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That Magical Season

treeplanter

treeplanter

Recruit
10 Year Member
I was 13 years old when I became a "die hard".

It was the summer of 1987 and approximately 12 months before Bruce Willis was to transform the expression into an instant Christmas classic.

We were in Omaha, visiting both sets of grandparents, when my mom and dad took me and my brothers down to Memorial to watch a practice. Afterwards, we were allowed onto the field where I encountered none other than wingback, Dana Brinson.

While nervously chatting with #33, Broderick Thomas passed by eliciting from myself an exclamation of "Whoa, there's The Sandman!".

Immediately, Dana expressed an excited "You know the Sandman? You know the Sandman??" and called him back; "Yo, Broderick, hey, Broderick, these boys want to meet you!"

Long story short, I got to meet Broderick "The Sandman" Thomas, went later on that year to my 1st ever Husker game - a 42-3 victory over Iowa St - and fell forever in love with the Huskers.

To this day, I believe the 87 Huskers are one of the greatest Nebraska teams not to win the national championship!


How about you, when and how did you become die hards?
 

Nice story. I have a great nephew named Broderick and yes, he's named for Broderick Thomas. My niece and her husband were raised correctly and named their first and only child accordingly. I just call their little guy "Sandman." Some people, younger and less aware. give me strange looks. It just gives me an opportunity to talk about Husker football.

My mama watched Sam Francis play when she was a child and taught me to love the Huskers and to pay attention when the game was on the radio. By the time I was a teenager and knew that Santa, the Easter Bunny and probably even God weren't real, I had found a religion that rang true to me.
 
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skerBob said:
Nice story. I have a great nephew named Broderick and yes, he's named for Broderick Thomas. My niece and her husband were raised correctly and named their first and only child accordingly. I just call their little guy "Sandman." Some people, younger and less aware. give me strange looks. It just gives me an opportunity to talk about Husker football.
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Awesome!!!
 
Sometime in the early 1990s. I remember the FSU game in 1993 and all the "Unfinished Business" merch. I was in elementary school and had started to get into football.

My appreciation for the Huskers deepened when I moved to Oregon. In the ten years or so before things like BTN or whatever hackjob pay-per-view racket the Big XII had, I was reduced to following the Huskers through online radio broadcasts and box scores. I realized how much I missed NU games. My dad even recorded games on VHS and would mail them to me for a couple seasons. I'd have to avoid Huskermax (Huskerpedia, at the time) all week until my tapes showed up Thursday. Then I'd have a day to watch the game, check HM, and then go back on lockdown until the next week.
 
DuckTownHusker said:
Sometime in the early 1990s. I remember the FSU game in 1993 and all the "Unfinished Business" merch. I was in elementary school and had started to get into football.

My appreciation for the Huskers deepened when I moved to Oregon. In the ten years or so before things like BTN or whatever hackjob pay-per-view racket the Big XII had, I was reduced to following the Huskers through online radio broadcasts and box scores. I realized how much I missed NU games. My dad even recorded games on VHS and would mail them to me for a couple seasons. I'd have to avoid Huskermax (Huskerpedia, at the time) all week until my tapes showed up Thursday. Then I'd have a day to watch the game, check HM, and then go back on lockdown until the next week.
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A true fan !!!!!
 
My earliest memories of football were high school games in the mid-70s where I'd play around the bleachers while the rest of my family watched the game. Not old enough to understand the difference between high school, college, and pro, I can remember hearing the name "Vince Ferragamo" from a TV announcer in what must have been the '76 season, when I was 5 years old. Beyond those snippets and some NFL memories connected to my older brothers being Vikings fans, almost every other football memory from my first decade of life involved hearing Lyell Bremser's voice calling out names that sounded like lines of poetry: "Isaiah Moses Hipp," "Jarvis Redwine," "Jimmy Williams," "Toby Williams," and "Jamie Williams." Folks that are younger than I am don't understand that we'd only see Nebraska on TV for maybe a game before they played Oklahoma and then the bowl game, so the radio was the connection to Husker football in the fall on Saturdays. My dad was a farmer, and he had an IH 656 tractor with no cab that had a fender-mounted tractor radio that was always so loud that we could hear the game in the yard while my dad was working in the fields around the farmyard. I remember being just old enough to be learning the states in grade school while hearing their names on my dad's radio. Based on the final scores, the state of Kansas really didn't play much college football in the 70s, but the state of Oklahoma was producing monsters.

You're never truly a die-hard fan, though, until your heart has been broken. I was old enough to be very upset when Oklahoma came back to win in '80, and I was an 11-year-old version of "outraged" when the referees gave the game to Penn State in '82, but there was never anything as heart-wrenching as the '84 Orange Bowl. I had talked my dad into buying every preseason magazine in the summer of '83, and I read every word of every one of them. We watched every televised game together. We watched the Milt Tenopir show on Nebraska Public TV every Tuesday night to see highlights of the games that weren't televised, even though we'd listened to them on the radio. I'd received something like 6 or 7 Nebraska shirts for Christmas that year, and I was wearing a different one for each quarter of the Orange Bowl. When the 2-point conversion failed, I cried. My older brothers had a couple of friends over to watch the game with my family, so there were 6 of us Husker fans sitting there, stunned, trying to process what had just happened. My dad, who had always reminded me of Osborne in almost every way, had immediately said after the last TD, "We'll go for two." After it was all over--and before it was possible to hear Osborne use the words--my dad shot down every criticism of going for two from the others by saying, "You play to win. You don't want to be remembered for backing into a national championship."

My brothers and I talked over what we were going to do when we went back to school the next day. We all wore Nebraska shirts. It was surreal. All of the Nebraska fans at school ate lunch together, and everyone else made fun of us. There wasn't a Miami Hurricanes fan alive in South Dakota in December of 1983, but suddenly everybody who hated Nebraska acted like they'd been a Miami fan since birth. I wanted to punch a lot of people. I was only a 7th grader, but I threw a glass pop bottle at one particularly lippy 11th grader who wouldn't shut up.

I agree, @treeplanter, that the '87 team was one of the best to never win a championship. Steve Taylor and Broderick Thomas concur. It's inexplicable how that offense went so flat that day against Oklahoma. If you had told me before that game that Oklahoma would be held to 17 points, I would have thought that we'd win by a couple of touchdowns. The Florida State loss in the Fiesta Bowl felt like we were sleepwalking. FSU wasn't that good, though that Sanders kid at cornerback was pretty decent. I was 22 years old when, again, my heart was ripped out at the '94 Orange Bowl. The '95 Orange Bowl was sweet, but it was also a burden lifted off of me in hoping that Tom would finally have a NC to shut everyone else the hell up. The next two were just berries on top.
 
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Middle-aged_Ball_Coach said:
My earliest memories of football were high school games in the mid-70s where I'd play around the bleachers while the rest of my family watched the game. Not old enough to understand the difference between high school, college, and pro, I can remember hearing the name "Vince Ferragamo" from a TV announcer in what must have been the '76 season, when I was 5 years old. Beyond those snippets and some NFL memories connected to my older brothers being Vikings fans, almost every other football memory from my first decade of life involved hearing Lyell Bremser's voice calling out names that sounded like lines of poetry: "Isaiah Moses Hipp," "Jarvis Redwine," "Jimmy Williams," "Toby Williams," and "Jamie Williams." Folks that are younger than I am don't understand that we'd only see Nebraska on TV for maybe a game before they played Oklahoma and then the bowl game, so the radio was the connection to Husker football in the fall on Saturdays. My dad was a farmer, and he had an IH 656 tractor with no cab that had a fender-mounted tractor radio that was always so loud that we could hear the game in the yard while my dad was working in the fields around the farmyard. I remember being just old enough to be learning the states in grade school while hearing their names on my dad's radio. Based on the final scores, the state of Kansas really didn't play much college football in the 70s, but the state of Oklahoma was producing monsters.

You're never truly a die-hard fan, though, until your heart has been broken. I was old enough to be very upset when Oklahoma came back to win in '80, and I was an 11-year-old version of "outraged" when the referees gave the game to Penn State in '82, but there was never anything as heart-wrenching as the '84 Orange Bowl. I had talked my dad into buying every preseason magazine in the summer of '83, and I read every word of every one of them. We watched every televised game together. We watched the Milt Tenopir show on Nebraska Public TV every Tuesday night to see highlights of the games that weren't televised, even though we'd listened to them on the radio. I'd received something like 6 or 7 Nebraska shirts for Christmas that year, and I was wearing a different one for each quarter of the Orange Bowl. When the 2-point conversion failed, I cried. My older brothers had a couple of friends over to watch the game with my family, so there were 6 of us Husker fans sitting there, stunned, trying to process what had just happened. My dad, who had always reminded me of Osborne in almost every way, had immediately said after the last TD, "We'll go for two." After it was all over--and before it was possible to hear Osborne use the words--my dad shot down every criticism of going for two from the others by saying, "You play to win. You don't want to be remembered for backing into a national championship."

My brothers and I talked over what we were going to do when we went back to school the next day. We all wore Nebraska shirts. It was surreal. All of the Nebraska fans at school ate lunch together, and everyone else made fun of us. There wasn't a Miami Hurricanes fan alive in South Dakota in December of 1983, but suddenly everybody who hated Nebraska acted like they'd been a Miami fan since birth. I wanted to punch a lot of people. I was only a 7th grader, but I threw a glass pop bottle at one particularly lippy 11th grader who wouldn't shut up.

I agree, @treeplanter, that the '87 team was one of the best to never win a championship. Steve Taylor and Broderick Thomas concur. It's inexplicable how that offense went so flat that day against Oklahoma. If you had told me before that game that Oklahoma would be held to 17 points, I would have thought that we'd win by a couple of touchdowns. The Florida State loss in the Fiesta Bowl felt like we were sleepwalking. FSU wasn't that good, though that Sanders kid at cornerback was pretty decent. I was 22 years old when, again, my heart was ripped out at the '94 Orange Bowl. The '95 Orange Bowl was sweet, but it was also a burden lifted off of me in hoping that Tom would finally have a NC to shut everyone else the hell up. The next two were just berries on top.
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Good stuff, MABC, thanks for sharing!!

Of course, I was aware of the Huskers as early as the '81 Orange Bowl team, but I still kick myself for being more interested in Star Wars and Super Friends and playing outside. As crazy as it sounds, I can't help but think that if only I had been listening to / watching / attending Nebraska games - we'd have won some of those national championships that we came so close to in the early 80s...
 
1971 Game of the century. I was 8 years old. One of the things that helped to peak my interest was the fact that I heard my last name on the broadcast. Mike Beran was my dad's Cousin son. I met him like 2 years later. in the 4th grade it was a bigger deal to me than anyone I met the rest of my life. When the Bobfather retired and Mike was front and center of the OWH carrying him off the field. I was the most popular kid in school for a few weeks.
 
Middle-aged_Ball_Coach said:
My earliest memories of football were high school games in the mid-70s where I'd play around the bleachers while the rest of my family watched the game. Not old enough to understand the difference between high school, college, and pro, I can remember hearing the name "Vince Ferragamo" from a TV announcer in what must have been the '76 season, when I was 5 years old. Beyond those snippets and some NFL memories connected to my older brothers being Vikings fans, almost every other football memory from my first decade of life involved hearing Lyell Bremser's voice calling out names that sounded like lines of poetry: "Isaiah Moses Hipp," "Jarvis Redwine," "Jimmy Williams," "Toby Williams," and "Jamie Williams." Folks that are younger than I am don't understand that we'd only see Nebraska on TV for maybe a game before they played Oklahoma and then the bowl game, so the radio was the connection to Husker football in the fall on Saturdays. My dad was a farmer, and he had an IH 656 tractor with no cab that had a fender-mounted tractor radio that was always so loud that we could hear the game in the yard while my dad was working in the fields around the farmyard. I remember being just old enough to be learning the states in grade school while hearing their names on my dad's radio. Based on the final scores, the state of Kansas really didn't play much college football in the 70s, but the state of Oklahoma was producing monsters.

You're never truly a die-hard fan, though, until your heart has been broken. I was old enough to be very upset when Oklahoma came back to win in '80, and I was an 11-year-old version of "outraged" when the referees gave the game to Penn State in '82, but there was never anything as heart-wrenching as the '84 Orange Bowl. I had talked my dad into buying every preseason magazine in the summer of '83, and I read every word of every one of them. We watched every televised game together. We watched the Milt Tenopir show on Nebraska Public TV every Tuesday night to see highlights of the games that weren't televised, even though we'd listened to them on the radio. I'd received something like 6 or 7 Nebraska shirts for Christmas that year, and I was wearing a different one for each quarter of the Orange Bowl. When the 2-point conversion failed, I cried. My older brothers had a couple of friends over to watch the game with my family, so there were 6 of us Husker fans sitting there, stunned, trying to process what had just happened. My dad, who had always reminded me of Osborne in almost every way, had immediately said after the last TD, "We'll go for two." After it was all over--and before it was possible to hear Osborne use the words--my dad shot down every criticism of going for two from the others by saying, "You play to win. You don't want to be remembered for backing into a national championship."

My brothers and I talked over what we were going to do when we went back to school the next day. We all wore Nebraska shirts. It was surreal. All of the Nebraska fans at school ate lunch together, and everyone else made fun of us. There wasn't a Miami Hurricanes fan alive in South Dakota in December of 1983, but suddenly everybody who hated Nebraska acted like they'd been a Miami fan since birth. I wanted to punch a lot of people. I was only a 7th grader, but I threw a glass pop bottle at one particularly lippy 11th grader who wouldn't shut up.

I agree, @treeplanter, that the '87 team was one of the best to never win a championship. Steve Taylor and Broderick Thomas concur. It's inexplicable how that offense went so flat that day against Oklahoma. If you had told me before that game that Oklahoma would be held to 17 points, I would have thought that we'd win by a couple of touchdowns. The Florida State loss in the Fiesta Bowl felt like we were sleepwalking. FSU wasn't that good, though that Sanders kid at cornerback was pretty decent. I was 22 years old when, again, my heart was ripped out at the '94 Orange Bowl. The '95 Orange Bowl was sweet, but it was also a burden lifted off of me in hoping that Tom would finally have a NC to shut everyone else the hell up. The next two were just berries on top.
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WOW!!!!
 
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