Old guys and their memories. Why don’t they just give it a rest?

Because we think our memories are interesting. That’s why. So we just throw some stuff out there, see if anyone cares, and if they don’t, well, enjoy your nap, young Mr. Whippersnapper.

Thinking, tonight, about two events only a few months apart … three decades ago. Wow.

The 1980 Masters

The 1979 Rams-Cowboys playoff game in Irving Texas.

And why am I thinking of these, you ask?

Pull up a chair, set a spell, and let me do some recollectin’ …

The 1980 Masters was the one and only Masters I covered. It was a fluky sort of thing. I believe I have written on this blog, maybe two years ago, how I apologize to everyone who truly cares about “a tradition like no other”, or whatever … because I haven’t golfed in more than three decades.  I barely care about the game. And, yes, I was at Augusta National for most of a week … and people who would do almost anything to go have never been there. Sorry.

I was there during a weird, three-month period when I was covering national stories for Gannett News Service. I had April through June, 1980. The Masters is in April. So there I was. (In May, I would do the Indy 500 and Kentucky Derby.)

Augusta National … The place is green. I remember that. Lots and lots of greenery. Except when broken up by blooming flowers. Verdant. Nice. But can you stare at that for 5-6 days and be amused? Well, I couldn’t.

It was also fusty and fussy, in my memory. It wasn’t clear to me where I was allowed to walk. Or stand. Or sit. Georgia (or that golf course, anyway) was like nowhere I’d ever been. As if it were out of some “Gone with the Wind” time capsule. It could have been 1880.

That big white clubhouse and the black servants and white club members … it made me a little uncomfortable. Way too antebellum. And that is back when the caddies were all black guys, too. Augusta National caddies; the Masters didn’t allow golfers to use their own guys. They had to hook up with these old black guys in white jumpsuits.

Yeah. Weird.

Anyway, covering golf, if you do it like it’s supposed to be done, makes for very long days. Like, 10-12 hours. For me, it dragged. Yes, it did. I had never covered a golf tournament, and I was amazed at how long it lasted. I was relieved when Seve Ballesteros finally won the tournament. I remember writing that he was golf’s next great player. Which he was … kind of.

I also remember … barbecue beef sandwiches in the press cafeteria, eating at Hardee’s on the way home and staying, all alone, in the enormous home of a doctor who rented out his place during the week. I saw him the day I left and we talked politics. Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter? Anyway, this is back when print news organizations spent money.

I have much more vivid memories of another famous sports site in the news today. Texas Stadium.

Five months before the 1980 Masters, I was in Texas Stadium for the Rams’ playoff game with the Cowboys. December 30, 1979.

I actually had first been in the stadium a few months earlier.  Back on Oct. 14, when the Rams got smacked around by the Cowboys in the seventh game of the season, 30-6.

That was when I first was impressed by Texas Stadium, because it was eight years old … but it was still cutting edge.

I believe that the Cowboys, and that stadium, set the standard for the football palaces that were to take over the game within a few decades.

In 1979, remember, many football teams still played in “multi-purpose”stadiums, those horrid, round stadiums that were bad for baseball and worse for football. Only one is still in use, the sad ol’ Oakland Coliseum. But back then, sheesh, most of the league played in yards they shared with ballclubs — in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Houston …

The Cowboys, however, had opened this football-only Taj Mahal (it seemed at the time). And to go inside it was to look into the future. (I had been covering the Rams for three seasons, but most of the time I was in the L.A. Coliseum, which was already old and creaky back then.)

Texas Stadium was out in the middle of nowhere,  about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. Near DFW (Which was sort of an Eighth Wonder of the World as an airport.)

I remember getting to the press box level … and being blown away. There were individual boxes for special people! Their only little rooms! Dozens of them. The interior was carpeted. The press box was enormous and had amenities I had never seen before — like tiny TVs at every seat. No craning your neck to look at one 13-inch TV six seats away. My own little color TV.

It was posh, is what it was. And it was open in 1971. By 1979, Giants Stadium was up, and so was the Superdome in New Orleans, and they were nice, too. But Texas Stadium somehow seemed sleeker. The first place where I really felt as if they were playing an NFL game in someone’s really big living room. It seemed almost sinful, it was so plush.

Great game, too. The Dec. 30 game. Rams up, 14-5. Roger Staubach threw a pair of touchdown passes, and the Cowboys led 19-14 in the fourth quarter. Then Vince Ferragamo, the air-head quarterback with the rifle arm, gunned a pass over the middle to Billy Waddy, a guy with great wheels and ping-pong paddles for hands. But Billy hung on to this one and sprinted in to score on a 50-yard play.

The Rams, heavy underdogs after going 9-7 in the regular season, held Roger the Dodger in the final minutes.  On third down, he threw a pass that was caught, illegally, by guard Herbert Scott. It would be the last pass he threw as a pro that someone caught. On fourth down he passed incomplete — and then retired four months later, right there in Texas Stadium, I do believe. I was there for his retirement press conference … but was it at a hotel? Hmm. Anyway.

The locker rooms at Texas Stadium were deluxe. I’d never seen anything like those, either. Big, expansive, well-lit. Again, this was in an era when most teams were trying to make do with a baseball clubhouse, and it didn’t really work, 43 guys with all that equipment.

Just a wonderful place to see a game. To cover a game. Oh, and the Cowboys PR crew typed up 20 pages of player quotes. I had never heard of such a thing. Almost too easy, really, to cover a game, at Texas Stadium.

And today … they blew it up.

Here is the video of it.

Watching this doesn’t exhilarate me. It makes me sad. There goes a bit of my life, imploding into rubble. Such a wonderful yard and, bang (bang bang), it’s gone.

I currently live in a city where the average lifespan of a building is maybe 25 years. The extreme heat and humidity, well,  they just rot out buildings here. They get all mildewy and nasty after a couple of decades, and down they come.

Texas Stadium, though, lasted nearly 40 years. I imagine it could have stood for much longer. But it was in the way, and I assume no one wanted to keep it up, and presumably the land is more valuable for something else … so they just … blew it up. After all, they have that even posher thing that has replaced it.

So, Masters,  Augusta National, Seve Ballesteros and “when is this gonna be over?!?”

Versus a football palace, a great game on my beat, a huge upset (Rams, 21-19) that led to the Super Bowl, three weeks later.

I remember the Texas Stadium event much more keenly. And watching the stadium go down today brings it all back.

Sigh.

And you all kids, sleep tight!