You get one of those good ol’ boy schools like Texas Tech or Oklahoma State, and a lot of times they do things a little differently from the self-styled elitists such as Texas or Oklahoma. Such campuses often are a bit friendlier and “hi y’all.” You can find countless items of unusual history.
Texas Tech has good reason to vary from the norm. Lubbock is about 70,000 miles to the west of Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Geography alone dictates variances. Tech embraced Indiana reject Bob Knight as basketball coach, hired a football coach who never played in college and once expanded its stadium with incredible simplicity.
Mark Mangino, whose Kansas Jayhawks face Tech here Saturday, didn’t play college ball, either. He and Mike Leach are two of the four such people now heading big-time programs. Yet both guys have strong assistant pedigrees, once serving on the same Oklahoma national championship staff.
But to me one of the most intriguing aspect of Texas Tech football was its ingenuity in expanding Jones Stadium from a 27,000-seater to 41,500 in 1959. It’s still considered one of the unique engineering feats on record.
The arena was built in 1947 at a cost of $400,000, now is rated with a 53,000 capacity; expansion plans call for more than 60,000 before long.
Back to the ’59 project. The playing field was excavated 28 feet deeper and the stadium was widened eastward 226 feet. It was accomplished by sawing up sections of the stands, pulling each section on steel rollers along old railroad rails – involving more than 10 million pounds of concrete and rails. Expanded sections were filled in, refinements made, the job was done.
Nobody can recall the resourceful old guy who showed up to make a bid, probably chewing on a hay stem. Tech was about to give up on the job due to the cost. Rube Rustic said he could do it for some incredibly low figure, and everyone chortled. Yet they gave him the chance, with all sorts of escape clauses, of course.
He and his guys sawed the sections, brought in their trucks, winches, rails, rollers and such and did the job under budget and ahead of time. The place has since blossomed into one of the finest all-around athlete-office-practice-competition complexes to be found.
T-Tech has gained a reputation for doing things like that despite its near-isolation from the common herd of the Lone Star State. TTU sometimes is overlooked when varying degrees of athletic success are discussed.
In effect, Tech football constitutes a fire Kansas jumped into when it leaped out of the frying pan in 1964. KU had been a Texas Christian whipping boy between 1942 and 1964, showing a 4-15-3 deficit in the series.
Glory be, the series was terminated for a while, and KU replaced the Horned Frogs with the Red Raiders for 1965 and ’66. Piece of cake for KU, right? Who ever heard of Texas Tech?
Except the Techsters unveiled top-flight talent like running back Donny Anderson, and since the series began, the Raiders hold a 9-1 lead.
There’s good reason to fear what unbeaten Tech will do to pass-vulnerable Kansas in a “basketball-on-turf” circus.
