Tooter Sooner!

SI’s got their archives mostly open and running, a boon for tweedy archvists like ourselves and something that had us sprinting straight for rock star Rick Telander at his most glorious: the February 29th, 1989 article “You Reap What You Sow,” which for the EDSBS underclassmen will serve as a cheat sheet (pun!) for what we mean when we say something is “Barry Switzertastic” in terms of program mismanagement and lax discipline.

We remember the exact instant when we read this article: sitting in a Fantastic Sam’s in a strip mall in Franklin, Tennessee, waiting on a haircut with Mom and vacillating between adolescent moral horror and unabashed admiration for the gusto Oklahoma’s football players displayed in their abuse of petty privilege.

A few of the finer cuts:

Earlier that week he had lectured children at a nearby grammar school about the evils of drug use. “Regardless of what anyone has told you about drugs,” he told the youngsters, “they’re the quickest way to end your life, the quickest way to be in jail.”

Three days later the FBI charged Thompson with having sold 17 grams of cocaine for $1,400 to an undercover agent on Jan. 26.

And:

Parks, who reportedly had been drinking, barged in and angrily confronted Peters about a cassette tape that he claimed Peters had borrowed. Peters told Parks he didn’t know what he was talking about. The two had gone to high school together in Houston, and Peters knew of Parks’s volatile temper. But Peters was much bigger—240 pounds to Parks’s 176—and once the shouting turned to shoving, Parks was on the floor.

In a rage, Parks bolted from the dorm and into the parking lot. He returned with a Harrington & Richardson eight-shot .22-caliber revolver. He threatened Peters with it and was taunted in return. “You’re not going to do anything,” said Peters. “I dare you! Go on, shoot me! Shoot me!” Peters stepped forward and pushed Parks yet again. Parks shot him. The bullet missed Peters’s heart by three inches. Parks fled to neighboring Jones Hall, where he was apprehended by university police officers. “I’m the one who did it,” police quoted Parks as saying. “I had no choice.”

The next time someone complains about “kids these days,” just send them this link and remind them that “crazy-ass motherfucker” has never gone out of style.