Merle Bertrand, Author of "The Bleacher Bum" Column
The Bleacher Bum by Merle Bertrand
Burnet people smell funny.
No, really! They don’t bathe, they wear weird clothes, and they’ve got goofy hair. Oh, and they have three eyes too. Or so I’ve heard.
Ah, yes, another Liberty Hill vs. Burnet Rivalry Week has come and gone, and with it all the outlandish, creative, and colorful rhetoric that goes along with it; some of it suitable for a family newspaper, and some of it, not-so-much.
Teams and fans of every level in every sport have that one special team they just love to hate. Cowboys fans loathe the Redskins, (or whatever they’re going to be called. I can just picture Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder renaming them the Washington Bullets out of spite.) Texas fans despise OU, (almost by default now, ever since Texas A&M decided to contribute to the now-ten team Big XII’s inability to, well, count to twelve.)
San Antonio and Dallas have reformed a healthy rivalry in the NBA which Houston fans would dearly love to join, now that the Rockets have developed a pulse.
The Astros don’t have a pulse, which will prevent Rangers and Astros fans from developing a rivalry of their own, at least for a while.
Still, nothing quite beats the rivalries that form between high school football teams and the townspeople who support them. It’s literally the stuff that becomes the subject of Hollywood movies such as The Best of Times and, of course, Friday Night Lights.
And I do think it’s different for towns like Liberty Hill and Burnet, as opposed to those rivalries found between rival schools in big cities or suburbia. There’s just something special about games that unite whole towns behind their school, especially when those towns sit some twenty miles apart like Liberty Hill and the green-hued home of those funky-smelling, weird clothes-wearing, goofy-haired, three-eyed neighbors to the northwest.
For some reason, whenever I’m on my way to Burnet, I think about the cancelled-too-soon CBS series Jericho. For those of you who don’t remember it – and that’s probably quite a few of you, since the series was cancelled after just its second season – the residents of Jericho, Kansas struggle to survive a nuclear war that’s left them cut off from the rest of a shattered United States. (Clearly this series was filmed in the archaic days when nukes freaked us out more than the zombie apocalypse.)
Things are proceeding surprisingly well for the resilient, tough-as-nails residents of Jericho as they adjust to their new reality…until they get raided by a posse from their bigger next door neighbor, New Bern. (Come to think of it, considering they inhabited a nearly destroyed, post-apocalyptic world, the people of New Bern probably really didn’t bathe very often, must have worn weird clothes, had goofy hair, and may actually have had three eyes, considering the nuclear fallout in the neighborhood.)
Faced with the opportunity to work together, the aggressors from New Bern instead instigated a battle for survival that made their old Friday night football battles seem like tiddlywinks by comparison.
While loving to “hate” your rival is fun, I’d like to think that if the unthinkable happened, the people of Liberty Hill and Burnet would set aside their rivalry and work together for the greater good. I saw hopeful evidence of this at last Thursday night’s 7th grade and freshman games in Burnet when what appeared to be a junior high Bulldog player came over to visit family members in the Liberty Hill stands.
It was strange seeing someone in kelly green mingling so peacefully amongst the purple and gold, but it also provided oddly reassuring proof that if the chips were down, it can be done. Because remember, according to the residents of Burnet, it’s the folks in Liberty Hill who don’t bathe, wear weird clothes, have goofy hair, and have three eyes.
Clearly, they’re confused.
But at least it provides hope that we’d do better than the people of Jericho and New Bern; that if the chips were down, Liberty Hill and Burnet would have each other’s back in the event of the zombie apocalypse…even if they do smell funny.
Happy Halloween!
Source:
http://libertyhillsports.com/2013/10/30/rivalry-week-and-the-zombie-apocalypse/
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