It’s happened every Oct. 6 for 29 years now. It’s the date of a not-so-great memory, one that will never be forgotten. I was 14 at the time, and we’d moved from Missouri to Kansas the year before. With that move came a lifelong love of sports, in particular Missouri athletics.
I really didn’t understand the Missouri-Kansas rivalry back then. All these years later, the people I went to high school and college likely remember me as the guy who likes the Missouri Tigers.
In 1990, I really had no idea what I was getting into rooting for that program. Up to that point, the disappointment I knew was minimal: A couple of tough first-round losses in the NCAA Tournament, notably a heart-breaking loss to a Northern Iowa team to end a season in which Missouri was ranked No. 1 for several weeks and won at Allen Fieldhouse.
In those days, Missouri football was something I listened to on the weekends and paid little attention to the rest of the week. That said, I never missed a game. If I was at a craft show with my parents, I’d “take a break,” run to the van and find the game on the radio.
I started following Mizzou football in the late 1980s, arguably the worst time to do so. It was a slightly less-painful version of modern-day Kansas football. In the first three years of fandom, the Tigers won a combined 10 games. Many of the losses were 60-point beatdowns against Nebraska and Oklahoma.
The beginning of 1990 looked a lot like the previous three years. Missouri blew a 19-0 lead to TCU in the fourth quarter, prompting the classic headline “Frogs roar, Tigers croak.” Two weeks later, the Tigers got destroyed 58-7 by an average Indiana team.
But the following week, Missouri showed its first sign of life in years, upsetting No. 21 Arizona State 30-9. I remember working a craft show with my father at the Expocentre in Topeka that day, running back and forth from the booth to the van to listen to the game. I’m certain he was annoyed after the 17th update on the score.
In Week 5, on that fateful Oct. 6, the Tigers hosted 12th-ranked Colorado, a team that routinely hammered them. I was alone that day in our home, a trailer we lived in for a year five miles outside of Burlingame before moving into a house in town.
I was fortunate that day: the signal from a Kansas City station was strong enough for me to listen on my small radio. I can still hear the crackling as I blasted the radio. I’d often “play” football while listening to the game, diving onto my bed or the couch, something my mother would have been thrilled about.
Though optimistic, I didn’t expect much of a game. To my surprise, it was back and forth from start to finish. I can still hear Bill Wilkerson describing Colorado players slipping and falling on Missouri’s infamous Omniturf. I can still feel myself jumping for joy when Damon Mays took a short pass and raced 38 yards to give Mizzou a 31-27 lead with 2:32 remaining.
Colorado came right back, driving down the field. Suddenly, it was first-and-goal and quarterback Charles Johnson spiked the ball to stop the clock. On the next play, Eric Bieniemy (yes, that Eric Bieniemy), ran to the 1-yard line, and the Buffaloes called their final timeout.
After play resumed, the Tigers stuffed Bieniemy again at the 1-yard line. On the next play, Colorado spiked the ball. By this point, I was screaming at the radio as the Buffs lined up for another play. “THAT WAS FOURTH DOWN!” Colorado scored on the next play (replays show Johnson actually was stopped short of the end zone and didn’t score) and won, 33-31.
I was mad and crushed. I was still fuming by the time my parents got home three hours later. Colorado went on to win their only national title, because of course they did. Missouri only won two more games the rest of the season, because of course they did.
So, every year for the last 29 years on Oct. 6, I think about that cool Saturday afternoon and the Fifth Down Game. It was a preview of things to come. A couple years later, the basketball team lost on a 40-foot heave by a 7-foot center at Oklahoma State. Two years after that, they lost at the buzzer on Tyus Edney’s layup, a play you see at the beginning of every single NCAA Tournament broadcast on CBS. Two years later, they lost on the flea-kicker in football.
I could go on and on. Let’s just say I’m not as optimistic about sports as I was when I was 14.