Games that meant nothing to you as a fan (but you'll always remember)

Like most dorms of the era, my male-only, sports-mad dorm floor at Fresno State had one television set -- in the community room. And in 1977, pre-ESPN, that meant any sporting event on one of the three networks would not only get first choice but draw a big crowd. Steve Brodie's nephew was our flag football quarterback and several of the guys on the varsity football team lived among us.

Of course, every event required some form of betting on one side or the other (usually nothing huge because we were poor college kids) in addition to the usual young adult boasting about how Team X was going to crush Team Y or why Player A was so much more talented than Player B. Just daily trashtalking from everyone before I knew the term existed. The Cowboys fans whooped it up against the Redskins, Niners and Rams fans, and that carried over to every sport, including boxing.

Well, Duane Bobick was 38-0 with 32 knockouts in the spring of 1977 when he was scheduled to face reigning heavyweight champ Ken Norton. Oh, the Valley boys -- mainly from Visalia and Bakersfield -- were certain Bobick was going to wipe the floor with Norton, and the trash talk reached a fever pitch about the time we all gathered in the community room around the one TV that evening.

My nickname was Supercomputer because I was the "answer guy" when it came to who, what, when and where for sports trivia at the time. During the leadup, the biggest talker said, "Hey, Supercomputer! I'll give you 5-1 odds Norton doesn't even make it to Round 5!" There were close to 100 guys crowded into the room, egging me on to take the bet, so I put a dollar bill on the table. I didn't care about the fight, but I wasn't about to let a senior from Bakersfield, of all places, put one over on a little, stupid freshman from the suburbs.

Some 58 seconds after the bell rung, Bobick was face down and the fight was over. I don't normally gamble but that is still the sweetest $5 bill I think I've ever stuck in my wallet.

And any time we got together the rest of the semester, everyone would holler "Duane Bobick!" any time Bakersfield dude walked by, which elicited a huge roar of laughter.

We loved each other almost as much as we loved ragging on each other. Wonder where all those guys are now.

 

The guy was right; Norton didn't see the fifth round. Of course, neither did Bobick.

Just watched the fight again, the referees' instructions lasted longer than the fight.

 

First line of a book or chapter or narrated movie ...

 

Sounds like Desert Moon was based on your gang. Did you try to find your love in ChiCAWgo too?

 

That song is goddamn perfect and just hits harder and harder every year.

Those summer nights, when we were young
We bragged of things, we'd never done
We were dreamers. only dreamers
And in our haste, to grow up too soon
We left our innocence on Desert Moon

This song alone has me taking Dennis DeYoung's side in any Styx dispute. Tommy Shaw's biggest solo hit was about girls with big boobs.

 

Desert Moon is a masterpiece both in music and as a 6-minute feature length movie.

 

Yeah, there's a sweet little pocket there in '83-85 when people really figured out what they could do with the music video.

 

Dennis DeYoung, outstanding pull except that I'm nowhere as good-looking or permed. That first year of college, especially that dorm floor, was hilarious for the number of crazy escapades and stories. Just off the top of my head (and I'm going back 46 years now) ...

The group stole a Christmas tree by having one guy distract the sales guy while the others grabbed one from the back of the tent and drove off in a pickup truck.

One guy brought a real chainsaw to an outside showing of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and started it up in the woods after the movie was over, scattering the crowd that was just leaving and causing the school police to lock down the dorms and search the area.

A group of guys went to an X-rated movie one night and Vern Shattuck, a 6-6, 260-pound Asian-American guy who shaved his head, snuck up behind a person in line to buy popcorn and goosed him on the ass, except it wasn't one of the guys from our dorm, which nearly set off a huge fight and required some serious apologizing.

George Sarkisian, a transfer student from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, put a hockey puck through a sliding glass door while showing us his slap shot. It ricocheted off the brick wall at a weird angle and hit the door in such a way that it shattered. They replaced it with plywood.

Elson Armstrong, my long-time buddy in Durham, N.C., was arrested after getting caught stealing the Los Angeles Times papers from the vending machine every day and distributing them to everyone on the floor. He called his roommate for bail money, since he only brought one quarter to open the box, and eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft.

Elson and a kid named Terry (whose parents were killed the Tennerife 747 disaster later that year) had a "North Carolina vs. California Drinkoff Contest" who see which one could hold their liquor longer. Elson threw up on one of the foreign exchange students and Terry stayed on the floor of the bathroom for most of the next day.

I was sick and tired of getting bullied by a kid from Ridgecrest that we all called "Radar" (because he looked like the M*A*S*H character), so one morning while he was mouthing off about something, I casually picked up the entire Sunday section of the Times and whacked him across the face in front of everybody in the community room, knocking him out cold.

The Supercomputer got a lot of respect after that.

 

Haha. Play Mr. Roboto and then ask JY what he thinks.

 

Now they're playing it live! DeYoung for the win.

 

Desert Moon is one of the songs that I remembered from my childhood that I didn’t know who sang it at that time or the name of the song.

Then one day m, decades later, I hear the song in, of all places, a CVS Pharmacy. I hear some of the lyrics, mumbled them them over and over while I was on the checkout line. The clerk and a couple of people were looking at me strangely; I paid my purchases, ran out to my car, grabbed a pen and an old receipt that was on the passenger side floor, wrote down the lyrics, drove home, put the lyrics in Google, and found Desert Moon again.

It’s had a permanent place on my playlist for 10+ years now.

 

The story of the chainsaw guy made me hysterically crack up.