Black 41 Flashback to 2001: A Football Odyssey
(Please note: I’ll get to the play, I promise. But first, a little background)
My Grandmother was from Oklahoma.
My Grandfather was not.
He was, in fact, a native of Broken Bow, Nebraska — population currently sitting at a robust 3,000+ people, according to Google — so proud of his roots that he repeatedly would corner anyone in his vicinity to discuss his track and field career highlights involving a bamboo pole vaulting pole.
This was the only civil strife I ever witnessed in the confines of their household.
If you think that Romeo and Juliet were star cross’d lovers, you should have watched my Grandma come walking out of the bathroom in her retirement community trailer in Arizona wearing her Oklahoma Sooners onesie pajamas purely to taunt us.
“I’m cheering for Oklahoma,” she’d smirk ruthlessly, her tiny frame practically vibrating with the unrepentant joy of a good troll-job, regardless of whether or not Nebraska was even playing OU. “Even if Nebraska isn’t playing them.”
This was an actual event that is forever seared into my hippocampus with all the permanence of the tattoos on my shoulders.
She did this during games when Nebraska was playing Colorado. Or Kansas State. Or anyone ever. She did this on days when Oklahoma wasn’t even playing. She did this in the summer, when football was a distant far-off promise, a whisper in the desert winds of the Sonoran desert.
She did this because she was a Sooner, yes. But she also did it because we were Huskers.
Deep down, wrapped around the very fiber of her dioxy ribonucleics, she hated everything about the Cornhuskers except for the one man wearing a Bob Devaney shirt sitting across from her in a recliner. And his son. And his son.
Only the unbreakable bond of a grandmother’s love would allow her to put up with me wearing the Ahman Green jersey I got via an Amigo’s promotional giveaway back in 1996.
She was famous for hiding out in the bathroom at family gatherings when the Sooners weren’t playing well, feigning some illness or ducking out the back door for alleged fresh air.
She was famous for the vociferous amounts of salt she would hurl at the slightest of wounds we suffered as Husker fans during the pinnacle of our dynasty.
If the Huskers lost 2 games in 4 years? Oh, did she cannonball all 88 pounds of herself directly into the pool of our shock and misery. She backflipped into it. She did gainers.
I remember all her love, all her kindness and unbridled optimism for my brother and I.
And I remember her beautiful, sublime ruthlessness as a sports fan.
I wasn’t thinking about her, that day, though. Not on October 27, 2001
Nope.
I was, however, locked in on my parents’ low-def TV, watching hazy images of our last true Heisman hopeful as he stared into the face of the rising action of 3rd-year-coach Bob Stoops’ dynastic liftoff.
You see, #1 (in the BCS) Oklahoma was in town to take on the #2 (same thing)* Nebraska Cornhuskers.
(*Author’s note: those kind of rankings for my team sound like some kind of wistful, opioid fever dream, now. An improbability rock smoked through the crack pipe of impossibility.)
It was amid this crisp, sunny, fall day — the kind of Midas-touched Midwestern Saturday that glitters from between the sunbursting leaves of the old oak trees along Washington St. — that I found myself standing in front of my parents’ old 3-seat gray couch with a Twizzler pull & peel in one hand and a Big Red Soda in the other, discovering that I was capable of stress eating for the first time in my young life.
It had been a defensive struggle. I was probably wildly angry at Rocky Calmus for existing. I still kind of am.
Eric Crouch, the golden boy from Millard North with the rocket launch legs and the joystick-jukes, had yet to truly break free when we found ourselves facing another critical moment in a game full of them.
I didn’t remember with perfect clarity exactly what the run-up to the play would look like, but thankfully I have watched the YouTube highlights approximately 41,210 times over the past 20 years. Here’s what happened before the black 41 flash reverse play.
The Sooners had just gotten flagged for an incidental facemask penalty (remember those?) and a disgusted Bob Stoops gesticulated wildly from his sideline.
With exactly six and one half minutes remaining in the game, clinging to a 13–10 with the vice-grip that current Nebraska fans use to grasp at the ’90s, Crouch took a snap from under center and handed it off to a pre-First-Degree-Homicide Thunder Collins.
This is where my particularly memory comes zooming back in.
Crystalline. Precise. Like a photo that has been sharpened all the way up.
Collins pitched it to Pre-Board-Certified-Opthamologist and third-string quarterback Mike Stuntz.
Stuntz rolled to his left.
I was screaming at an unknowable level of decibels.
Stuntz then lofted an absolute dime over the shoulder to a sprinting, Heisman-momenting Crouch.
My eyes were bulging like someone being strangled. Someone in the neighborhood likely reported the presence of a howler monkey to Lincoln’s animal control.
Crouch caught it. He reeled in the pass, turned on the kind of white-boy afterburners that hardly anyone with his level of melanin has ever seen and housed the touchdown in what was one of the greatest plays I have ever witnessed.
Memorial stadium detonated like a thermonuclear warhead.
You know in Terminator when Sarah Connor has nightmares about the US being shock-wave vaporized by a nuclear strike? That’s what memorial stadium sounded like.
There was a mushroom cloud of pure sound that might still be reverberating somewhere out in the edges of space and time.
My brother and I attempted to high five one another.
We missed.
We swung our hands so recklessly hard, so rotator-cuff-tearingly strong, that when we passionately whiffed and I merely clipped his hand, his fingers ricocheted off my palm like a misfired bullet and struck me directly in the face.
He scratched just underneath my eye, narrowly missing half-blinding me and turning me into the least cool pirate of all time and which would have undoubtedly caused me to have to seek out Dr. Stuntz in the future for some eye work.
My face immediately started bleeding, blood coursing down my face.
My mother was horrified.
I didn’t care. I was leaping off the furniture, howling into the ether like a human tornado siren and going back for seconds on the high five with my brother.
“Stop!” She wailed. “You’re bleeding!”
“IT DOESN’T MATTER. DID YOU SEE THAT PLAY ASD:FLSKJG:SLKDGHSLDKJSLFKDJSKLDGHSKJDGSDKLGNSDKLF.” I responded.
Fortunately for me, the only scar I got from that fateful date was the one left on my heart when we prematurely fired Frank Solich and thereby doomed ourselves to 20+ years of feeble, flaccid mediocrity.
I’ll never forget where I was that day. I’ll never let me brother live down the time he nearly gouged out my eye.
And I’ll never forget the Grandma who would have totally understood me, bleeding and screaming and whooping, because she would have done the same if the roles had been Black 41 flash reversed.
