Hatred

In 1967 my future bride transferred to Baylor from Texas A&M for the fall semester at the insistence of my future in-laws. Nearly every Friday afternoon I drove to Waco and lived out of a 1965 Corvair Monza until Sunday evening when I drove home. I spent many nights in a dormitory parking lot, curled up in the Corvair's back seat, shivering and trying to sleep. During my weekends on the campus, I learned that BU students looked down their noses at Aggies as lowlife yahoos. My woman transferred back to A&M for the spring semester -- and by then I hated Baylor nearly as much as I hated Texas U.

The courtship survived, I married the girl, and a few years later I went to work in the public welfare bureaucracy as a caseworker. In 1974, I was promoted to supervisor and transferred to the Waco office. Most of the people I worked with there were big Baylor fans; a few were even BU grads. While we lived in Waco, Grant Teaff was coaching the Bears to levels of SWC success they hadn't previously enjoyed, and when Baylor hit a four-year winning streak against the Aggies (1978-1981), those Baylor fans made my life miserable. By 1982, when we left Waco, I hated Baylor and Texas equally. Obnoxious fucks.

When the Southwest Conference disintegrated, a few powerful Baylor alums in state government (Bob Bullock among them) exerted political pressure to ensure that Baylor was allowed to tag along when Texas and TAMU departed to join the Big Eight conference. As it turned out, life in big-time college football wasn't kind to the Bears -- Baylor was usually as close to a guaranteed W as A&M could get. Still, I'd have preferred to leave them behind, maybe in a third-rate private school league with Rice, SMU and TCU.

At any rate, Baylor and its president, former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, are giving me fresh new reasons to hate their fucking guts.