Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
I have a rocky relationship with University of Texas athletics. I’m wishy-washy on their football, I have generally positive feelings about the university as a whole, and I’m a men’s basketball hater ever since they ran Shaka Smart out of town. If Texas and another randomly selected athletic department were on the plane with me and I had one parachute to give out, I’d usually give it to Texas? I think?
This is part of the experience with Texas. For most schools, neutrality means indifference. With Texas, even what nets out to neither like nor dislike is full of strong opinions. Kim Kardashian and I could each balance our checkbooks, but one of us would have a much wilder ride to get there. For Texas, the calculus goes something like this: Some of the students and alums are great. Some of the fanbase really sucks. The football program is exhausting. Sam Ehlinger was cool. That burnt orange color pops. The school went to great pains recently to protect a song a lot of players feel is racist.
What I really want out of my Texas emotional experience is bemusement. I live here in Austin, I’ve got a front-row seat to the shenanigans, I want there to be shenanigans to see from the front row.
You can’t always have bemusement, though. Someday, Texas is going to win in football or men’s basketball. Right?
Hmm.
Yeah, good call.
Maybe they just never will.
Where I’m trying to go with this is that I want to like Texas baseball. I might never like Texas football or Texas men’s basketball all that much, cheering for them intermittently but not to achieve anything all that good, but I want to like the other sports. I want to go to volleyball games. I want to like Texas baseball. I’m scared, though, because I’m going to the game this afternoon, and what if Texas baseball isn’t likable? It’s a risk for any college baseball team, that the players will be assholes (this is what doomed Tennessee last year), and I’m not familiar enough yet to know whether that’s what we’re walking in to. They’re playing against Kansas State, too, and as a rule, Kansas State tends to be easy to like.
I’m already thinking of contingency plans. For example: If I go to the game and I still don’t like Texas baseball, I might need to have a kid. Get that kid some cute little-kid Texas gear, and I’ll have to like Texas. That’s how being a parent works, right? You love your kid, so if they’re wearing a cool little Texas baseball jersey, your love for the kid gets associated with the baseball team? It’s a big investment, but I might have to do it.
Hopefully, it doesn’t come to procreation. Not because I don’t want kids—I’d love to have kids someday—but because that would be a weird reason to have a child.
