, a far superior establishment, and Friday night I discovered I had left a few clothing items in my Anatole room. My stupid goof. I called the Anatole and asked if they had found the clothes. I was told there was no way to know. I was told that any recovered items go to a lost-and-found, and those items are placed in a dropbox that can’t be opened until the next day, when they will be itemized. Are you kidding me? This full-service hotel, with more staff than the White House, and they can’t tell me if something was found in my room?
Again, my bad for leaving the stuff there. And my bad for checking into the Anatole in the first place.
10 BIG LOSERS FROM WEEK 6
10. Sunday Night Football: ESPN offered a college game to go against the Packers-Bears on NBC. Unfortunately, Boise State 58, New Mexico State 0 chased whatever viewers it started with.
9. Tommy Bowden: Clemson started 4-0, but a 41-23 home loss to Virginia Tech dropped the Tigers to 4-2, and Bowden remains a coach who can’t seem to get it done at Clemson.
8. Purdue: The Boilermakers weren’t taken serious despite their unbeaten status, and for good reason. Purdue was blanked until the final 10 seconds of a 23-7 loss to fellow unbeaten Ohio State.
7. Southern Miss: I called Southern Miss one of the best candidates to be the best next Boise
State. But after a 31-29 loss to Rice, the Golden Eagles are a long way from a Fiesta Bowl.
6. Wisconsin: Bret Bielema was 17-1 as a head coach, but skated by on a bunch of close calls. Not so Saturday, when Illinois pulled off a 31-26 victory.
5. TCU: On Sept. 8, the Frogs led Texas 10-0 at halftime and had to be thinking BCS bowl. But after a 24-21 loss at Wyoming, TCU is 3-3, and now any bowl seems shaky.
4. Rutgers: The Scarlet Knights’ status as the Big East upstarts lasted all of one year. After a 28-23 home loss to Cincinnati, that mantle passes to the Bearcats, with Connecticut waiting in the wings.
3. UCLA: Who ever knew a loss to Notre Dame could bring such embarrassment? But UCLA’s 20-6 loss to the Fighting Irish did just that.
2. Florida: Not only did the Gators lose a chance to upset LSU and stay in the national title hunt, but a series of off-field incidents continues. And the fans came off no better. The owner of a towing company involved in safety Tony Joiner’s burglary case said he received over 200 threatening phone calls.
1. Bill Callahan: Nebraska’s previous two trips to Columbia, Mo., resulted in 41-24 losses. So Callahan did something about that. He coached the Huskers to a 41-6 loss and gave Nebraskans one more reason to think they’ll never be back among the national elite.
OU-TEXAS THOUGHTS
1. I did my radio show from the Ten Sports Grill in downtown Dallas and discovered what the “Cheers” theme song means when it says, “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” Ten is an urban bar where people come to unwind after work. Several times I saw some group come in, take a seat at a table and the waitress got them beers without taking their order. She knew exactly what they wanted.
2. Las Colinas is the place to stay. Anything close to downtown, and you’re headed for trouble with noisemakers. I need a good night’s sleep the day before the game.
3. My secret route for avoiding traffic, which I’m sharing only because I generally don’t have to use it: Take I-635 East off I-35 (Stemmons Freeway). Circle all the way around, down by Mesquite, and come into the fairgrounds on I-30 going West. All the traffic is the other direction. It will save you a ton of time.
4. When are they going to widen I-35 through Denton? You’re 35 miles north of Dallas, yet that’s the worst traffic, only because the interstate squeezes into a little tube.
5. I’d never seen so much confidence on the OU side. My wife coordinated a dinner on Thursday night for donors to the OU College of Engineering. The dean asked me to take a few questions after dinner, so I fielded questions for 20-25 minutes. Not one person asked me about the game the next day. They asked about OU-Colorado, about Bob Stoops, about Josh Heupel, about how OU plays its defensive backs. But not one person asked about Texas.
6. I’ve taken some flack for picking Texas, but I’ll stand by it. I always pick who won the year before. OU’s victory was historic. It was the first time ever — and ever is a long time in OU-Texas — a team lost with a two-game series winning streak.
7. Downtown Fort Worth is really cool. I’d never driven around down there but had to run an errand over there Friday. Big time nice.
8. The Dallas skyline is fantastic at night. Really underrated. Truth is, the whole danged city of
Dallas is underrated. Great, great city.
9. Sports radio in Dallas is not as good as sports radio in Oklahoma City. We’ve got our hijinks, too, but sometimes you can listen to the Ticket, Dallas’ version of the Sports Animal, for 15 minutes and not get sports. The Animal will do that in the mornings sometime, but this was mid-afternoon.
10. Listening to football on the radio still can be charming. I left the Cotton Bowl about 10 p.m. Saturday with co-worker Scott Wright, and we listened to OSU-A&M and Florida-LSU deep into the night. Great games, good entertainment. That, and a Wendy’s stop in Gainesville, got us through the night.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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First of all, it’s gotta be the corny dogs over the turkey legs. The legs are great, but they’re hit or miss — bummer if you get the occasional tough, over-cooked one. Fletcher’s is always sweet, crusty perfection!
By the way, you do go see the giant butter sculpture every year in the arts and crafts exhibit, right, Berry? That’s always a must-see, though this year didn’t live up to past years. The life-sized, butter Elvis a few years ago was memorable.
Your closing comment made me think about how wonderful it used to be during the 70s probation to listen to all the OU games on the radio. The Brooks-Treps team was magical. I’ll always remember what I think was a coach in the pressbox screaming in the background while Treps called Lil’ Joe’s TD run that beat Mizzou in 1975, with Treps himself breaking down to say “Go, Joe!” Thanks to Youtube I can finally watch the play together with the call 32 years later. I’d listen to more radio games in the car as you did Saturday, but my AM reception has never been the same since some Alabama fan ripped the antenna off my car after we won in Tuscaloosa.
As for your OU-Texas pick, look at the answers to your “following Texas off the cliff” blog entry and you’ll see the two-game-only winning streak has happened in this series. But the last time it happened for Texas, Woodrow Wilson was President — so it has been awhile, and it’s never happened for them in the Cotton Bowl. I don’t think the over-confident folks you wrote of had any idea how tough history is to overcome in Dallas. The win was absolutely historic. And oh my, what a classic game it was!! Boomer Sooner!