FanPost

Ode to the Hate Barn

John Glaser-USA TODAY Sports

College football is almost here, which means my activity on this site will steadily increase over the next few months. Typically, I’m here writing a Fan Post about statistics and what they might mean for the Aggie’s upcoming matchup, but the onset of the upcoming season and other life events have me feeling sentimental and nostalgic. So if you want to join me for a very long post I’d appreciate it, although I can't promise it has a point or a conclusion like my other writings, maybe you'll enjoy it anyway.


I am 13 years old and I am experiencing pure joy. It is my first game at Kyle Field, it is 2005, and the Aggies are playing SMU. My friend and his dad have brought me to this sweltering concrete chapel to take in a game day experience (after years of steering me towards a future of Maroon and White) because they both know the simple fact is this: if you want to fully convert someone, you have to take them to church.

I am being baptised in 90 degree heat and $5 Dasani water, and I am now a believer in the prophets of Reggie McNeal and Jason Carter and a giant named Jorvorskie Lane. I try to follow the choir directors below me, all dressed in white, who’s hand signals let the crowd of 70,000+ know exactly what to say and when to say it. I picked up a program at the entrance and it serves as my hymnal, in the back are pictures letting me know what the hand signals mean and how to translate them, so I can join the chorus.

I am mesmerized by it all, and when I lock arms with my friend and the stranger next to me and saw off invisible horns, I am locked in for good. My friend would end up being my roommate in college and despite winning 66-8 that day, the Aggies would be terrible that season and finish 5-6. I knew none of those things at the time, I just knew what joy was.


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I am 14 years old and I am experiencing heartbreak. It is my second game at Kyle Field, it is 2006, and the Aggies are playing Texas Tech. My brother, a current student at Tech, has brought me for a birthday gift, and I am in enemy territory. If the North End Zone was my church pew, this southwest corner surrounded by the opponent’s fanbase is surely Hell.

There is trash talk, and cheering at the wrong moments, and other unholiness all around me, but I don’t care because the Aggies have the lead late in the 4th quarter and I am still feeling that same joy. And then something happens. A 37 yard pass, an acrobatic catch by Robert Johnson (a name I recall easily, despite the fact that he hasn’t played American football in over 12 years), and suddenly my church is as silent as a graveyard. Except for the section around me. Except for Hell.

I spent the rest of the day trying to be happy with my ecstatic brother, and eventually managed to remember it was nice of him to have brought me anywhere at all. In later years we would end up spending more time in College Station together, and college football will always be somehow both a divisive and uniting subject for the two of us. I knew none of that at the time, I only knew what heartbreak was.

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I imagine joy is what E.J. Kyle felt 100 years ago when the Aggie football team went undefeated on the patch of grass he had dedicated to the university for athletic use in 1904. It’s hard for me to even imagine the team going undefeated at home (something they haven't done since 1999), much less going 10-0 and allowing zero points scored all season. Almost as hard to imagine as a time when the university didn’t want to spend money on athletic facilities, so an academic faculty member stepped in to make the contribution. I imagine heartbreak is what the former Horticulture professor might have felt in 1970 when they ripped up the grass and put down AstroTurf, but who knows.

And who knows what Mr. Kyle would think of the stadium now. Was he impressed in 1921 when students managed to run cable from the press box to Bolton Hall, where they used Morse code to broadcast the game against the Longhorns (The first college football game to be broadcast on radio)? What would he think now that you can watch any game played at Kyle Field from anywhere in the world with a cell phone and an internet connection? I wonder how he felt watching the stadium transform over the years. Progressing from that little patch of grass to a concrete Hate Barn, stacking decks on top of one another until someone said, "Let’s tear it down and rebuild it over two seasons." And they did. And now it's all red bricks, beer gardens, escalators, and unreliable Wi-Fi, and on Saturdays in the Fall it still turns out heartbreak and joy. Because church has never been about the building itself, it's always been about the people inside.

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I imagine heartbreak, not the sports kind, but the real kind that doesn’t go away and hurts forever, is learning that 12 of your classmates perished in a crazy accident. Realizing that whether you knew them or not they were real and they had families who loved them and finals to take and tickets for the game on Thursday. And there is still a game on Thursday, because people still need church after a tragedy, even when going almost feels sacrilegious. I imagine that’s what real heartbreak is. I wouldn’t know, because like a lot of other things in life I am too young to know. But I can imagine. The feeling of despair, and then somehow the joy you feel on Thursday when the Aggies upset a highly ranked Horn team 20-16. The joy doesn’t replace the heartbreak, it never does, but they can coexist for a moment weirdly and magically, and there is no better place for that mixture to happen than at Kyle Field in the Fall.

I imagine that mixture of joy and heartbreak might have been present again, nearly two years later in 2001, if you happened to be there for arguably an internet message board’s greatest accomplishment. Kyle Field, still concrete and objectively ugly, but beautiful because of the people in it, wearing coordinated t-shirts of red, white, and blue in a show of support for those that lost their lives in another tragedy just 11 days prior. A truly remarkable feat of patriotism and Aggie Spirit, and it happened at Kyle Field, because where else would you see a miracle but at a church? I imagine it gave a lot of people joy to be a part of that (and to see the Aggies beat Oklahoma State by two touchdowns), even though it was still a little scary to be in the world at that time. I imagine because I wasn’t there. Again, I’m just too young to know.


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I am now 19 and I have found the joy again. I am on the grass at Kyle Field, because church overflowed this week and they set up chairs on the field, and when the Aggies beat Nebraska 9-6 there was no way you could keep me from rushing the pulpit. I am high fiving Von Miller, and patting Ryan Tannehill on the shoulder, and flashing a Gig’Em to Coach Sherman. I am drunk despite consuming zero alcohol that evening, something about doing the War Hymn with the team goes straight to a goofy freshmen’s head I guess. "Wrecking Crew!" chants fill the air and I am joining in because the joy is too much and I believe in that moment it will never leave.

I am 20 and the joy is gone, and the heartbreak is back. I skipped my family’s Thanksgiving for a funeral, as I watch Justin Tucker bury a rivalry, an era, and my joy behind the south end zone goal post. Now I really am drunk because sometimes that’s the only way to deal with feelings after a funeral, and I have no desire to chant or even be around other people at the moment. This cycle of heartbreak and joy, highs and lows, it’s likely unhealthy and probably an indication of an overcommitted-ness to a sport that will never love me back. But it’s the only way I know how to handle it. It’s been that way since my first two visits to the Hate Barn, and I don’t see it going away. Mainly because I don’t want it to. Like I said, there is something kind of magical about their coexistence, and a church can’t really be effective if you walk out happy after every single sermon.


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I imagine there are people out there that might read this with many older memories of Kyle Field. Some were probably there in ‘99 and ‘01, and experienced that tragedy and joy firsthand. You might still have your colored shirt somewhere, folded up in a box never to be worn again... because miracles usually don’t happen twice. Or you might have been there for the joy of going undefeated at home in 1992, or in ‘85 when the crowd was flagged for making too much noise, or any number of dates before I was even born, where Kyle Field converted you fully and totally to its religion.

Or you might have been there at times when you came this close to becoming an atheist. Like when the false prophet/future medical sales rep Todd Blythe rode into town and caught four touchdowns, or when the Aggies laid an egg against Ole Miss in front of a record number of true believers in 2014. I envy you for your memories, but I would not trade them for mine.

Not just the memories of the things that happened on the field, but everything around it and leading up to it. Camping out for Cotton Bowl tickets on a December night in 2010. Watching a friend duct tape a bag of wine to his stomach to sneak inside (Because what would church be without a little communion). Watching Johnny Manziel salute the student section as he returned from a suspension he received for being a college athlete who felt he deserved money. There are many more, and even now I have to fight to remember them all. I know the emotional attachment to a sports complex is a little much, I really do. But the longer I'm away from Mr. Kyle's little patch of grass, the more I realize how important it is to me.


I was sad to hear the news a couple of weeks ago that EDSBS was shuttering it’s internet windows. I always enjoyed reading Spencer’s (and the rest of the crews) writing there, and will continue to keep up with them at their new site. The title of this post is obviously a reference to his work, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say his style and skill wasn’t a little bit of an inspiration here. There’s a bigger inspiration out there though, that has me really thinking about writing and feelings and life lately.


I am 27 years old and I am experiencing a lot of joy, not the sports kind, but the kind that sticks with you for a long time. I am NOT at Kyle Field, and likely will not be for a while. My son will barely be a month old when the Aggies face Texas State on a Thursday night in August, and I’d like for him to be able to control his head the first time he visits the Hate Barn. My son is named after my grandfather who passed away in May, so he comes prepackaged with that mixture of joy and heartbreak, and he has no idea about the range of emotions I hope to experience with him some day. He doesn’t know all my stories about Kyle Field, and he doesn’t know that, yes it really is just another athletic facility with a big screen and stale nachos... but sometimes it’s something more than that. He doesn’t know that college football is so stupid and weird and wonderful, that I never want him to take it seriously, but that I believe it’s ok to feel the heartbreak and the joy it brings. Those feelings are real, just as real as when you experience them in other places in life. And it’s ok to feel them separate and together, because feeling them is better than feeling nothing at all.

Of course neither of us knows what college football, or Kyle Field, or Texas A&M will look like in the next ten to twenty years.

We don’t know, because we are both much too young.

But I can imagine.

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