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Hunker Down with Kes

Beam Us All Up Scotty

Posted

Transfer Portal.

It sounds like something out of a “Star Trek” movie.

It actually is the latest fad in college sports.

I was watching the Alabama-Miami football game Saturday when a linebacker for Alabama stood a running back up and threw him to the ground. The Johnny-on-the-spot announcer quickly identified the tackler as Henry To’o To’o.

I sat straight up! That guy was the University of Tennessee’s best football player for the last two years. What is he doing in a Crimson Tide uniform?

And don’t tell me there are two Henry To’o To’os!

I called my 15 year old grandson. He is at that age when you know everything, “He entered the transfer portal, KK. If you don’t like the school where you are, you can enter the portal and transfer to another school and play immediately.”

“But surely the player would have to sit out a year and lose some eligibility. And it would stand to reason they couldn’t transfer within the same conference, anything else wouldn’t seem fair—”

“You’re thinking old school again, KK.”

This “move where-you-want-to window” was, as I learned in one weekend of football, the most popular thing on campus since swallowing goldfish, streaking and stuffing coeds into Volkswagen Beetles. Every other player it seemed who threw a pass, ran a touchdown or tackled someone had played for another team the previous year.

I guess if you didn’t like the coach, couldn’t pass the courses or, probably more to the point, had two guys ahead of you on the depth chart...no problem, just beam yourself over to another school. Presto, you’ve realigned your future, swapped uniform colors and flipped the playing field...hopefully, in your favor!

Loyalty has apparently gone the way of the T-Backfield, 7-Diamond defense and head on tackling.

But if this “transfer portal” thing works in college football...the possibilities could be endless.

My mind fumbled back to Pam Collins. Pam beat me up every day at recess in the second grade. You know, if we’d a’had this “exit-reenter window” in 1954 I could have just “portaled” myself down to Gleason. I bet those kids were all nice.

If I’d a’gotten to junior high in Gleason and the teacher asked me to stand up and recite one of those Emily Dickinson poems...I’d a’been back in McKenzie so fast students’ heads in both places would still be spinning!

Or how about standing on Mary Hadley Hayden’s porch a few years later when she told me I was a nice guy BUT... At that serendipitous moment in life, I couldn’t think of nothing to say or do. I mostly stared at my penny loafers and wished the ground would open up and take me under.

I certainly didn’t realize I had an option. Gosh, if I could have a do-over, I would have “transported” immediately to that free standing swing on Billie Jean Barham’s front porch.
The first day of college football practice big Bill Johnson ran over me like that steam roller thing flattens Wiley E. Coyote. John Stewart and Marshall Boone picked me up in pieces. Some coach blew a whistle and Bill ran over me again. And again!

Boy howdy, you talk about looking for an escape hatch. I would have leaped over the moon to get to Western Wyoming Junior College in Rock Springs. They didn’t have a football team there in 1965. Maybe I could have learned to rope and ride.

The storied University where I was didn’t get any easier as my first fall faded into an ice cold, snowy, fog ridden winter. I was in Latin class trying to read Virgil’s “The Aeneid” in its original language! The professor kept raving about it containing over 9,000 lines of perfect “dactylic hexameter.” Good Lord Golly America, it was worse than standing on Mary Hadley Hayden’s front porch!

I bet they didn’t talk, read, converse, cuss, ride, think or yell in nothing but good ole American English at Western Wyoming Junior College! What I wouldn’t have given to have had a “declare and go” window at that moment...

You reckon a transfer portal wouldn’t have come in handy a time or two raising our sons. ’Course, I can tell you what those boys would have said halfway through their teenage years, “Hey Dad, where’s that button...somebody in this house has got to have some relief!”

Maybe I’m a little leery, or perhaps jealous, of the merits of the “transfer portal” because I never got the opportunity to use it.

Or maybe I’m better off without it. I’d sure hate to get lost “out there” between Tennessee and Alabama, McKenzie and Gleason, two front porches or Heaven forbid, halfway between the University of the South and Western Wyoming Junior College...

Respectfully,
Kes