Posted by Rick Denney on December 05, 2002 at 12:19:44:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Where's the tuba?!! posted by Mark Wiseman on December 04, 2002 at 17:16:18:
I was present at that game, and can provide an eye-witness account.
The MOB's show was indeed its usual collection of jabs and insults, and no, the Aggies didn't like what they saw. Some institutions value tradition too highly, and A&M is one of those.
(That reverence for tradition has its strong points, too. At the time I went to A&M, the commitment to academic excellence, the work ethic, and the generally held moral code were much stronger than at many other state schools. Of course, Rice is a different sort of a school; being private and small it was able to maintain extremely high entrance requirements, though sometimes its proponents used that lofty perch to look down on others. I considered going there--their architecture school was well regarded (as was A&M's) and that's what I wanted to study at the time. But I grew up in Houston, and wanted to go to college out of town. Plus, my father was an Aggie. As you know, I had many friends at Rice, including a certain professor that you and I both knew well.)
There was considerable audience comment on the MOB's performance, and the usual yelling matches between students in the stands, that occurs at many college ball games. What apparently unnerved the MOB, though, was that the A&M students did not leave the stands after the end of the game. The assumption, I suppose, was that they were waiting to attack the MOB. Actually, they were waiting for their post-game yell practice (that's pep rally to you non-Aggies), which was a long-standing Aggie tradition of which the MOB was apparently unaware. I suspect most of the Aggies present were unaware of the panic in the stands on the other 30-yard line. The MOB was escorted from the premises without any molestation (or even attention) that I could see from the stands across the field (where my father and I were watching the game and the ensuing yell practice). If there was active rather than assumed intimidation, it was not apparent to us, even though we walked across the same parking lot after the game that most Aggies did.
But the blowup that followed the game, which involved such "public servants" as Maaaaaarvin Zindler, showed that even the Rice intelligentsia could make mountains of molehills. It was quite entertaining in the news media, with proponents of both schools embarassingly demanding apologies from the other.
By the way, there had been something like four Reveille's up to the time of that game. Reveille is the mascot of Texas A&M, and after the first, which was a stray mutt taken in by the students, it has been a pure-bred border collie that lives a life of noisy luxury in the care of a special group of CT's. Dogs don't live forever, so I'm sure it hadn'e been all that long since the last Reveille had died, heh, heh.
I will add this: It is easy for non-Aggies to laugh at the occasional indignation of Aggies when they hear Aggie jokes (and that's what the MOB's show really was). They will say, "Hey, don't take it so seriously. Hey, it's all in good fun. Hey, we are laughing with you." But after hearing literally thousands of them, they lose their humor, though we usually still laugh and though we still appreciate a good one. Those jokes accumulate; no one of them is hurtful, but in sum they can be tiring. The occasional loss of patience is to be expected. Of course, Aggies take themselves too seriously, which is why it's fun to joke about them--you sometimes get a good reaction for your effort. No argument there. But you ought to think about what it is like to feel that provocation repeatedly. When I went home during summers and holidays, I heard them unceasingly from my UT friends, accompanied by much laughter (from them). It's a little like poking a stick in an anthill. Sure, the ants are fun to watch, but the fellow with the stick has no cause for complaint if he sometimes gets stung by an angry ant.
Rick "who, now living in Virginia, does not miss incessant and usually terrible Aggie jokes" Denney