It's about 11:30 on a Saturday night--Oct. 4--and Vanderbilt's football team had just beaten Auburn 14-13 to go 5-0. I'm so excited with the prospect of seeing a couple of good bowl teams just two hours away from here that I instantly order four tickets for the Vandy-Wake Forest game today in Winston-Salem. Wake was 4-1 at the time and this one was looking like the kind of game that would capture the imagination of the entire country: two schools whose players can read playing football in a game that matters.
Today, after trying to sell my four tickets to see two 6-5 teams who've hit a swoon after a fast start, I'm understanding the definition of an impulse buy. When I found out the game was going to be played at 7:45 in late November, that was just too much. I got my son to put the tickets on E-Bay. We got no takers. Neither did a whole bunch of other people. A few of them got 99 cent bids for a pair of tickets--mine cost $17 each, not much by major college standards, but a lot more than 50 cents.
This still could be a pretty good football game and it looks like both teams will go to bowls, but this won't be the Rose Bowl for either of them ... more like the Tidy Bowl. But I wouldn't get home until about 2 a.m. and I'm too damn old to be driving U.S. 220 after midnight.
My son and his family, including my three-year-old buddy Madeline, an honest-to-goodness fan, were going to accompany me until they found about the TV-dictated start time. Just too much for all of us. TV, you suck. Wake's been playing at noon all year, so why the change? Because I bought tickets and you found out? Probably.
Oh, hell. Anyway, my Tennessee Volunteers appear to have hired a new football coach to save them from the Philip Fulmer doldroms. He's a 33-year-old wunderkinder with a 5-15 record in the past two years. I've just heard him thoroughly trashed by several TV sports guys and my football day is turning increasingly sour. But for one shining moment ...
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