Sports Inticer
Garrett Wait
Sports Assistant
So after nearly two-and-a-half years at Pepperdine, I finally realized what was lacking from our Saturdays on campus. A college football team.
Of course I knew we didn’t have a football team when I first came to Pepperdine, but I didn’t feel the loss until I went to Saturday’s UCLA-San Diego State game and saw what a football team can do for a school. I still chuckle to myself, though, when I walk into the bookstore and see the Pepperdine football t-shirts. Those people still haven’t caught on. What a bunch of tools.
Now I want to make this loud and clear in the beginning of the column: I am not lobbying for Pepperdine to build a stadium and finance a team. I am merely stating that my life is incomplete because the administration chose to emphasize my education over my entertainment.
As I sat there, I saw all the different types of fans— I mean the whole range, from obnoxious drunken fans, to underage drunken fans to comatose drunken fans and everything in between. I saw how UCLA was united in their hatred of a common opponent, despite the fact that most UCLA students do not actually like each other.
The student section was loud and rowdy and they all wore their matching t-shirts. It was like a big baby-blue army. I became jealous until I thought again about the fact that they go to a school with an undergraduate student body larger than the population of my hometown.
Then I thought about the University of Southern California. It has the No. 1 college football team in the entire universe. Of course, students do pay the same amount of tuition as we do, but they live in beautiful downtown Watts.
People down here are so unbelievably psyched about USC football that I swear Fox Sports Net is in talks with the school to change the official station title to the Pete Carroll Sports Programming Network.
Speaking of the Trojans’ head coach, does anybody else think he made the greatest career decision in history when he left the New England Patriots for USC? He basically saved both football teams by doing that. Needless to say, Pats fans should be kissing his feet.
Yes my friends, Los Angeles has caught college football fever, and I think I may be coming down with that same affliction. But what are we supposed to do about it if our school simply doesn’t have the resources to make my dreams a reality?
Intramurals does have flag football, but because I’m not a pantywaist, I tend to not get as excited over flag football as I do over the real thing. I mean, if the worst injury one can get making a “tackle” is a paper cut, then it’s not really my cup of tea.
Then again, watching football on television isn’t quite the same as being at the game. Sure the game’s still football and most of the time you actually have a better view of the field than when you’re actually there, but the excitement level is missing.
When the fans and the players connect on some cosmic plane in one of those moments that define what it is to love sports, there you are sitting on the couch in your sweatpants spilling Doritos on the floor. And in that moment you wish you were in the stadium screaming your lungs out with 60,000 other people.
So here’s what I’m proposing: ticket allotments for Pepperdine students at UCLA and USC games. If SGA could somehow strike a deal to get us tickets each Saturday, I would be forever indebted to them.
Think about it: it’s a win-win situation. We would no longer have to struggle to get tickets, plus we would be in the stadium instead of lazing around, wasting a perfectly good Saturday. The other schools would undoubtedly make a profit off of us, because they could sell the tickets to us at a discounted price, but not the same price they give to their own students.
I think this could actually work. There are plenty of Pepperdine kids who are just crazy enough to adopt one of those other school’s teams as their own. A lot of students here would love the chance to experience a real college football environment, including the occasional pre-game tailgate party.
And if we went to the games, our own school rivalries would only get stronger. Waves fans might even show up to those USC-Pepperdine water polo matches, or the UCLA-Pepperdine women’s soccer games.
It’s your basic trickle-down theory, except mine could actually work.
That’s it; the ball is in SGA’s court on this one. Maybe I’m delusional in thinking that we could afford 30 or 40 tickets to UCLA or USC’s home games. Then again, what if my harebrained idea actually works?
It could be the cowbell that will cure my fever.
10-07-2004