Thursday, November 1, 2001

Winning season
Football frenzy comes to Skiff
Commentary by Earnest Perry

The fall of 1984 ushered in the reawakening of TCU football, and as sports editor of the TCU Daily Skiff, it was my job to record it. It all started in the mountains of Utah.

The Frogs, led by head coach Jim Wacker, did something that hadn’t been done in 52 years. They blew out an opponent on its home field by beating Utah State 62-18.

I know last year’s fans would look at that as just another Saturday, but in the early 1980s any win was cause for celebration, and that blow out led to the mother of all keg parties.

For the next three months, Frog fans and the Skiff sports staff, which consisted of me, my roommate W. Robert Padgett, who doubled as editorial page editor, and Grant McGinnis, a Canadian who actually knew a little about football, followed the Frogs’ weekly romp through the Southwest Conference.

We lost to rival SMU but beat Arkansas, 32-31, in Fayetteville for the first time in 29 years. The Frogs knocked off Rice by 19 points, then North Texas by 31. Baylor came in for Homecoming and left with a 10-point defeat. It was the Frogs first winning season of the decade. TCU went 8-4 on the season and 5-3 in Southwest Conference play.

The same year, President Ronald Reagan defeated democratic candidate Walter Mondale in a landslide for a second term, but nobody in Fort Worth cared — TCU was in bowl contention for the first time in two decades.

We had a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate in Kenneth Davis and ABC scheduled the 15th ranked Frogs for a split-national telecast against the No. 3-ranked Texas Longhorns. Both teams were tied for first in the conference and the national sports media descended on Stadium Drive.

I and my budding band of sports reporters were giddy with excitement. When we weren’t at the Skiff or at the practice fields, we were at the U-Pub praising the beer-loving gods that the Frogs chose 1984 to bring winning back to campus. No more writing about “what ifs” and “could haves.” We were writing about winners and even though there was other news on campus (there must have been, but nothing comes to mind right now), the main topic was TCU football, all day, every day.

The largest crowd to ever watch a TCU football game, 47,280, saw the Frogs get man-handled by the Longhorns, 44-23. A week later, Texas A&M ended the Frogs chances of a conference title and a trip to the Cotton Bowl with a 35-21 win.

However, one of the best moments for me as a Skiff sportswriter occurred in the TCU locker room at Kyle Field in College Station. A representative of the Bluebonnet Bowl asked Coach Wacker to accept an invitation to play in the New Year’s Eve game.

Wacker said yes and the place erupted.

The Frogs were going bowling for the first time since 1965, and I was there to record it. The Frogs lost to West Virginia, but it didn’t matter. I got to see them play in a bowl game in my hometown of Houston during my senior year of college.

Life couldn’t get any better.

The excitement of winning was short-lived. A month after I graduated in August 1985, several TCU football players, including Heisman Trophycandidate Davis, admitted to being paid by boosters. The NCAA placed the program on probation and it would be another 13 years before TCU football would fully recover.

In 1998, during my first year as a journalism professor at TCU, I got to experience the rebirth of TCU football under Dennis Franchione and LaDainian Tomlinson. After the surprise announcement that the Frogs would play Southern California in the 1998 Norwest Sun Bowl, I challenged my senior journalism students to put out a special edition. They had about three days to report, write, design and produce it. I could not have been more proud of a group of students as I was of that class.

It was 1984 again, except this time I got to experience it from an advisor’s perspective. I guess the saying is true: Once a Skiffer, always a Skiffer.

Earnest L. Perry is the head of the news-editorial sequence in the Department of Journalism. He can be contacted at e.perry@tcu.edu.