Margie Miles, my grandmother’s sister, lived near the University of Missouri campus. On one trip down there, Mom got so sick of me asking where we were that she gave me a map and said, “Here. Follow Highway 63.” A roadgeek was born.
“October 31, 1986, Valerie’s first Halloween that she’s going to go trick-or-treating,” Mom’s voice says on the tape. “We’re down at Aunt Margie’s, and we’re going to go trick-or-treating in Columbia! And Mom’s going to go to the football game tomorrow, Missouri against Iowa State.” Us trick-or-treaters would make out like bandits, but Iowa State would lose the game. Jim Criner would be fired two weeks later.
Much more than Texas A&M, a little more than Nebraska, Missouri’s defection from the Big 12 hurts. It’s personal.
But no one else cares. About the only acknowledgment during Conferencepocalypse II that Missouri plays Iowa State, let alone has done so for more than a century, was one cursory dismissal of the Telephone Trophy. All of the energy is focused on the loss of the rivalry with Kansas.
When the ISU men put up the most points ever in a losing effort, 109 points in four overtimes in 2001, it was in the Hearnes Center. Two years later, when the ISU men lost there again, Larry Eustachy went out and got drunk.
Tonight, as with Nebraska and A&M, I plan on attending the final ISU women’s Big 12 basketball game in an opponent’s home venue. The game is in Mizzou Sports Arena, less than a decade old, and known for being abruptly renamed about the same time it opened.
The Missouri women have not won a conference game since beating the Cyclones in the last game of the 2010-11 season. Current coach Robin Pingeton graduated from Benton Community and was an assistant to Bill Fennelly when I was at ISU.