FIRST PITCHES: Oct. 23, 2010, the college game day that started it all

EDITOR’S NOTE: Some of the best sports journalists in the nation started their careers on the pages of the Columbia Missourian. To recognize and celebrate that legacy, we asked a number of notable alums to contribute an account of their favorite sports memory from their time at the Missourian. ‘First Pitches’ is an occasional series written by the sportswriting sons and daughters of the Missouri School of Journalism. We start with Joan Niesen, MA, Class of 2011.

Before every football game when Greg Bowers was the sports editor at the Missourian, one of the three beat writers was assigned to what Greg called “the walk-around story” — three words none of us could muster saying without an eye roll. Often, the walk-around involved pre-reporting on Thursday or Friday. We’d have to find a crazy out-of-town tailgater or some other spectacle set to take place in the parking lots surrounding Faurot Field, get in touch with a ringleader, arrange to meet. The guy with a million stuffed tigers? That had been written before, and Greg wasn’t about to allow any of us to write it again.

I covered the Missouri football team in the fall of 2010. The Tigers started the season unranked in Blaine Gabbert’s second year as the starter, and apart from a near-loss to San Diego State at home, they looked relatively competent. By the time Missouri traveled to College Station, Texas, in Week 7, it was ranked No. 21, and it crushed the Aggies that Saturday afternoon. Next up: the No. 18 ranking, No. 1 Oklahoma in town, and Columbia’s first visit from the “College GameDay” people at ESPN.

That week, I was assigned the walk-around.

I brainstormed for days, starting on the ride home from College Station after the “GameDay” destination had been announced. My beat partners, Lenny Goldman and Dieter Kurtenbach, and I blasted Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” at least every half-hour to keep ourselves awake on the 12-hour drive. I stuck my head out the sunroof, hoping for a jolt of mental energy. There were, it seemed, too many potential options for the walk-around: “GameDay” and all its pomp and circumstance, the waves of Sooners fans who were bound to flood Columbia, the madness of campus itself ahead of the biggest home football matchup in years. Greg always wanted an angle, though, not an amorphous idea. Something concrete.

I decided to push back.

Greg intimidated a lot of writers. I can’t say why, but he never quite scared me. I just respected the hell out of him, which is why I was nervous to ask permission to try my plan, which wasn’t really much of a plan at all. Was I ready, I asked him, to wander around all day Saturday and find whatever story hit me? What I really wanted and couldn’t articulate was to try my hand at writing scene, pure and simple. Somehow, Greg agreed, and I got to spend the day of the game crisscrossing campus and talking to everyone who’d give me a minute.

I spent years covering college football at Sports Illustrated, and nothing I saw in that time compares to Oct. 23, 2010. Everywhere I went was packed. The weather was perfect. Campus was a 1,200-acre cloud of bratwurst-scented smoke, a fact that looks much less appealing in type than it smelled in reality. Even Oklahoma people were impressed. I remember one of them in particular, an older man in a cowboy hat who looked like a cartoon of what I’d imagined a Sooners fan to be. He invited me to his tailgate to meet his family. They offered to feed me and told me they’d questioned making the drive but were thrilled they’d committed.

You probably know what happened next: A receiver who played mostly on special teams, Gahn McGaffie, returned the opening kickoff for a Missouri touchdown. That’s when I turned, made eye contact with Lenny and Dieter and raised my eyebrows. Huh. The game stayed close through three quarters, but the Tigers opened the fourth with a touchdown, a field goal and another touchdown, all unanswered. Lenny and I made our way down to field level to stand on the sideline for the last five minutes, which media are permitted to do, and it wasn’t until then that it hit me: I was about to get to help cover the biggest win in a generation. I also realized the crowd was about to rush the field, right into my 100-pound frame.

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Oh: Mizzou won, 36-27.

I don’t remember a ton about what came next. We went to the press box. We wrote. (Apparently I typed a second story that night. There’s one in the Missourian archives online. I have no memory of this.) Dieter twitched a lot. Somehow, when the media shuttle driver said the roads were too congested for him to drive us to our car in a parking lot south of the stadium, we convinced him to take us to the Missourian newsroom downtown instead. Dieter kept twitching. Greg called us into his office for a debrief, and that’s when my memory sharpens.

“It was good,” he muttered at me.

“My story?” I asked, incredulous.

He grunted; that meant yes.

I had to look up the score of the game before I sat down to write this. But I can still picture Greg’s office and hear his gruff baritone grunting almost a decade later.

Greg made Lenny and Dieter walk me up 9th Street to Broadway, where I was meeting friends at a bar. We passed pieces of the sawed-down goalpost as we walked, being hauled to who-knows-where. I remember laughing and wondering where they planned to put these bright-yellow concrete souvenirs, or if they’d even make it home from Harpo’s. I felt both too sober for the scene and glad for it. That night, when my then-boyfriend and I got back to my apartment, I couldn’t stop pacing, feeling the post-deadline adrenaline rush.

The boyfriend asked if everything was okay. I told him things had never been better. I just had to figure out a way to keep doing this ridiculous job as long as I could. I didn’t want the adrenaline to run out.

Joan Niesen graduated with her Master’s in journalism from Mizzou in 2011. After graduating, she covered the NBA for FoxSports.com for two years. She then spent a year at the Denver Post on the Broncos beat before being hired by Sports Illustrated, where she worked for six years before private equity cavemen took over and laid off half of the staff, including her. Now, she’s working on a narrative podcast that will be released next fall, writing a book and freelancing.