The state is in a frenzy over its No. 1 team
It is insulting and, of course, untrue to say that there is nothing in Nebraska except a Big Red football team, but there is nothing else quite of the kind.
No mountains. No beaches. No big-league teams. Other than slow-changing seasons, burning summers, bitter winters, and autumns that can be rather a brilliant compensation, only this football team gathers up an entire state of people and brings them to one emotional place. In other regions of the country enamored of college football, there is never just one rallying point, and almost always a cluster of them. For no matter how dominant the University is, some will always root for State, never mind A & M. Over in Omaha, Creighton has stirred a certain passion for basketball, but to most Nebraskans this must seem as wrongheaded as when Creighton dropped football in the '40s. On the farm lands, in the sandhills, across the cattle country, through the Platte River Valley, as well as in downtown Lincoln and Omaha—really the only two cities in Nebraska—there is but one institution, and that is the State University, as in state of mind. Hundreds of miles from Lincoln, farmers who never went very far in school regard the University of Nebraska as their alma mater. In case you have not heard, it is a bumper harvest this year.
At Memorial Stadium, impishly referred to on fall Saturdays as the third largest Nebraska township (pop. 73,650), a principle has been literally etched in stone: "Not the victory but the action. Not the goal but the game. In the deed the glory." The words seem too high-blown to be associated with modern major-college football. Putting aside the moral excesses, just the logistical ones are awesome. And the Nebraska program, like so many others, is overgrown to the point of hilarity, but not to the exclusion of charm. Five years is the common hitch for a Nebraska football player, and there seem to be more of them than cornstalks. None of which depresses the local citizenry, a delegation of whom rises on Thursdays before dawn, sometimes 350 strong, to attend a 6:30 a.m. breakfast, with a pep band, where the special guests may be the secretaries of the football coaches and the door prize a home-baked cherry pie.
Souvenirs of the team are for sale seemingly around every bend in Lincoln. Loraine Livingston, the sparky proprietor of Cornhusker Corner, insists there are only a few outlets worth speaking of, and furthermore, "the fellow in the filling station is from Oklahoma," and she fairly spits, "just a transit." Cornhusker Corner is open twelve months a year, seven days a week, serving to paint the town red. The huge, rouge crowd that assembles on Saturdays somehow seems older than one would expect. The mood suggests a state fair. Bobby Reynolds, an insurance man from Grand Island who played for the Cornhuskers in 1950, in fact whose touchdown record finally fell just a couple of weeks ago, describes the gathering as a congregation, and his family has always occupied the same pew. "One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting right here at the Nebraska games," says the man who grew up to be the star of the team, and now, more than 30 years later, is still sitting there.