The Bad News Bears | Championship Game |Totally Human and Absolutely Fun
We loved the movie, “The Bad News Bears,” not because in the end they won their championship game (they did not), but rather because of who they became, and the fact that they took us all along for the ride. They were totally human, and absolutely fun.
And so it was with the 2009 Texas Longhorn baseball team. As the Ameristar chartered 737 headed south from Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Thursday morning, the bright sun forecast another hot day as summer had come to Nebraska. In the distance out the right side of the plane, was Rosenblatt Stadium. It was quiet now, with only the grounds crew and the clean-up folks stirring where the night before Texas and LSU had played for the National Championship of all of college baseball. The blue, red and yellow seats are beginning to fade, in anticipation of next year’s final season at the stadium on the hill, just beyond the Missouri River and the zoo and the roar of the big jet engines.
Bad news bears For 15 days, they had lived a dream in the nation’s Midlands. Whatever the obstacle, however high the hill and regardless of the size of the challenge, they had reached in their magic bag of miracles and pulled out one after another.
When Texas had come to Omaha, despite earning the NCAA Baseball Committee’s No. 1 seed because of its record and its RPI index, the Longhorns were considered in the middle of the eight-team field by the pundits who cover the sport of college baseball. In its own bracket, both North Carolina and Arizona State were given a better chance to still be standing when the Championship Series began.
But when Monday night came, there was Texas, playing and leading odds-on favorite and top-ranked LSU, with two outs and two strikes on the batter in the ninth inning.
I have told many times of the conversation I once had on a radio broadcast with former Longhorn football coach John Mackovic after Jody Conradt’s very special 1997 team had been eliminated in the NCAA Women’s Basketball playoffs as a shot that would have tied the game bounced away at the buzzer. “What do you say to your team as a coach,” I asked him.
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