DALLAS — He remembers feeling gobsmacked at age almost 18 that when he and his Oklahoma teammates stepped off the bus at the Texas State Fair for Texas vs. Oklahoma, they had to reach the locker room by slaloming through the crowds. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said.
He remembers feeling jarred that when he exited the tunnel into the Cotton Bowl, the Texas cannon blasted at just about the very same moment he looked over and saw Bevo, the famed Longhorn steer. “That scared the hell out of me,” he said.
And he remembers feeling wary the next year, 1973, that when Oklahoma and Texas players walked together through the tunnel as they did back then, the trash talk escalated “back and forth, back and forth, [until] I thought we were going to have a fight.”
Here’s life for you: One day you wake up and you’re reminiscing about a Saturday that somehow has reached age 50, as former Oklahoma wide receiver Tinker Owens reminisced this week. The game in which Owens caught four passes for 163 yards and two touchdowns — back when people didn’t run around with 163 yards of receptions like they do nowadays — still shines from the memory bank, even as a former teammate joshed him, “Do you [even] remember the game?” It shows again how in the memory in all of life and all the world, very little rivals a rivalry in college football for vividness and lunacy and very little rivals Texas-Oklahoma … for vividness and lunacy.
Advertisement
They’re at it again come Saturday late morning in the Cotton Bowl with its singular motif as a stadium half crimson and half burnt orange with apparel. They’re at it for the 119th time dating from 1900 when Texas won, 28-2, in Austin and the Oklahoma coach, Vernon Parrington, could console himself later on when his three-volume work, “Main Currents in American Thought,” won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for history. They’re at it with both sides unbeaten for the first time in 12 years. They’re at it for the last time in the Big 12, just as they used to be at it in the Big 8 and before that in the Southwest Conference, and just as they will be at it again next year in the SEC.
Texas Coach Steve Sarkisian told reporters in Austin, “The Red River Rivalry is why we’re in college football.” Oklahoma Coach Brent Venables told reporters in Norman, “This is probably the first week of the season that y’all want to actually talk about this week’s opponent.”
They’re at it again.
Advertisement
“I can’t really explain what it’s like to walk out to the Cotton Bowl for somebody who hasn’t done it,” Owens said, 50 years after his part in a 52-13 win, the worst loss in all the storied history of Texas Coach Darrell Royal. He does know one peculiar reality: He feels as if he can feel “exactly what they feel inside” each year as players emerge — the fine, boiling stew of their innards.
There’s always an ongoing saga.
Go back 10 years, and it’s Texas winning, 36-20, after three straight losses to Oklahoma that epitomized the Longhorns’ long teeter from their last great season (2009-10). “You shouldn’t leave this school without beating Oklahoma. You need to do that,” Texas Coach Mack Brown said that day, in what would become the last of his whopping 16 Red River Rivalries.
Go back 20, and it’s an emblem of an Oklahoma heyday (three national title appearances in five seasons), a 65-13 mauling with Jason White’s four touchdown passes and Mark Clayton’s 190 receiving yards.
Advertisement
Go back 30, and Oklahoma Coach Gary Gibbs really, really needed to beat Texas after going 0-4, so when he did, 38-17, he said: “I’m happy, but I’m also relieved to get the monkey off my back. But if we come down here and lose next year, the monkey will jump back on.” (They did, and it did, and he departed after 1994.)
Go back 40, and it’s Texas winning, 28-16, with a prized recruit, 6-foot-4, 226-pound freshman running back Edwin Simmons, whose 67-yard run clinched it even if he would join the many whose knees protested their ascents.
Go back 50, and that’s what Owens and longtime teammates/friends have been doing in different ways this year. They held a gathering, for example, to mark 50 years since Barry Switzer became head coach. “And I thought, ‘Hell, I was a sophomore in college [back then], and here a bunch of old broken-down players are limping in or hunched over, or some have a cane.’” Stuff hurts — neck, back — but as former teammate and NFL player Tom Brahaney told Owens, “Tinker, you know we would do it all again, wouldn’t we?” Switzer just turned 86 on Thursday. “I’m going by his house to drop off a card and a bottle of wine,” Owens said.
The coach was just getting going in 1973 when his first Sooners, 2-0-1 and on a Big 8 probation that would render them bowl-less with a closing No. 2 UPI coaches poll national ranking, brought to the Cotton Bowl that offense with a name gone largely to the graveyard: “wishbone.” Then they threw some. They had great running back Joe Washington zip a 40-yard touchdown pass to Owens to open the scoring, and still every time Owens sees Washington, Washington says, “I always thought I was going to lead you out of bounds.” They threw enough that Owens had a 67-yard post touchdown on one of the trickiest catches of all to make: that one while all alone.
They threw until quarterback Steve Davis finished with a stat line that can dredge a 2023 chuckle: 5 for 6 for 185 yards.
Advertisement
That 5 for 6 is one drive anymore.
Or part of one drive.
“I think that by halftime [and a 21-6 score],” Owens said, “they had kind of given up. … When they came out for the second half, they weren’t the same team as in the first half. We had broken their will, if you will.” They broke the will and boarded the bus: “Once we got out of there and went back [to Norman], we all went out and had one hell of a time.”
Owens reached Norman as a little thing (161 pounds) from little Miami in the northeastern corner of the state, the younger brother of 1969 Heisman Trophy-winning power back Steve Owens. Tinker had had his days the previous year, such as a blocking performance at Nebraska as a freshman in 1972 that earned him Sports Illustrated’s lineman of the week nod, a distinction still spawning grins, and as MVP of the 1972 Sugar Bowl, a 14-0 win over Penn State. “The way we ran the football, obviously, with the wishbone, we didn’t get many opportunities,” he said. “People tell me I never dropped the ball. I figured if I ever dropped the ball, Switzer wouldn’t throw me another pass.” He would make it to four NFL seasons in New Orleans and then to Tinker Owens Insurance & Marketing Services in Norman.
Then one day, it’s 50 years ago.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGeAcH2PaGdvZ6KasW6%2ByK%2Bcq2WinsOiuNGyZKGho6m8s8WO