Well, I'll delurk for this one.....
I moved down from Nebraska to Kansas City back in March of '96. A fellow Husker went with me to the 'lights out' night game over in Lawrence, can't remember if that was '96 or '98. Anyways, it was 32 degrees, raining, and Memorial Stadium concessions ran out of coffee and hot chocolate before halftime. We were teased a bit in the first half, just a little by a couple of guys, but nothing in the second half as 90% of the KU faithful had left.
Skip forward a few years.....
I had tickets to both the '07 KU and '07 MU games. When I told my father, he said be careful in Columbia. I asked him why, and he said when the KC Alumni took a bus trip over for a game (my parents lived in KC for one year) the Missouri fans were really nasty. I asked him what year was that. He said 1967 or 1968. I told him I thought things have probably changed in the past 40 years. Well..........
A friend of mine from Marsland, NE (well, that's his official address, in reality, he's a few miles east of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument) drove all the way to Kansas City, then I drove us to Columbia. We got there and noticed all the students wearing bright yellow (not gold) t-shirts with '(sexual reproduction) CORN' in large letters on the front. I thought to myself, wow, real creative and with the class and debonair style usually only seen in people who don't wear shoes. Well, we tracked down our tailgate party (half Mizzou, half CORN). After some playful banter, speculation, food, beer, etc., we went into the stadium without much taunting, well, I should say, that I could understand. I think the MU students had been drinking all day and most of our taunters were totally incoherent. Once in the stadium I had one of the MU students get right in my face and yell at me that my beloved Cornhuskers were not a very good team in rather vulgar terms.
We were constantly barraged with running commentary on how badly our team played by the three young men behind us. They kept it up the whole game. Afterwards, we returned to our car amids shouts of derision aimed at anyone wearing a scrap of red, to find it not in exactly the way we left it. The results were that it took a few trips through the car wash to get the gunk off (still haven't figured out what it was), an afternoon to get the trim back on, and I still haven't gotten all the marks buffed out of the clearcoat.
For the Kansas game, my sister came down from Lincoln and we took my 4 year old boy and 7 year old daughter to the Lawrence. We were treated exceedingly nice by KU fans. We did our own little min-tailgate before the game and chatted with some BLUEs next to us. I was wearing my replica letterman's jacket and received a couple of compliments on it while walking to the stadium. We had about as good a time as one could have at this game, given the outcome. The KU fans cheered for their team and didn't give us any grief. On our long march back to the car, a lot of KU fans felt sorry for us and were offering us beers, sodas, food, etc.
Now, I have to put in this disclaimer, at the Kansas game, we were in the family section. So, I kind of call shenanigans on myself in comparing the experiences during the game. But the before and afterwards tell me who the better fans are. In fact, I was thinking about some of the stories opposing fans have related when coming to Lincoln. Sounds to me like KU has the edge.
My sincerest wish is not for retribution when the Jayhawks and the Tigers come to Lincoln in '08, but I hope they are overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of EVERY NEBRASKAN THEY MEET! I doubt very much this will happen as those values seem to be in short supply in the under 30 crowd, but I can always pine for the old days of applauding our competitors after the game while our band plays their fight song.
). The impressive thing though is that they weren't spotted by the crowd control/security guys nearby, they were caught by security up above the luxury boxes who had apparently either been watching them with through binoculars or with surveillance cameras.
