When I was young, there wasn’t much I liked about Texas.
I had never actually been there, but it seemed like bad thing after bad thing came out of the Lone Star state. You might be surprised to learn the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas wasn’t the first.
Eleven months before that, the Naval Academy football team and their Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, who I had enjoyed all season in our first year living in Virginia, went to Dallas for the Cotton Bowl and were thrashed by Texas for the National Championship.
It got much weirder when that quarterback I so admired turned out to become a Hall of Famer for the Dallas Cowboys and tortured our Washington Redskins for a decade.
Then Dallas took our baseball team, the second Washington Senators, and left us without baseball for more than 30 years.
And of course, there was that guy Oswald.
All those things put Texas pretty near the top of my hate list, although as a child of the ’60s it never quite equalled Mississippi.
But two great writers and one friend started changing things, and my career started taking me to Texas on occasion.
I don’t remember if I discovered Larry McMurtry or Dan Jenkins first, but they became two of my favorite authors. I absolutely loved “Lonesome Dove,” a historical novel that seemed almost perfect to me, and the miniseries based on it is the best thing I ever saw on television in more than 65 years of viewing.
Everything Jenkins ever wrote resonated with me, although I still haven’t gotten to a few of his nonfiction golf stuff. He died two years ago at age 90, and I think if he isn’t the best sportswriter ever, you couldn’t live off the difference between him and Red Smith.
When I read his book “Baja Oklahoma” in the ’80s, it was the first time I found myself thinking maybe I had been wrong about Texas.
My first time in the state was early in the 1984-85 basketball season, when I covered a Missouri-Baylor game for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. I made it back in March 1986 for the NCAA Final Four at Reunion Arena in Dallas and watched Louisville beat Duke.
Later that year, when I moved to Colorado, I made my first Texas friend. Nancy Gay was married to our business editor at the Greeley Tribune and she was one of the coolest people I ever met. I was the sports editor and she worked for me for two years as a part-timer. She has gone on to a great career, first as an NFL writer and then as a big-timer with Fox Sports West.
One of the proudest things in my career was whatever little bit I did to mentor her.
I made it to Texas — to the Houston area — a couple of times in the late ’80s when I was working in Reno, but I never made it back until 2010, the last year I was in California. And that trip, to the Hill Country, was when I realized there was a part of Texas I could truly love.
I spent 11 weeks that summer in Bandera, losing weight and getting back in good physical condition.
I drove all around the state on weekends, catching a ballgame in Houston and another one in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. I walked in wonderful state parks, visited the Alamo and drove all the way to the Mexican border.
Except for being apart from Nicole, it was one of the most wonderful summers of my life.
It was the summer I realized that hating a place without ever seeing it was sort of foolish.
Maybe before I die, I’ll have a look at Mississippi.