Weekend Reflections: State of Texas Bonanza
With proper due given to our late friend Gatorama I present some reflections from a trip to the State of Texas this past weekend for Thursday AACtion between Tulsa at Houston at TDECU Stadium, ALDS Indians at Astros at Minute Maid Park, and then the RRS at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
Four of us (younger brother, and two friends) scouted this trip since May, the lone wild card was whether Houston would win the division, and hopefully get an early start on Friday, to make the trip up to Dallas a little easier for us. The key was LAD finishing with a better record than ATL and hosting Game 1.
TDECU Stadium: Tulsa 26 Houston 41, Announced crowd: 29,823. Guessing 18k were in the seats. One of my old roommates at Nebraska lives in Houston, and used to work in the Athletic Dept. so he hosted us for a day and joined us at the Astros game too. The Thursday night game, meant a smaller than usual tailgate contingent, and thus smaller crowd. Hot and breezy with Sun setting. I can’t imagine how miserable that 11 am start was for the Arizona game.
We hunkered next to the stadium in the RV lot and watched the early innings of Game 1 of Rockies/Brewers, Texas Dow Employee Credit Union (TDECU) opened in 2014, and holds 40,000. It really is a nice stadium, no bad seats, very smart design for the club/suites, very low to the field. Excellent wi-fi. Easy to watch or listen to Brewers on my phone. Very open concourse design. Beer is sold. Bathrooms were really nice. Huge video board, great PA sound. TDECU was built on the site of the old stadium (Robertson Stadium). The Cougars played at the Texans stadium while TDECU was being finished. UH looked like they were going down, before rallying with 17 points in about 90 seconds in the 4thquarter. Ed Oliver was the best player we saw all weekend. Students did show up in a pretty good numbers, but man, I’d say 80% of them bolted by second half. We had nice seats on the 20s.
ALDS Game 1 Friday: Indians at Astros (1:05 pm). Minute Maid Park: I’ll be brief, this is a football board. I had been to this park the year it opened (Enron). Lots of changes mostly positive. To me after Pittsburgh and San Francisco, all the new parks I’ve been to are at a similar level. Very nice, mallparks, with some interesting unique features, but largely the same. We sat on the field level down the 3B line. Very nice matchup (Kluber v Verlander). Great crowd, to be expected. Thank God for A/C as it was, well Houston, so it was hot/humid day. Astros ended up pulling away and won 7-2. Now it was time to hustle to Dallas, but not before grabbling food (at Mr. Hamburger in Huntsville) and being ordered by other Texans to stop at Bucc-ees, a cultish following for this Texas based Convenience Store. Tasty beef jerky, and frankly remarkable how busy this place was, but in the end, its still a C store. Keep hustling to Dallas, arrive at 10 pm, as RRS is a 11 am kick. Early night, a couple beers, watch USU handle BYU, up by 7, Uber by 8 to the fair.
RRS: Texas 48 OU 45. Cotton Bowl. We knew it would be expensive. Face was $140, we bought two different pairs of seats for an average of $260 per ticket. My brother worked the street outside the Fair for about 45 minutes before we got it done. He did well, relative to what StubHub was listing. Very little supply out on the streets, and about 100 people with fingers in the air. He had our cash, and the three of us basically eavesdropped on any negotiations of others. I sat on OU side, w my friend and my brother and his friend sat on Texas side. Texas State Fair, GameDay wedged into an area near the midway. We were amongst the only people on the grounds, not wearing OU or UT colors. I love all the trash talking t-shirts that you see at this game. So much variety, as in dozens. The best neutral site game out there, though WLOCP is no slouch. My 2ndtrip to the RRS, I went in the early 2000s. I love this place, they’ve done a nice job keeping this stadium up, much better bones than my first visit. They did add a stifling Beer garden on the OU side, which we popped into in the late 2ndquarter to check in on the other games. Beer not available in the stands.
I won’t summarize the game, other than to say, there’s so much cannon fire/gun fire at this game, humorous. Some OU fans split when the going was rough (45-24). It rained a little bit well before the game, but then got hot, good breeze helped. So much emotion at this game and the crowd swings are enormous, given the 50/50 split. Nothing else like it except WLOCP. Once game ended, we escaped out the main gate, near where the assistant coaches on both sides are hustling through the crowd to get over to the lockerooms, off of the tunnel. We did see Mike Stoops in a golf cart, sweaty, and he looked like a ghost (he was fired Sunday). I then immediately crushed a Corny Dog. RRS is a must see for people on this board. I know Utee 94 has assured us they’ll never go to JerryWorld, preferring to go to campus if the Cotton Bowl isn’t the host. The vibe would be gone, the event is not the event it is without the venerable Cotton Bowl and the scale of the State Fair. It’s always going to be in my top 5 stadium/experiences.
We did hit a bar which rivaled the one we all hit in Nashville 10 years ago as far as TV game control competence, but it was taken over by the UFC crowd as the night wore on, which made it a little feisty. We actually saw SMU fans, and UCF fans at this place. I’ve never seen SMU fans before, maybe a fan, but not eight. We bailed after the UK/A&M game and ate some really good Thai food around the corner. The meatheads at the table next to us were incredulous at us leaving before the main events of UFC. No offense, I'm not anti-UFC, we just didn't care.
Go to the RRS.
