I had no idea what to write about for today, so I sent out a request for topic suggestions on Twitter, and a good friend of mine from college suggested I keep it K-State themed. As you probably know if you’ve been here, I’m a K-Stater, and right now, it’s Nebraska week. We’re playing them tomorrow night on national TV. So, I’m gonna go with 12 random K-State college stories.
Real quick, just in case you’ve never been here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. Click here to see why I’m running 61 marathons this year for Train 4 Autism.
The Good
1. A lot of people ask me how I chose K-State, because I was born and raised in Southern California. Spent my entire pre-Kansas life there. Well, I was a journalism student at my local community college and I narrowed it down to five colleges I wanted to go to based on the quality of the journalism department and the student newspaper.
My list included USC, Missouri (Columbia), North Carolina (Chapel Hill), the University of Kansas and K-State. USC was too expensive for a journalism degree, North Carolina was farther away than I wanted to go and I probably wasn’t going to get into Mizzou, because they have an incredible (and incredibly competitive) journalism department and they had very tough standards for junior-college transfers (I was about a 3.0 student, which is OK, but not good enough to go there).
So, all of a sudden, I was down to KU and KSU. My neighbor in California was from Topeka and I asked her about the in-state reputation of the two schools. She told me the people that are better than KSU go to KU. And the people who don’t care about the people who are better than them go to KSU. I figured KSU was my place, so I applied, got accepted, and flew out to see the campus and register without ever looking at KU. And in case you couldn’t tell, I’m thrilled with the decision I made. I loved it there.
2. Since we’re talking K-State today, it was a lot of fun going to a college that was (at the time) a major football factory. The program was top 10 for most of the time I was there and even No. 1 in the nation during a chunk of my last semester. The biggest win while I was there was against Nebraska in 1998. We hadn’t beaten Nebraska in 30 years until that night. It was fun being in the press box for the AP for that one. With the team doing so well, there were about 300 media credentials issued weekly. For that game, the national media converged and there were more than 600 members of the media there. ESPN did their College Gameday broadcast there. While I was writing in the press box after the game, I was talking with folks from the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe … the list went on and on. It was certainly a memorable experience.
3. My buddy who told me to write this column told me to include the play that one of my stories got that week. I was writing for the AP, and since the game was the national game of the week, my stories would go out on the wire and get picked up by everybody. There was one I wrote about our quarterback, Michael Bishop, that spent 24 hours as the lead story on every major sports website — espn.com, cnnsi.com, thesportingnews.com, usatoday.com. It was pretty cool, still being in my final months as a student, to see something like that.
The college football reporter from the L.A. Times did a huge story on K-State football that took up half of the front page back home in the paper, and he talked to me and my buddy and quoted us in the story. They took a pull quote (when they make it bigger so you see the quote before you read the story) from me and it was above the fold on the front page of the sports section of the Times. I had a TON of people back home calling me up about that.
4. My last semester, I had a sweet 800-square foot studio apartment. It was in a great part of town, Aggieville, and it had thick green shag carpeting that killed a bag every time I vacuumed. There were flowers on the wallpaper, wood paneling from the ’70s, it came fully furnished (including an olive green refrigerator), it had off-street parking, was a three-minute walk to campus and two-minute walk to the bars, there was bright red carpeting in the bathroom, sweet formica countertops and my kitchen was about eight feet away from the country bar next door, so I could always hear the music. The price tag? $350/month. That’s living large, my friends. It was awesome.
5. I just did my thing at the time, but I got to talk to a bunch of people who’d end up having pretty good NFL careers. I had a 15-minute phone interview with Donovan McNabb when he was a junior at Syracuse. I spent 5 or 10 minutes doing a 1-on-1 with Drew Brees in San Antonio when he was a sophomore at Purdue. Most of the guys who were in college back in 1998 are out of the league now, but for several years, I couldn’t turn on a game without seeing multiple players I had interviewed.
The Bad
6. I used to drink a lot in college. One day, we had our daily newspaper budget meeting at a bar. It was St. Patrick’s Day and half-yards were $1. I spent $4 and then we went back to campus. Good thing I wasn’t driving. Somebody brought in a tray of Jell-o and for whatever reason, I thought it would be a good idea to stick a square on the ceiling in the newsroom. It stuck! We put a table beneath it for when it fell, but it didn’t fall that night! Nor did it fall the next week! Nor has it fallen over the past 12 1/2 years! The water evaporated and it basically turned to a rock. It’s still there, and there are all sorts of urban legends about the Jell-o now, but I’m the one who put it there. Yes, that’s my legacy at Kansas State University.
This picture was taken in 2009, I believe. They re-did the ceiling, but preserved that tile.
7. 776-5577, call us now, Pizza Shuttle. I still remember the number, 15+ years after I first arrived on campus. Is it bad if you turn a pizza upside down in the box for 10 minutes to let all the grease soak out? Not if that pizza only costs $3.50! Best 2 a.m. food ever.
8. We had a football player named Frank Murphy who was a highly-touted recruit with blazing speed, but he had to miss the first four games of the season for accepting improper benefits (a deal on a $3,000 used car) from a booster. He was not made available to the media before his first game of the season, at Colorado, so I asked Michael Bishop, our quarterback, about how excited Murphy was. Bishop told me that he was talking to Murphy, who said he wanted to score a touchdown on his first play. Bishop asked him, “What if we’re only on the 20?” Murphy told him, “Then I want to go 80!”
Well, I put that in my story, and I didn’t take it out of context at all. But my story ran on the wire and Woody Paige, who’s a big-time columnist in Denver, wrote a column about how Murphy bragged he was going to go 80 yards against CU’s defense the first time he touched the ball. That went over well.
It turned into a war of words, Murphy didn’t play much in the game, and afterwards, at the press conference, KSU coach Bill Snyder dragged Murphy into the press conference to apologize to CU coach Rick Neuheisel. It was extremely awkward, because Neuheisel didn’t seem to think it was any big deal. But then when Neuheisel and Murphy left, Snyder went off, yelling at all of us media gathered there. The press conference was broadcast live. I was about three feet from him when he was yelling and he was looking right at me about half the time. I really, really, really didn’t want to be there at that point.
The Ugly
9. My fraternity went on probation for hazing at one point when I was there. One of the things that got us in trouble was an active cracking a whip and threatening a pledge in the middle of a large lecture class with about 300 people in it. Seemed bad at the time, but it sure is a fun story to tell. I mean, who can say that their fraternity went on probation for that? Oh yeah, I can.
10. Two times, I played drunk football in college. The only problem is, one time was in the hallway of a hotel, and I outweighed my opponent (who was sober) by more than 100 pounds He wasn’t a willing participant and there wasn’t a ball. The second time was in the hallways of Kedzie Hall, the journalism building, and my two opponents each weighed about 80 pounds less than me. And again, they were sober, there was no ball, and they didn’t want to play.
11. Have you ever been on a teleconference for a men’s basketball postseason announcement, and thought your line was muted, and then made a phone call from your cell to talk to a friend and used too much profanity to tell her about how bad the men’s basketball team was going to get beat in its postseason game, only to find out your line wasn’t really muted? Yeah, I have.
12. I spent 6 1/2 years getting a mass communications degree. I had fun, went on academic probation, and did a million memorable things to have the “college experience” everybody should have. When push came to shove, though, I got it done and was set to graduate in December 1998. A funny thing happened, though. Somehow, I was failing a one-hour freshman geology lab class I was taking that semester. I found that out about three or four days before graduation and didn’t know what to do. Apparently, I’d missed one too many labs. So, I begged the instructor, a GTA, to let me make up the work, and she was cool with that. I got to go out by a lake in the freezing December weather and dig around for fossils. I must have spent an hour or two out there. It was miserable. But it was better than explaining to my dad how after all the money he spent, and 6 1/2 years chasing a journalism degree, I couldn’t graduate because of a one-hour freshman geology lab.
So that’s it. My 12 random things about K-State, since it’s Nebraska week. We get them tomorrow night. They’ll probably beat us, but even if they do, I’m still proud of where I went to school and I always will be!