My wife’s stepdad, Mike, was notoriously slow to soften. This was especially true if you were me, the bouncy, naive kid dating his stepdaughter.
One particular interaction between us lives in family lore. I came to visit Kansas City as a mop-haired photojournalism freshman at the University of Missouri. However, a baby shower swamped the house with diapers, pink baby toys and cooing aunts. I retreated to the safety of Mike’s workshop. The menagerie of power tools, wood glue and sawdust lured me.
With some mid-1990s “hey dude” enthusiasm, I asked Mike, “What are you working on?”
Bunkered behind his bench, his hand tightening a vise on a piece of wood that he was filing, Mike looked up. Over the top of his oversized glasses perched at the tip of his nose, he said, “Why don’t you go back inside?”
I got the message. For years, I tiptoed around him, until we established a tender and public truce during the weekend I married Polly. Still, I worried about bringing him big news, even after decades of being family.
Eight years ago, I had some news for him.
My wife’s family adores the University of Missouri and its sports teams. Black-and-gold diplomas decorate offices of so many family members. We have rearranged birthday parties to avoid distracting from Tiger basketball games. Cousins, uncles and parents tailgated in bitter cold and absurd heat in Columbia. My wife and I had season tickets for Mizzou basketball while we lived in Kansas City, zombie-driving west on Interstate 70 at midnight from Wednesday night home games against Texas to make it to work the next day.
Yet, eight years ago, I accepted a job at the University of Kansas. I was going to be a Jayhawk. I was, impossibly, trading black and gold for crimson and blue.
When I told Mike about the new job in Lawrence, he lounged on the couch in his favorite Missouri polo. He didn’t blink.
“When are you leaving the family?” he said.
I laughed, but he didn’t.
This kind of rivalry — with this hellbent allegiance — is the fuel of college sports. Or, it was.
This week’s announcement that USC and UCLA would join the Big 10 conference in 2024 was Step #247 in the 458-step plan to disassemble college sports and its quirky yet searing regional rivalries.
That news was preceded by step #246, which was the recruitment of Brigham Young University, the University of Houston, the University of Central Florida and University of Cincinnati to the Big 12 to join KU, Kansas State and others. Texas and Oklahoma had signaled their exits from the Big 12 last summer. Only six of the original Big 12 will remain in a conference stretching from Florida to Utah.
Fans who have clustered for decades around the Jayhawks, Tigers and Wildcats have experienced the disintegration earlier and more completely than any others.
