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