| KChiefs1 |
10-16-2011 11:25 AM |
Quote:
Sunday, Oct 16, 2011
Regional differences complicate the question of Mizzou’s conference future
By KENT BABB and RUSTIN DODD
The Kansas City Star
CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. | Three men crouch along the waterfront, two of them balancing a level while another chips away old concrete and gravel from the riverwalk stairs. Their supervisor is standing nearby.
These are some of the men building Missouri, and for the better part of the last year, they’ve worked on a project to upgrade the floodwall that protects Cape Girardeau from the Mississippi River, one of the nation’s great transport lanes and crossroads. On this day, the men chatter about college sports and, as the nation waits for the University of Missouri to choose a conference — staying in the Big 12 or jumping to the Southeastern Conference or even the Big Ten — where their home state fits best.
“Each section of Missouri is its own little state,” says Stacy Langston, 34, the supervisor and a native Missourian. “Southeast Missouri is its complete own state. It’s just completely different anywhere you go.”
Across the river is Illinois, perhaps the center of the Midwest, and downriver a few dozen miles are the borders of Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas — the threshold to the South. To these workers’ backs, past the state’s western border, are the flatlands and cattle ranches of the Great Plains and the West.
Cape Girardeau is a junction city in a junction state, Missouri fitting partially in each of these regions but perfectly in none. There are contrasting personalities, cultures and ways of life in the state’s far reaches. Neighbors here — from the cotton fields of the Bootheel and corn farms in the state’s north to the rolling Ozark Mountains and the big cities on Missouri’s eastern and western borders — sometimes feel more like strangers.
“That’s one of the fun things,” Gov. Jay Nixon says, “about governing in the state of Missouri: You have to weave together a very complicated fabric in order to move forward.”
When the university decides on a conference, many residents are certain to feel alienated. It won’t be the first time this state has been an awkward fit. A century and a half ago, Missouri was a border state in the Civil War, when neighbors battled because the state fit both Union and Confederate philosophies.
“Coming from southern Missouri, it’s incredibly different from northern Missouri,” says Cabool, Mo., native Tymon Bay, 24, a law student at the University of Missouri and the son of a history teacher. “We like things the way we like it; they like it the way they like it. … We don’t want to be told what to do.”
For now, the university is taking its time deciding which conference feels most like home — and which might offer the best deal. There are, of course, money and politics in play. But it has at least given the state’s residents something to talk about, and reason to debate where Missouri belongs.
As a freight barge glides north on the Mississippi, these four workers talk about this state’s, and therefore their own, identity. Langston, the supervisor, hopes MU jumps to the SEC; his colleague Jason Goben, 32, would prefer the Tigers remain loyal to the Big 12.
This is sometimes what it’s like to be a Missourian.
• • •
KENNETT, Mo. | Jason Chandler stands in the early afternoon sun, cotton lint clinging to his St. Louis Cardinals hat as he watches two industrial cotton pickers cut paths in a 120-acre field. It’s harvest time in the western corner of Missouri’s Bootheel, where the tea is sweet, the barbecued pork is topped with coleslaw, and the residents speak with a drawl that seems borrowed from the Mississippi Delta.
“We’ve got our own language around here,” says Chandler, 31.
In the southernmost tip of the state, it’s possible to grow cotton, a crop that’s foreign to most of Missouri. Chandler says he hopes to harvest about 6,000 bales this year; each bale can hold more than two tons of unginned cotton. He said Missouri residents north of here can say what they want about the state being Midwestern or part of the Plains.
This, he says, is the South. There’s a sense of community in Kennett, population 12,000, that places outside the region seem to lack.
“It seems like when you get around there to St. Louis,” he says, “it just changes some.”
A few miles from here, the lunch crowd gathers at Kennett Country Club. The table in the rear corner is packed every Tuesday through Friday. On most afternoons, the conversation turns to sports, and this day is no different. Digging into the Tuesday special, hamburger steak and grilled onions, the friends needle each other about the Cardinals, who reached the playoffs only after a late-season turnaround.
“Well,” says Terry Whitlock, who runs a roofing outfit, “I know somebody who just gave up this year.”
“You’re damn right I did,” lawyer Mark Pelts says. “I was ready to have the funeral.”
They laugh together for a long time.
“We’ll argue about anything,” Pelts says.
One thing here that’s not up for debate is the conference that suits MU best. Many Bootheel residents identify with the SEC; after all, the universities of Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama are closer to Kennett than Mizzou, whose campus is 320 miles from here.
Of the seven voting members of the Missouri Board of Curators who will eventually vote on a conference destination, two — Judith Haggard and Don Downing — are Kennett natives. The men here hope their influence carries and the board votes to send MU to the SEC.
“We’re a long way from Columbia,” says Pelts, who earned an undergraduate degree from MU.
Pelts boasts that Kennett lies south of the Mason-Dixon Line. This is a part of Missouri that, at least based on the representation at this table, remains uncomfortable with the idea of an outside aggressor deciding its destiny.
“If you’re going to let Oklahoma and Texas control you,” says Brandon Rouse, an optometrist, “and if they end up jumping ship in a couple years, then what have you done?”
• • •
CROSS TIMBERS, Mo. | Brent Lower leans over his next patient as the sound of rattling metal and nervous moaning echoes through the dusty barn.
Lower is talking casually, a little country chatter flying as he slides a long plastic glove onto his left arm. In a second, he will plunge his hand into the hindquarters of a 2,000-pound Simmental bull. Drool will leak from the beast’s mouth.
“Ah, you big wuss,” says Lower, a large-animal veterinarian from Humansville.
It’s semen-testing day at the Lucas Cattle Co., a ranching operation in the idyllic hills of southwest Missouri. It’s not quite the plains, but the barbed wire, hay bales and grazing cattle paint a picture of frontier life — more like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, Big 12 states.
“If you don’t like the people you’re around, it’s a long day,” says Cleo Fields, a herdsman from Cross Timbers.
This is Hickory County, Field says, population 8,000, where young men like Jeff Reed, 31, and Brandon Atkins, 33, wake up early, pull on a dark blue pair of Wranglers and start an 80-hour work week.
As the morning turns into afternoon, the conversation drifts from sports to kids … and back to sports.
Lower graduated from Mizzou in the early 1990s, and this talk about the SEC is enough for him to pause for a moment.
“It ain’t a done deal yet,” he says, slowly removing the plastic sleeve from his arm.
The SEC is a whole different animal, Lower adds, and it’s not entirely clear if he’s still talking about football.
This is about history, he says. He never missed a game when he was in school. The Mizzou fight song is still designated as his ring tone; his daughter Kaylee used to use it as her lullaby, he says.
When Mizzou lost at Oklahoma last month, it stung Lower. He doesn’t care much for KU either.
Life would be different in towns like Cross Timbers and Humansville if Mizzou couldn’t maintain rivalries with their neighbors to the west: states and people that share a way of life. Lower might need new barbs if the Tigers start playing Florida instead of Texas.
“These bulls are the equivalent of the whole offensive line at one Big 12 school,” Lower says. “By golly, if we could draft these bulls to go to Columbia, we’d have everything set.”
• • •
MARYVILLE, Mo. | If stability is what Missouri is looking for in a conference, it doesn’t have to look far to see what it looks like.
Things in Nodaway County have been done a particular way for generations. The calendar revolves around corn, football and family — sometimes in that order.
At Maryville High School on Friday nights, parents watch their sons, then drive their cars straight toward the Northwest Missouri State campus to claim a coveted parking spot for the Saturday morning tailgate party that will begin just hours later. Townspeople still meet at the grocery store early mornings to drink coffee and talk football.
“This is a football town,” says Paul Snow, the athletic director at Maryville High.
Over 17 years at Northwest Missouri State, Mel Tjeerdsma built a championship program with tough-minded boys who grew up nearby in football-loving communities where farming provided a backdrop for life.
One of them was Adam Dorrel, who grew up in Nodaway County, played football for Maryville High and later, Tjeerdsma. Now he’s the coach, taking over after Scott Bostwick, Tjeerdsma’s replacement, died in June.
Sitting in his office, Dorrel points to the back wall, black-and-white photos decorating the canvas. There are stories in those photos, he says. One shows Northwest’s original football team from 1908.
The fullback is Dorrel’s great-grandfather.
• • •
ST. LOUIS | Two men walk quickly from a side door at Busch Stadium, hurrying out after another busy day. Tyrone Armstrong, 32, and Clarence Chaney, 31, are cooks here, and even on a day with no game, there’s plenty to do.
The hum of lawn mowers fills the air. The fountains at Kiener Plaza are dyed Cardinal red, and banners have been hung from doorways and poles. Workers scurry on a cloudless day to prepare the stadium for the Cardinals’ next game in the National League playoffs, which isn’t for another two days. The buzz, though, arrived early.
“The Cardinals in St. Louis,” Chaney says as he passes, “it just overshadows everything.”
It would seem there’s too much going on among the city’s three professional sports franchises to spend much time wondering where Mizzou belongs. But some have an opinion.
During the midafternoon, a family walks around Busch Stadium’s perimeter, stopping to inspect statues of former players. Andy Toennies, 45, has been following the realignment saga, but the only thing that makes sense to him is for MU to ditch the Big 12 and do what many wanted to happen a year ago: join the Big Ten. This might be the Gateway to the West, but in this banking capital and home to high-dollar universities, there aren’t many reminders of frontier life.
“Texas and Oklahoma,” Toennies says, heading toward a giant statue of Stan Musial, “they’re not really part of our fabric.”
St. Louis was, for years, home to its own Border Showdown football game against Illinois. Toennies says interest peaked then, but the game at the Edward Jones Dome was discontinued after last year. In the time since, college sports have become mostly an afterthought. He says he hears how it is on the opposite side of the state. But, he says, it’s just different here.
“People talk about it,” says Kevin Liese, 41, a bartender at Jack Patrick’s, “but it’s not a giant deal.”
• • •
KANSAS CITY | They still come to the red steakhouse on Genessee Street, hauling the decades-old memories with them.
Some tell of spending a night at the Golden Ox after selling cattle for hours with their fathers. Some tell of days spent around basketball and bitter rivals.
“I wish I had all the stories written somewhere,” says Bill Teel, a co-owner of the restaurant, which sits connected to the old Kansas City Livestock Exchange Building in the heart of the West Bottoms.
After 62 years, the Golden Ox is still here in a neighborhood of change. The bottoms were once home to the Kansas City stockyards, millions of cattle herded through each year. They shut down in 1991.
This place was also home to the Big Eight, then Big 12 men’s basketball tournament at Kemper Arena, where Missouri and Kansas would do battle just a block from the state line. The tournament is now played up the hill in the Sprint Center. But if Missouri moves to the SEC, it could leave Kansas City for good.
The threat of Mizzou’s departure is so potentially damaging to Kansas City that the mayor took time to send MU Chancellor Brady Deaton a personal plea for the Tigers to stay. The tournament is worth an estimated $14 million to the local economy.
“We believe this region,” Sly James wrote, “collectively values University of Missouri athletics — has, does and will — to a degree that won’t be replicated elsewhere.”
Basketball left the bottoms in 2005, but the conversation at the bar inside the Golden Ox drifts from the economy to college sports on a recent late afternoon. The bartender moves to his right, revealing the image of five small stickers on an aging cash register: two for Mizzou, two for KU and one in support of sheet metal workers.
Teel believes that the Golden Ox can endure, a symbol of Kansas City’s heritage in a time when money and progress can uproot institutions.
“It’s good that things change,” Teel says. “And it’s good that there are new things. But it’s also good that you have tradition.”
• • •
COLUMBIA | Students walk from here to there during lunchtime at the Francis Quadrangle. These are the ones being pulled in all directions by what Missouri is and what it should be.
Not for the first time, this state is involved in a tug-of-war. Students from Missouri’s far reaches have grown up in different ways, in different cultures, with different belief systems about what’s important. Now they have converged at the state’s center, on this campus, with corresponding opinions on the direction that best fits MU.
“We’re so deeply rooted in the Big 12, just like history-wise,” says Turner Davis, 21, a Lee’s Summit native, “and it would just feel like we’re betraying our roots.”
“I would rather them go to the Big Ten than anything,” says Caleb Hartzell, 19, who’s from St. Louis.
“There’s somebody, some third person saying: ‘We’re going to tell you guys how to do it,’ which is essentially what Texas is,” says Bay, the MU law student from southern Missouri. “… The smart thing, I think, right now is definitely to be considering trying to get into the SEC.”
They debate MU’s direction, the same as they do in their hometowns, at local eateries and offices and classrooms. What’s next for MU? It might not be a perfect fit anywhere, but which conference — and region of the country — seems the most natural?
“Mr. Mizzou” sits in his office late in the afternoon, shaking his head at the possibility of another period of uncertainty for his home state. John Kadlec is 82 now, and he has traveled all over Missouri — as an athlete, a broadcaster and now an ambassador for the university. He doesn’t see the point of MU leaving the Big 12.
While the state’s residents wait for Deaton and the Board of Curators to make a decision, some have begun to lobby school officials to go their way. Kadlec spends some of his hours now trying to talk boosters out of pulling their donations if MU leaves — or doesn’t. He says a significant donor of nearly 30 years, a St. Louis resident, called him recently and said that, if the school joins the SEC, he would no longer give.
“It’s all about money,” Kadlec says, trailing off.
A moment later, he begins telling a story.
“Maybe I’m a traditionalist. Probably I am,” Kadlec says. “I like tradition.”
The story is about a friend of Kadlec’s who lived in Columbia for about 15 years, and through many of those years, he spoke frequently about moving back to Springfield. Sure enough, the man moved there and found that his friendships from 15 years earlier had faded; the image of change was far better than its actuality. Before long, the man moved back to Columbia to resume a life he hadn’t appreciated, a kind of comfort he hadn’t noticed.
“You go someplace,” Kadlec says, shifting the conversation back to MU’s decision, “and you realize maybe that’s not what you should’ve done.”
The sun is beginning to set in Columbia on the Wednesday of homecoming week. Perhaps this week more than any other, Missouri’s diverse representation will visit, and many of them will share opinions on where their school belongs. Luke Arnzen, a 25-year-old manager at Shakespeare’s Pizza, hears some of the chatter.
“I just want Mizzou,” says Arnzen, who’s from Cape Girardeau, “to find a home.”
@Go to*KansasCity.com*for a photo gallery.
The Star’s Dave Helling contributed to this report. To reach Kent Babb, call*816-234-4386*or send email tokbabb@kcstar.com. To reach Rustin Dodd, call*816-234-4937*or send email to*rdodd@kcstar.com
© 2011 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.*http://www.kansascity.com
|
KC Star |
