Never play poker with John Sleeper. He cheats.
He always has a card up his sleeve.
John-Boy never plays any kind of game unless he has the upper hand.
I come in the office Monday and sports editor Kevin Brown says Sleeper has suggested that he and I write dueling columns on the Apple Cup game.
Do I get to choose my team?
Of course not.
John-Boy has already taken the Huskies.
Great.
I get the loser.
I’m the lawyer who battles Perry Mason in court.
I’m Custer at Little Big Horn.
I’m the rookie just up from Class AA facing Roger Clemens in my first at-bat.
I’m screwed.
I might as well wave a white flag right now.
Thanks a lot, John-Boy.
Glad we weren’t gun fighters in the Old West.
You’d have back-shot me for sure.
What was I thinking when I accepted this challenge?
I don’t have a chance.
How do you make a case for the Cougars?
They’ve lost the Apple Cup six years in a row, 12 of 15, 23 of 30.
Oh, I guess I’ll take the Huskies, John-Boy laments as if he’s doing me a big damn favor.
Hey, John, if you’d been around in 1939, would you have put your money on the Germans or the Poles?
And who do I get?
I get the Poles.
The Cougars.
On paper, the Cougars are favored.
You know what you can do with the paper.
The Huskies did it the last three Apple Cups. Shoved it right up the Cougars’ noses, Top 10 rankings and all.
The Cougs came into the 2001 game ranked No. 9. Lost 26-14.
In 2002, they were No. 3 in the country. Lost 29-26 in triple overtime.
In 2003, they were No. 8. Lost 27-19.
And I’m expected to make a case for these guys?
That’s like trying to make a case that Courtney Love has talent. Or that this president is the most eloquent world leader since Churchill.
I’m still trying to figure out why ABC is televising this thing. Are they that hard up? Don’t they have any old “Wide World of Sports” shows they could fill time with?
This game isn’t going to be about the “Thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”
It’s going to be about “can I keep my lunch down while I watch this train wreck?”
Don’t get me wrong. If I weren’t working the game, I’d be watching it. Not for the reason you think, though.
Keith Jackson is calling the action. I’d watch Jackson do a taffy pull.
He can make a bad football game entertaining. And this has all the makings of a really bad football game.
The last time I saw Jackson he was getting on the elevator at Husky Stadium after working the UW-UCLA game on Sept.18.
Someone asked him about the Huskies, who had lost that day, 37-31. “They’re gonna be all right,” he muttered, as he squeezed his big body into the little elevator. “They’re gonna win some games.”
I like him as an announcer, not as a prognosticator.
They won their first game three weeks later, beating a bad San Jose State team, 21-6.
They haven’t won since.
So we have the Huskies with one win and the Cougars with four playing to a regional audience that’ll switch to C-Span before the first quarter is over.
Keith, you’ve got your work cut for you, big boy. “Whoa, Nellie, he went through that hole like a hooch-running moonshiner with a carload of Feds on his tail.”
I can hardly wait for the kickoff. I haven’t been this psyched since my last tooth extraction.
With my luck, our plane will go down en route to Spokane, Sleeper and I’ll both survive, and rather than freezing to death in the mountains, he’ll bore me to death with how he once led his Port Angeles High School football team to a dramatic come-from-behind victory.
HE WAS THE WATER BOY.
Back to the Apple Cup.
Realistically, the Huskies should never lose this game.
They ought to be 96-0 in this series.
They have every recruiting advantage over the Cougs. Under the former coach, they transported future Huskies on a boat to the coach’s lake-side home for dinner. In Pullman, Cougar recruits get on a hay wagon pulled by a John Deere tractor to go to coach Bill Doba’s house.
Husky recruits dine on prime rib. Cougars on Rocky Mountain oysters. And if you don’t know what that is, you ain’t never been on a pig farm.
Speaking of which, this Apple Cup could be a real oink.
How can the Cougs win it?
They can’t. But neither can the Huskies.
I look for a 26-overtime game.
Last man standing wins.
And that is? John-Boy Sleeper, who the hell else.
(OK. OK. I’ll give you a score. Cougs 2, Huskies 0. Safety with two seconds to go.)
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