Favorite UC memories/ traditions
With apologies to baseball fans and our burgeoning Olympic sports lineup, it's the offseason. So, I thought I'd start an old farts thread on here. I'd love to hear folks' favorite memories and traditions from the days gone by.
I'll start with one, and it predates my time as a student. It's 1986, I'm in middle school, and a buddy of mine asks three of us at school if we'd be interested in being ball boys for the upcoming football season. We're all in. For a 13 year old, despite not being the salad days of UC football, it was a pretty intimidating environment and we really had to pay attention. The problem was that none of us had ever played football (which begs the question of why we were asked), and that was apparent in the first game of the year.
We were clearly a sore spot, and when we showed up for the second game, we were assigned to just retrieve balls and give them to student managers (I believe that's who they were) who basically acted as ball boys instead of us. One of our jobs in retrieving balls was to go into the student section for every field goal and extra point. There weren't nets behind the goalposts, so every kick went into the stands. We were supposed to retrieve the balls, but we had competition. A group of UC students (15 of them?) would plant their biggest guys in the student section, and the rest would spread out around the stadium. When the ball landed in the section, the brutes would inevitably wrestle it away from us, then play a game of keep away by launching the ball from section to section to their buddies who spread around. We chased them as the play continued, sometimes lasting a whole drive, only to have to sprint back to the student section and do it all over again (there were quite a few opposing PATs in those days).
We were judged to be inadequate at this task as well, and somehow we regained our ball boy posts for the game against #1 Miami. We were excited to see Testeverde and the Hurricanes up close and personal, and it was a big time environment at Nippert - they even had extra seating at Nippert for the game. We were at our absolute best, and feeling pretty good about our performance. In the 4th Quarter, though, I was standing next to the least athletic of my buddies. For some reason, just as Miami was lining up at scrimmage, he swore that the line judge yelled, "Ball, ball!". The guy couldn't throw a football straight if his life depended on it, but just as Testeverde snapped the ball, my buddy launched the perfect spiral. It was so perfect that he hit his intended target - the line judge - in the head. The play was called dead. That game was our swan song as ball boys.
Three of the four of us went to UC, and all of us (including the spiral-throwing, collar-popping eventual Miami dolt) remain fans today. Our buddy maintains to this day that the line judge yelled, 'Ball, ball".
Gimme your early memories, traditions, etc. And let me know if you were one of the yahoos who we chased around the stadium after PATs.
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