Albuquerque Journal

I Admit It, 37-0 Was My Fault
By Rick Wright
Of the Journal
   
   Guilt consumes me, nibbling at my consciousness like ants at a picnic.
   
   I subsist on Maalox and little chocolate doughnuts, washed down with blue sports drink. It's better than I deserve.
   
   I constantly wake in the middle of the night, screaming, “37-0! 37-0!” My wife has taken to sleeping with earplugs; my dog checked herself into a kennel.
   
   It's my fault, OK? It's my fault!
   
   To backtrack:
   
   Last fall, Journal colleague Greg Archuleta announced he would be forced to miss UNM's Nov. 3 football game at TCU because his wife was due to give birth that week. It would be the first game Greg had missed since taking over the Lobo beat in 1998.
   
   I volunteered to replace him.
   
   I was a fool. Could Doug DeCinces replace Brooks Robinson? Could Phil Bengston replace Vince Lombardi?
   
   The week leading up to the game was longer than Yao Ming's trousers. UNM coach Rocky Long's 6 a.m. practices, which as a columnist I generally manage to avoid, became my responsibility. To say I'm not a morning person is like saying Nastia Liukin isn't fat.
   
   Meanwhile, the computer formats Greg uses to construct Saturday's wrap-around Lobo section were as foreign to me as the menu at a Kyrgyzstani restaurant. Somehow, little thanks to me, the paper got out.
   
   The trip to Fort Worth, at least, was uneventful. Photographer Greg Sorber and I enjoyed a pre-game lunch on the patio of a seafood restaurant near the TCU campus.
   
   Then, at Amon Carter Stadium, it all came crashing down.
   
   Horned Frogs 37, Lobos 0. And, no, it wasn't that close.
   
   It wasn't supposed to be this way. UNM had entered the game with a 6-2 record; TCU was 4-4. A Horned Frogs victory at home was no surprise, but no one had expected the Lobos to implode like an old Vegas casino.
   
   I'd covered blowout defeats before, of course, but rarely with sole responsibility for reporting them. Normally, I could count on Greg, as the beat writer, to ask the first postgame question.
   
   On this day, I stood with three or four radio/Internet types — all of whom seemed to have taken a vow of silence — as a tight-jawed Long waited.
   
   For reasons I still don't understand, I led with a statement.
   
   “Man, I haven't seen you guys get pounded like that since the Las Vegas Bowl against Oregon State in 2003,” I said.
   
   Long looked at me the way a bear might regard a salmon. But, veteran that he is, he responded by answering the question I should have asked.
   
   “(The Horned Frogs) were ready to play, and they played extremely well,” he said. “We added to it because we played terrible.”
   
   Minutes later, I entered the UNM locker room. The first sound I heard was a metal folding chair hitting the wall.
   
   Strategically, I chose linebacker Cody Kase and center Vince Natali, both mature, well-spoken seniors, to interview. Each handled the situation with class. I returned to the press box, wrote and filed my stories, then managed to get Sorber and myself totally lost on the drive back to our hotel.
   
   “Thanks for destroying my beat,” Archuleta said when he returned to the office the following week. He was kidding, mostly, and so am I, mostly. I didn't actually shoot the Lobos that day; I just wrote the obituary.
   
   Still, here's the math. Lobos in 2007 with Archuleta covering: 9-3. Lobos in 2007 with me covering: 0-1 (and 0-37).
   
   This week, as the Lobos prepare to play TCU on Saturday at University Stadium, Greg and I are in our customary roles.
   
   Lobos, take heart.