In the Box

Published 9:00 pm Friday, September 8, 2006

I just arrived at my seat in the press box at Memorial Stadium, and it is quite a facility. Beautiful stadium, beautiful press box and a really, really neat atmosphere. I got here early to beat traffic and walked a mile or two to the stadium. They close off a section of the street (Asp) leading to the stadium and it’s like a street fair, with vendors selling food, drinks and memorabilia.

It’s about a 25-minute drive from Oklahoma City to Norman. Oklahoma City is a big city, very spread out and (obviously) very flat. Once you get to Norman, everything is Sooner, Sooner, Sooner: Sooner Mall, Sooner Center, Sooner Cleaners, Sooner Ribs…you get the idea.

After you get past the street-fair like scene, you walk a little farther to get to the stadium, and the streets are lined with tailgaiters and people selling more merchandise. There are also “event photographers” wandering around to shoot photos of you (for a price, I’m sure).

The stadium has a brick facade on the outside that looks great. From the press box, I can see the main stadium parking lot and it is packed with tailgaters. It is a huge stadium, the bleachers across from the press box rise very high and you can see the practice field to the right just behind the bleachers on that side.

I’ve seen plenty of Husky fans wandering around, no signs yet of the team yet. It is about 85 degrees but not nearly as muggy as I expected, due in part to a breeze that has kept things pleasant. The skies are somewhat cloudy but no real sign of the thunderstorms that were predicted.

I listened to some of the pre-game radio show on the way to the game. They are definitely good ol’ boys and fairly typical to most sports talk radio shows: a lot of chuckling at ridiculous nonsense and not a whole lot of real knowledge. They spent several minutes talking about Washington’s purple pants, and seemed very excited to learn that there was another Tuiasosopo on the team (though they thought Trenton was a backup quarterback who had been injured in a motorcycle accident). They also spent time trying to figure out what Isaiah Stanback’s number was, and then talked at great length about how Oklahoma has struggled opening the season ever since Bob Stoops took over as coach.

I’m also quite sure I’m going to be very tired of hearing the Sooner fight song by the time I head back to Seattle tomorrow morning. You hear it pretty much every 5 minutes. You know the song well if you play the NCAA football video game.

Also, for those interested, gas is in the mid-$2.20s range.

More later