Oregon Ducks: My hometown team is No. 1 and seeking first national title — while I watch alone from a world away

You want to baffle Italians? Try explaining American college sports to them.

“You mean if a high school kid is a good athlete, he goes to university for free?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Because people pay big money to watch college kids play sports.”

“Why?”

“You really don’t think college is just for education, do you?”

“Yes.”

This is when the cultural barrier between the U.S. and Italy – well, Europe in general – reaches an impasse. This is when we don’t understand each other in either language. This is when I switch topics and ask if they’ve been to any good trattorias lately. 

College in Italy is as basic and dull as dry fettuccine. Italian colleges – and most in Europe – have virtually no campus life. Students live at home or in cheap apartments. College is an extension of high school, like a big chain of junior colleges with better professors. A wild night in an Italian college is a Friday night pizza.

No one ever talks about Sapienza University of Rome’s big soccer win over University of Florence back in ‘95. Sapienza has no soccer team. 

So imagine my Italian friends’ confusion here in Rome when I tell them I will be up until 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day night watching my university play American football on my laptop.  

“Who’s your team?”

“The Oregon Ducks.”

“Ducks?”

“Yes.”

“You mean anatre?”

“Yes.”

“Your school’s team is named for a little bird that floats in ponds and we put in ragu?”

“Yes. But we’re actually called the Fighting Ducks.”

Italians don’t have a great sense of humor but when they hear that, they howl.

Explaining the importance of the game offers little clarity. Oregon is the top-ranked team in the United States and seeded first in national playoffs that have expanded to 12 teams for the first time in the sport’s 156-year history. Italian soccer only has playoffs in lower divisions.

What is easier to explain is Oregon started playing football in 1894 and has never won a national title. My A.S. Roma last won Italy’s Serie A soccer title in 2001 and even that seems like it happened during the Pleistocene Ice Age. So this week I am trading my Roma red and yellow for Oregon green and yellow and will Quack! Quack! our way to victory.

From 10,000 kilometers away.

From sportswriter to sports fan

My transformation from sportswriter to sports fan when I retired to Rome in 2014 has been a depressing insight into the damaged psyche of the tortured sports fan. I adopted Roma as my team in 2002 and over the last 11 seasons in Rome I have experienced heartache that never entered my world as a sportswriter.

Three second-place finishes to evil Juventus. The 7-1 Champions League home loss to Bayern Munich. The two losses to Serie B teams in the Italian Cup. The current 17-game winless streak on the road and on our fourth manager in 2024.

As a sportswriter, my biggest heartache was missing last call.

But as a Roma fan I am not alone. More than 40,000 fans fill Olympic Stadium every game, tops in Serie A, even for a team hovering over the relegation zone. I can walk across the street and commiserate with Davide, my corner bar barista. I go to my Abbey Theatre Pub and watch games on the big screen in a room filled with Romanisti. My Corriere dello Sport has at least five stories on Roma every day.

Sorrow loves company and in Rome, I have it.

Cheering for Oregon in Rome is like cheering from outer space. No one hears me. I am alone on my couch. My living room is dark except for an illuminated globe and a stained glass lamp from Istanbul. It’s often 2 or 3 in the morning. My lone communication with fellow Ducks are anguished Facebook texts to a friend in Oregon and perusing comments on Twitter. I’ve become that weird uncle watching his laptop in the dark.

Until Oregon swept through the country in this unbeaten season and became the subject of numerous Internet stories, I read little about them. My hometown Eugene Register-Guard, taken over by the bloodletting GateHouse Media company that chewed the paper to its bare bones, has gone from the best sports section of its size in the country to one of the biggest embarrassments in American journalism. It didn’t have the wherewithal to even send a reporter to Oregon’s conference title game in Indianapolis three weeks ago.

Reading the Internet this season has been nearly my sole connection with the Ducks. They usually play on CBS which my streaming service does not carry. They are 13-0 yet I’ve seen them play exactly once, when they barbecued Oregon State, 49-14, clear back on Sept. 14.

In Rome I can’t go to Oregon watch parties. I can’t go to bars. Forget tailgating, the time-honored American sports tradition of eating and drinking in the parking lot before a game. It’s the United States’ greatest contribution to sports besides Nike (born in Oregon, by the way).

My Oregon history

Oregon playing for a national football title still seems surreal considering my sad history with the team. I was born, raised and educated in Eugene, Ore., two miles from campus. My first game was Sept. 29, 1962 when my dad took me, in first grade, to watch Oregon play Utah in old 22,500-seat Hayward Field, built in 1919 and which later became one of the most iconic track facilities in the world. 

Oregon won 35-8 behind future NFL Hall of Fame running back Mel Renfro. I’ve been hooked ever since.

In 1967 the Ducks moved to brand new 41,000-seat Autzen Stadium, a colorless concrete bowl across the Willamette River from campus but at the time seemed like the L.A. Coliseum. My parents, who met as students at Oregon, had season tickets. 

Some of the few close bonds I had with my father were going to tailgate parties where I became addicted to our friend’s chocolate-frosted, nutty fudge brownies. My dad and his friends would pound bloody marys then we’d go into the stadium and watch the Ducks get pounded in the rain.

Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s Oregon was decent. We had a coach named Jerry Frei who was a hero to my knee-jerk liberal family. During the turbulent times of the Vietnam War, this World War II fighter pilot let the Black players wear afros and all players speak out against the war. When he wasn’t upsetting UCLA, Jerry Frei became a symbol of our school’s liberal light shining from the Willamette Valley.

Meanwhile, 45 miles up the road at archrival Oregon State, or, as I always called it, Oregon Straight, Oklahoma-bred coach Dee Andros was kicking a Black linebacker off his team for wearing facial hair. 

But Frei didn’t win quite enough and he couldn’t beat the hated Oregon Straight Rodents, er, Beavers and he left after the 1971 season. Then Oregon football fell into an abyss. Broke and provincial, we promoted Frei’s offensive line coach, Dick Enright, who got whacked after only two years and a 6-16 record. 

At the time, Oregon had become a basketball school under new, fiery basketball coach Dick Harter. Enright’s lone legacy was this popular bumper sticker: 

“If you can’t get your Dick Enright, get your Dick Harter.”

By the time I enrolled at Oregon in 1974, we were a tire fire. In my four years in school, we won 12 games. This year’s Ducks have already won 13. From 1974-77 we went 12-32 and there were some classic pratfalls.

In 1975, 25,000 sat in a driving rainstorm to watch us lose to San Jose State, 5-0. In the stadium sat newly hired Oregon president William Boyd who told the Register-Guard, “I’d rather be whipped in a public square than watch a game like that.”

In 1981 before Oregon and Oregon Straight finished the season against each other, both sporting 1-9 records, the Register-Guard’s screaming headline read, “Now for the Game of the Weak.”

At the end of our 1983 season, in which we finished 4-6-1, we tied Oregon Straight, 0-0. A week later, in the last line of his notes column, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Alan Malamud, wrote, “Any score from Eugene yet?”

While Oregon football circled the drain, I had changed. I became the Oregon football beat writer for the Oregon Daily Emerald my sophomore year in 1975. Sportswriting kills subjectivity. Objectivity stifled my cheers and hopes. I evolved. I hardened. Of course, getting blanked by San Jose State and losing to Washington at home, 54-0, added to my malaise.

I became more concerned with why the cute Alpha Chi Omega wouldn’t return my calls than I was whether Oregon could cross midfield against USC.

I covered the Ducks for the Emerald in 1975 and ‘76 then for the Associated Press in 1977. I saw up close the bottom of college football’s barrel the Ducks were scraping. Coaches shared offices in a cramped space in McArthur Court, the basketball arena that opened in 1926.

The team’s locker room at Autzen was as barren as some Youth Hostel dorms I slept in a year later in Europe. Oregon was so awful, the Pac-8 considered dropping it along with Oregon Straight and Washington State, the conference’s other bottom feeders.

Rise to relevancy

But then came the slow arc that has turned into a beautiful rainbow and we all hope is headed to a pot of gold. My senior year in 1977, Oregon hired a UCLA assistant named Rich Brooks. He struggled, but the university stuck by him and he got us to the 1989 Independence Bowl to end a 26-year bowl drought.

I remember playing hooky from work in Las Vegas and watching the game  in a dark, dive bar, not believing that we actually made a bowl game.

Attendance improved, they built an indoor practice facility and we won the conference in 1994. Nike founder Phil Knight, an alum and former Oregon track runner, started pouring in more money for state-of-the art facilities, sparking a national arms race among blueblood schools trying to catch up to my Ducks. 

Coach Mike Bellotti won big with a spread offense, we got flashy new uniforms and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly got promoted in 2009 to make us the most feared offense in the land. Autzen expanded to 54,000 seats and now resembles a spaceship more than a sports facilility.

But during this rise from the ashes, my heart remained distant. I’d moved to The Denver Post in 1990 and only watched from afar. When I became our national college football writer in 2003, I wrote about the Ducks’ ascent as a journalist, not as a fan. Oregon was just another team.

I remember covering Oregon’s national championship game against Auburn in Arizona at the end of the 2010 season. Oregon lost on a last-second field goal but during the game I never got emotional or even excited. I was too busy writing and deciding whether to race to the locker room for quotes or stay in the press box and finish on a tight deadline.

It wasn’t until later when I plopped down in my hotel room that I realized, “Holy hell! Oregon just played for the national title!”

College Football Playoffs

They’re doing it again. Wednesday at 11 p.m. Rome time in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., Oregon plays eighth-seeded Ohio State (11-2) in the quarterfinals. It’s a rematch of an October game won by Oregon at Autzen, 32-31. They’re considered the two best teams left in the field and Ohio State probably has the most talented roster in the tournament, bolstered by a $20 million player payroll. (I have not tried to explain college football’s new Name, Image and Likeness policy in Italian. My mind might snap and so might my Italian friends’.)

Oregon is a 2.5-point underdog which is about right, considering Ohio State’s blueblood status dating back 100 years and its 42-17 rout of Tennessee in the first round. But Oregon is considered to be the fastest team in the country, is healthy for the first time in weeks thanks to a first-round bye and has the most experienced college quarterback in history in Heisman Trophy-finalist Dillon Gabriel. I have faith in our dynamic third-year coach, Dan Lanning.

I worry about Oregon’s rushing defense inside. I worry about Ohio State freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith who burned the Ducks in October and has risen to possibly the best player in the country. 

But most of all, I just worry about Oregon being Oregon. Is it doomed to reach for the highest echelon of the sport but in the end always left grasping at air? In my memory bank, Oregon’s losses to Auburn and San Jose State share equal space. 

Is Oregon always going to be just Oregon? Or in three weeks we’ll be the king of a sport which nearly kicked us to the curb when I went to school there? This will be a surreal scene. I’ll be sitting 10,000 kilometers away, in a darkened apartment near the center of Rome watching my alma mater play for glory that, in my mind, would be as great as anything Ancient Rome achieved.

I’ll watch alone, wearing the lone school T-shirt I brought to Rome 10 years ago but I will still yell one thing. Whether I wake my neighbors or not, I don’t care. I’ll explain later. At least, I’ll try.

“FORZA ANATRE! (GO DUCKS!)”