I grew up maybe a mile from the stadium on a little street called Institute Lane, so Rice was always on the edge of my imagination. When I was really little and got caught doing something bad, I'd blame an imaginary nemesis I called "the Owl." "I didn't break the cookie jar -- the Owl did it." Never worked.
One my my earliest memories is our street being full of cars and people headed over to the Super Bowl...Big excitement on a misty and grey day. Years later, I’d come across Hunter Thompson’s “coverage” of that game. Scare quotes because as was his wont at the time, the game itself figures but little in his missives from the Bayou City, which found him still in top form. It was at the downtown Hyatt that he formulated “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Houston had a galvanizing effect on him at that time; in his letters from that era, he was always bandying around the idea of a novel set in the sleazier districts of Houston (South Main held a special appeal for him) and along the Seawall. Anyway, nothing came of that, obviously, and I digress…
Rice would leave the stadium open year round. I went in there and chunked a football around with some friends one spring day and made a sliding catch on that turf. Whoa, lesson learned about turf burn. I basically peeled off my forearm on that epidermis-shredding abomination.
Around the same time I was poking around a concession stand in the empty stadium and found an old hand-painted sign that said "COLORED ONLY." I stole it and gave it to my grandfather, who was kind of disturbingly pleased to have it. I don't know what he did with it. It vanished into a closet where he hoarded some of his treasures and I never saw it again..
This was about 1986. I was madly in love with this incredibly gorgeous and whipsmart homegirl I met at Coaches Driving School. She was a St. John’s girl, daughter of a hugely successful attorney. She lived on Rice, and I lived on Institute! Clearly, a match for the ages!
I took her to a movie — A Room With A View, at the River Oaks. I was pulling out all the stops, as you can see. And things went well, or so I thought.
But alas. She was nowhere near as into me as I was into her. So anyway I took her out again, hoping to get her tipsy at Hungry International (where they served everybody) and at least beat out an infield hit to first base. We'd see where things went after that. She had other plans.
She, we'll call her Laura, brought a friend with her -- one who was as into me as I was into Laura. And Laura was trying to fob me off on this other girl ("Susan"), who was perfectly fine, but just not in Laura's league. Laura was then, and remains now, pretty close to being a league of her own. It's hilarious -- 35 years later, people who know her now and knew here then are impressed at my 16-year-old game just for getting her to go out on even one date with me.
So I ended up buying us all Black Mamba beers and we got a little buzz on and headed over to the stadium and climbed to the top row to watch the city lights twinkling in the summer haze from the Med Center and Downtown and Greenway...Me in love with Laura, Susan in love with me, hormones raging, and none of us getting anywhere. And that — with a melancholy whimper amid high humidity and African beer fumes — is where that sad misbegotten love triangle ended.
And oh yeah, I saw some football games there too. I remember dad taking me to see a Bill Yeoman veer UH Cougar juggernaut flatten a Tommy Kramer-led Rice team...Saw the Longhorns struggle through some Akers games, one of which was that Bluebonnet Bowl vs Air Force, others versus the Owls, who were then once more proving a handful for those subpar Horns squads. Others were just random games -- you could just walk over there at halftime and stroll right in for free.
When my son was a toddler we'd be at Valhalla, the grad student pub, every Friday, which is unofficial family day. A bunch of us would go and spread blankets and get sozzled on fifty cent cups of Pearl beer while our kids would roam the campus free as birds, climbing statues and roving far and wide. John Henry is still friends with his little Valhalla bunch to this day, twenty years later.
John Henry, causing a toy to levitate, and some of his Valhalla crew at the Hermann Park train station.
He used to think Rice, the university, was kind of an adjunct to Valhalla, the real nexus of the school. And it was funny / sad -- he got to where he could lead us walking all the way back to our house at age four or so. He knew the whole mile back and forth by heart.
What a wonderland it is. Houston is so lucky to have such a weird little gem in its midst. Without it, it would be that much more like Dallas.
Great stuff, noitce he stops about five decades or so back in his Rice ootball commentary. Sad to see the onc mighty Owls have to battle to defeat the likes of TMSUI miss the oldSWC of course an back thn they hgad freshmen football with ths Shorthorns, Cubs, Shoats, Owlets, Ponies playing separate games from the varsity but freshman eligib ility soon d demoslishee tht tradition, seems like early - mid '70s
My first job was selling cokes at Rice Stadium. We'd carry a bucket filled with a dozen of the small 6 ounce cokes packed in ice, an apron for our change and the round bottle opener. We paid a dime a Coke and sold t hem for a quarter, (this in mid-late '50s) and the best games to work were when the LSU Tigers came to town and they tipped better as the cokes were mixers for their whiskey and they drank more than other fans so by the second half they would often give us a buck and tell us to keep the change. Alas, they only came every other year. We would also ride our bikes all over the campus on our way to the giant hill in Herman Park where we would ride to the top and then see if we could coast all the way to the reflection pool. Back then Rice and West University were sort of on the western fringes of the city.