John Canzano wrote a piece about his grandfather attempting to get to the Rose Bowl in 1929 – and how he made it to Pasadena a day late. This reminded me of my first trip to Pasadena.
I would love to tell you a romantic story about a just graduated college kid who hitched a ride to Pasadena and found his way to the 1995 game against Penn State, but that would be a fantasy; a story that may be true of someone else, but not my story.
I did indeed graduate in 1994, but I was married with two children during my senior year at Oregon and separated by the time football season came around. It seemed a rather selfish concept to spend that kind of money for a trip to the Granddaddy of them all when I could barely afford to give my young boys a memorable Christmas.
I was not sure that the moment would ever come again, so I simply took comfort in some good memories of that season watching football with my older brother. Three seasons later, I would buy my first season tickets and started going to the stadium every game. But it would be another 12 seasons before I started sponsoring tailgates for Duck Sports Authority.
When I returned from a season as an assistant strength coach in South Dakota, I asked my good friend AJ about the DSA tailgates and they had stopped sponsoring them during that 2008 season. We came up with a plan to start them up again for the 2009 season.
We had no idea how unique that season was going to be.
This was when you could still get general admission into the Autzen parking lot and we used to really pack in a lot of people. We had two spaces side by side and used every inch of those spaces for most games.
The thing that really stands out to me about the 2009 season is that it seemed to really come from nowhere when we were in the moment. Sure, 2008 had ended spectacularly with a great win over Oregon State and Oklahoma State, but we did not really know what the rest of the season would hold.
So when Oregon beat Oregon State 37-33 on December 3rd, a reality came up – for the first time in my life I had a real chance to go to the game. But it would not be easy. I wanted to take my wife, my children, and hers all to the game; I wanted to have my brother and nephews come to the game. I was not exactly a high-level donor, so I could only get one ticket via my application. So I went to work. I got on our message boards; I got on Craigslist; I scrambled everywhere and came up with enough tickets for everyone that wanted to go with me – and it was not cheap.
The memorable part, though, was the drive.
I was working at a Beaverton area body shop and my youngest son was in Umatilla for a basketball game on December 28th – the night before we were going to leave. I was going to get through the mountains that Tuesday and get to Pasadena on Wednesday night. Plans changed due to an unexpected snowstorm that night. My wife was off that day and planned to drive to Umatilla to pick up my son – fortunately she was in our four-wheel drive Blazer and made it past Troutdale before the road was closed. She got home around one o’clock am on the 29th and we decided to leave earlier than had been planned.
We were bringing all of our tailgate gear with us – which included a pair of 10-foot PVC piles we used to lift the DSA flag high enough to be found – with three of our sons in the back and poles too long, they sort of bisected the seating and created a divide.
We met up with my brother in Weed (CA) and picked up two of my nephews. Suddenly we had five boys ages 11-16, me and my wife in the car. She still has nightmares of five teenage boys eating greasy gas station foods and those residual odors that typically follow.
But she remembers them. And she remembers all of the ‘that’s what she said’ and ‘your momma’ jokes. It makes her smile and I am sure it will continue to do so for the rest of our lives. This was the moment when our blended family began to feel blended. Where suddenly, all of those things that make blending families difficult seemed to fade into flatulence, jokes, laughter, and a whole lot of bonding.
We capped off the mayhem by getting to Pasadena early enough in the day to get some In-N-Out, catch a nap, and get to downtown Los Angeles to hang with AJ and Mo on the 31st before heading back to our hotel. The last, scramble came at 4 am when I received a call from a friend – Sandrea Benyard – to tell me I probably ought to head to the stadium right away because the backup for parking was ‘insane’ (her words).
So, we scrambled to get our coolers into the Blazer; the grill; all of the food, put some new bags of ice in the coolers, and head down the road. When we got there, we were exhausted in that way you feel when you do way too much and yet are exhilarated at having done it. We slept in the cab of the Blazer for about 90 minutes.
But it is that drive down and the morning scramble to get to the stadium that will always hover. Yes, I would go again in 2011, 2015, and 2019, but this was the first one and the change in our family dynamics from a trip that created better bonding than we could have ever hoped for are what really stand out for me.
That is the story about how an innocuous little football game between Oregon and Ohio State blended a family stronger than we ever thought possible. Yes, there was some juvenile boy activity. But we would not change that trip for anything.
