An Aggie, a Sooner and a Longhorn Walk Into a Bar

By Geoff Lou

An Aggie, a Sooner and a Longhorn Walk Into a Bar
“What does an A&M graduate say to a Longhorn?” Stewart Noll asks, grinning from cheek to cheek. As he says this, his smile frantically attempts to suppress his tongue’s relentless urge to scream the punch line. The smell of whiskey on his breath and in the air of the dark, loud Austin, Texas bar make the difficulty of telling a good joke even more apparent. “I give up,” says Ryan Carnes, a fellow UT student, while determinedly holding back his own drunken laughter.

Meanwhile, 90 miles to the east, a tall, proud sign reads, “Welcome to Aggieland.” And if the sign posted along Highway 21 didn’t warn you, this is College Station, Texas — the Mecca for all things maroon. It’s a place where the color burnt orange is so heavily despised, that even the similarly orange shade garnishing Whataburger’s famous “W” has been replaced by a much more Aggie-friendly hue of maroon. A place where it’s practically a city regulation that, in order to pass inspection, all cars must sacrifice rear-window visibility for an oversized sticker, proudly declaring an eagerness to “Saw ‘Em Off.” For its former students, College Station is a place filled with memories of tradition and majesty, a place where their lives of “Gig ‘Em, Aggies!” began, and, thanks to an alumni-exclusive on-campus cemetery, can ultimately come to a “t.u.”-hating end.

North of the heavenly grounds of College Station and sandwiched somewhere between the Cotton Bowl in Dallas and the armpit of Oklahoma, sits the city of Norman — home to the University of Oklahoma and the Sooners. Blink when passing through city limits, and the abundance of disfigured, altered and distorted Bevo stickers will leave visitors wondering if they’re in Aggieland. However, a keen eye will notice that the Aggies and Sooners differ in their message, as Sooners prefer simply to “Beat Texas.”

Regardless of the verbiage, when you’re clad in maroon or crimson, one thing is clear: whether you’re 90 miles away in College Station or 400 miles away in Norman, you will never consider yourself far enough away from The University of Texas.

While the Sooners and Aggies have given us the honor of reserving their hatred exclusively for our beloved Longhorns, we face the unique burden of fighting a two-fronted war. With A&M establishing itself as the first institution of higher learning in Texas and OU opening its doors seven years after UT, we are truly the middle-child in a trio of major southern colleges. And as any middle-child will attest, being stuck between a barrage of insults and threats from your older brother to the east and the gluttonous smirk your spoiled, suck-up of a younger brother to the north means that we, as Longhorns, have to learn to pick our battles.

Yet, lately it has become impossible not to get caught up in the overwhelming frenzy of hype surrounding Texas’ rivalry with OU. In an article dated July 2 posted on ESPN.com, Pat Forde declares the Red River Rivalry the number one rivalry in all of college football and says that the “Sooners and Longhorns are at each other’s throats.” Poll any number of students on campus, and they’ll all say the same thing — it’s OU. So it’s no surprise then, after what happened between UT and OU in last year’s Big 12 South tiebreaker, that we would forget that a place such as College Station exists — much less, that they’re our rivals.

Meera Rajagopalan, former director of special events and rallies for the Texas Exes Student Chapter, agrees that the Longhorns’ rivalry with OU has, in recent years, overshadowed the rivalry with A&M. “From A&M’s standpoint, we’re their biggest rivals, but from our standpoint, I definitely think it’s OU,” she says. However, Rajagopalan says that student participation and attendance at Texas Exes sponsored rallies has remained strong, despite the trend. “We have the Torchlight Parade every year before OU and always have a strong following,” she says. “But the same goes for the Hex Rally — especially the past couple of years when A&M beat us.”

“I think there has been a shift in the rivalries because the talent level of A&M has fallen off,” says Jimmy Fraser, an OU alumnus. “I think it's because [OU and Texas] have both been the better two teams in the Big 12 South and are always competing for representation in the Big 12 Championship. That is where the rivalry has spiced up a bit, and why [The Red River Shootout] matters more than our in-state rivals.”

The strength of OU’s football team has undoubtedly caused Longhorns to concentrate focus on the Sooners, but as in any two-fronted war, it’s important to distribute your troops appropriately. So when it comes to the Aggies, Longhorns must remember that no matter how much we may hate our neighbors to the north, historically, we hated the Aggies first. “For [Aggies], the rivalry between [A&M] and UT dates all the way back to the 1894 football season, when UT beat A&M 38-0,” says Larry Cooper, Director of Marketing for the Association of Former Students, A&M’s alumni association. “It was [A&M’s] first football game ever, so we didn’t take being beaten lightly.”

Cooper says that sports weren’t the only reason the Aggies and Longhorns bicker. “While football plays a major role, the roots of the rivalry extend way back and weren’t exclusive to sports,” he says. He believes that geography and state allocated funding also contributed. “The geography aspect of it is obvious. Any time you have two major schools pooling from the same area, there’s going to be some tension,” he says. “But another factor was funding. In 1912, the state came really close to closing A&M and merging it with UT.”

You can call it a sibling-rivalry, hatred at its finest, envy, or you could even call it a misunderstanding, but Jay Steider, an A&M former student, says that no matter what you call it or what the stakes are, the UT/A&M rivalry is always thrilling. “To really make sense of it, you have to define rivalry. You’re always going to have your in-state battles. And Texas and A&M are always going to be big in that respect. But, right now, in the grand scheme of things, the OU and UT rivalry is definitely going to take the spotlight,” he says. “That being said, the Aggies know for a fact that no matter how good UT is, there’s always some extra element there that can help them beat the Longhorns — and if they don’t, it always comes down to wire.”

Then why has our once-passionate, thrilling and storied rivalry with A&M been flat lined to a slow beating pulse, in recent years? “Personally, I think it all goes back to bonfire,” says Robert Hunter, an A&M graduate from the class of ’92. He believes that with Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to put an end to university-sponsored bonfires, an annual tradition held by A&M before every game against UT, the rivalry took a major hit. “I think he was scared his hair would ignite,” he jokes. “But then again, his mansion in Austin burned down, so maybe he and fire have a long history of trading punches.”

“Who says it’s dead?” asks John Roberson, a UT graduate and member of Texas Exes. “With OU, the rivalry is always flared up because it’s state versus state — no holds barred. It’s taking the stage right now because it has national impact. With A&M, the reason it’s on the backburner right now is because A&M is an in-state school. It’s where our brothers and sisters go; it’s where our friends and neighbors from high school go. So when they’re not beating us at football, we share that Texas connection. But no matter how bad either school gets at football, we’ll always be rivals.”

Perhaps Roberson is right; maybe the Lone Star State’s oldest rivalry doesn’t need reviving. Maybe the blinding scale of the OU rivalry has caused Longhorns to simply lose sight of the 300,000 Border-Collie-loving Aggies who find UT utterly disgusting. And, because of this, maybe the revitalization requires nothing more than a reminder of why we’re not Aggies — because no matter how determined they are to “Saw ‘Em Off,” how many push-ups their Corps of Cadets can do, or how many times they so cleverly refer to us as “t.u.” — we’re Texas.

“I give up! What does he say?” shouts Carnes. After battling to maintain the suspense of his cliffhanger, Noll finally submits and forfeits a punch line. “’Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order?’” he blurts in his best impersonation of an exaggeratedly slow southern draw. Almost instinctively, Carnes’ head rears backwards in amusement. As the duo walk out the door of the bar, their tattered and faded burnt orange hats, which don the sacred Bevo logo, cling desperately to the devoted, loyal Longhorn crowns they adorn.

A loud, nearly incomprehensible chorus of drunken cheers follows them out the door and rolls down what sounds like the entire stretch of 6th Street. It’s a sound loathed by Sooners and Aggies alike. It’s a sound familiar to Longhorns everywhere. It’s the sound of college rivalry. It’s “The Eyes of Texas,” and it’s the way all, good Aggie jokes end.

Magazines that may be interested:
Burnt Orange Magazine: Written from a UT angle. Deals with UT related topics.
Writer’s Guidelines:
Burnt Orange Magazine – See attached.
Lexis Nexis:
Larry Cooper would be the only possible hit returned by LexisNexis, but none seem to be the same Larry Cooper.

Sources:
Stewart Noll
Ryan Carnes
Meera Rajagopalan
Jimmy Fraser
Larry Cooper
Jay Steider
John Roberson

Web sites:
http://www.aggienetwork.com/Default.aspx
http://www.barkingcarnival.com/eyesoftx/on-this-independence-day-thank-god-youre-not-an-aggie
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=4297677&sportCat=ncf
http://www.texasexes.org/tesc/
http://www.texasexes.org/
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/if-you-love-your-alma-mater-to-death/