Which is it, girls or football?
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."
2002