Football is a Serious Enterprise in Texas
2002
Football is a Serious Enterprise in Texas
I saw a TV interview where the Texas Tech football coach was posed in front of a huge banner with a repeated pattern of TT logos on it. The logo had text in it: texastech.com. Dot com? Not dot edu? Texas Tech is a college, right? How embarrassing it should be to admit that you are a commercial enterprise instead of an educational institution, I thought. Boy, was I wrong. Pride. I thought that was unusual until I noticed that UT football holds its interviews in front of a huge banner with logos that say texassports.com.
I should have known. Football is serious business here, from grade school on. A modest example: recently, a school district spent $20.5 million for a new football stadium. Twenty million! For a high school football stadium! Seats 11,000. Twenty-by-twenty foot video screen for replays. Geez, my priorities must be wrong. I foolishly think they might spend some of that on frivolous items like books, labs, teachers, you know, the stuff that usually distinguishes a SCHOOL from other buildings. Obviously I have not yet acquired native Texan sensibilities.
Kinky Friedman told a joke recently -- well, I'm sure he told it many times, but I heard it just recently. "In Texas, a high school boy who is more interested in girls than in football is suspected of being homosexual."
