What Price Loyalty?

It is dark and musty here, a living duffel bag, crammed with the wrinkled spoils of a life in the bleachers.

Nearly everything cluttering the tiny rooms is orange, or horned, or both. Flags drape the ceilings, posters fill the walls, a worn tangerine carpet covers the creaky floor.

When Scott Wilson cheerfully says, “Take a seat,” he could be talking about the giant University of Texas helmet that doubles as a stool.

And if he asks you to wipe your feet, cover your ears, because the welcome mat blares, “The Eyes of Texas.”

This is not a home, it’s a three-bedroom, 1 1/2 -bath pep rally, conducted daily by a man who lives vicariously and loves unconditionally.

Wilson, who has attended every Texas football game home and away for the last 28 years, gives the Longhorns not only his heart, but his bed.

Covering the mattress are meticulously pressed orange Texas sheets and pillow cases.

“I mostly sleep on the couch,” Wilson says.

The imperfect arrangement is the perfect metaphor for the bittersweet relationship between beer-swigging fans such as Wilson and $80-million athletic departments such as Texas’.

For today’s national championship Rose Bowl, the metaphor becomes a theme.

This greatest of games will once again ignore the greatest of fans. While donors will feast, die-hards will scavenge. The records broken on the inside will be surpassed by the broken hearts on the outside.

Wilson, a 54-year-old lawyer who has sacrificed several jobs and relationships to remain faithful to his school, will be there. But barely, and distantly.

It is the first major road game this season for which he was able to buy a ticket from the university instead of a buddy or a scalper.

He flew not into Los Angeles on a boosters charter, but into Ontario on Southwest Airlines.

He is not staying with, or near, the team in Century City, but at the Motel 6 in Arcadia.

His pregame buffet? Jack in the Box tacos.

His postgame party? Trying to find his car.

Unlike the big boosters, he will never come close to a Longhorn player or coach or official. If they win, he will not be allowed to share in their celebration. If they lose, he will be denied access to ease their pain.

While Wilson loves the Longhorns, they don’t often love him back.

As far as Texas officials are concerned, the most important number in Wilson’s file isn’t 343 -- the consecutive football games he has attended -- or 28 -- the years worth of home and away baseball games he has attended -- or six -- the Longhorn sports to which he holds season tickets.

The only number that matters is 800. That’s how many dollars he annually donates to one of college athletics’ most endowed programs.

In Texas talk, that’s just a spit in the bucket.

“I know what the rules are,” he says. “Money is the priority for them. It’s all about dollars and sense.”

It’s the same way at USC, where every summer, folks complain about being moved out of their long-held Coliseum seats and into less desirable areas because they haven’t donated enough money.

Have you run into longtime USC fans who are disconsolate because they can’t get tickets for today’s game? Drive through Pasadena this afternoon and you’ll see plenty of them.

“Nobody has a bigger heart than Scott, nobody cares more than Scott, but it’s a fact of the times,” says Bill Little, special assistant to Coach Mack Brown. “You cannot run an $80-million athletic department without a substantial donor base.”

Because Wilson is at the bottom of that base, he drives to places like Waco and College Station without tickets. He flies to Columbus, Ohio, and pays a buddy $270 for tickets. He has slept in his car after road baseball games and slept on his lawn chair before football games.

He consistently attends events in campus arenas named after big donors while knowing that the university would never dream of honoring him. There have been no plaques, no jerseys, no recognition in university publications, not even a request to throw out the first pitch at baseball games where he has spent decades leading the crowd in “The Eyes of Texas.”

“The university does nothing to recognize him because he’s not a big donor,” says John Kelso, a local newspaper columnist and longtime friend. “But they ought to put a statue of him next to Darrell Royal. It’s people like Scott that keep the UT sports program going.”

Heck, he wouldn’t even need a statue.

“They could just name the baseball parking lot after him,” says Kurt Zeitler, a local investment broker and friend. “He’s always there.”

Or they could just build a case to display his car, a 1975 burnt orange Cadillac with longhorns jutting from the hood.

After 13 years of service, it finally died a couple of years ago in the middle of Oklahoma, on the way home from the College World Series, leaving Wilson to frantically wave down other Texas fans for a ride home.

The car was towed about 500 miles to his small driveway, where it sits rotting and molding. But if you charge it up and don’t mind the smoke, it still plays “The Eyes of Texas” on the horn.

Did we say that he likes that song?

*

His first game was Nov. 1, 1958, Texas against Southern Methodist.

That’s not just a memory, it’s a furnishing, the orange pennant his father bought him that day still hanging on his wall.

“It was my school,” Wilson says. “It’s always been my school.”

He graduated from UT, received his law degree from Baylor, then returned home to work and watch football, beginning his current streak on Oct. 22, 1977, also against SMU.

By then, his father and brother had died of heart attacks and he realized what was important.

It was family. It was belonging.

“So he married UT, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer,” friend Kelso says.

The better parts are walking into campus sport events from distant parking spots, everyone knowing his name, recognizing his bespectacled eyes and thick drawl and deep laugh.

“You see him everywhere,” says Nick Voinis, a Texas senior associate athletic director. “I’d be more surprised if I was at any UT event and he wasn’t there.”

The worse parts: during games Wilson has lost both a car engine and a girlfriend.

Start with the engine. It once caught fire on the way to College Station. He simply pulled to the side of the road, doused the flames with water and ice from his beer cooler, and waved down a fan to drive him to the game.

Now, for the girlfriend.

“I never married because a lot of women don’t want to do all the stuff I do,” he says. “Actually, most of them don’t.”

Then there was the one who stood up during the middle of a Longhorn baseball game. It not being the middle of the seventh inning, he knew it was trouble.

“I’m sick of this, and I’m leaving,” she said, storming off, never to date him again.

Perhaps this is what happens when you insist on keeping, in your home, the figure of Oklahoma football player composed entirely of cow pies.

Maybe it’s the 2,000 beer cans in the garage, or 2,000 dusty caps in one of the bedrooms, or the “A Horny Year 1967” bumper sticker in the living room.

Or, possibly, it’s irritating to sit on the toilet and see, taped to the wall in front of you, cheering cards from Texas volleyball games.

“Wilson may not be a big donor, but he deals in the coin of the spirit,” says Charles Tischler, a local writer and friend.

And if you add up the value of the souvenirs that paper his home, and the cost of his constant trips, and the money lost when he has changed jobs several times to maintain the freedom to attend games?

“Oh, he’s probably already given a million dollars to the university,” says his sister, Nancy. “It’s just a different kind of donation.”

A kind that does not compute to university accountants or school officials at Texas or anywhere else.

“You would think that, considering his streak is the longest one anybody knows about, the university people would always make sure he can get tickets to anything,” Zeitler says. “He’s been going for nearly 30 years, why isn’t he on every list?”

Last year, I wrote a story about Francis Benavidez, the USC fan who had attended nearly every home game for 68 years.

The highlight for Benavidez was not the story, but the phone call later from Coach Pete Carroll, who wanted to thank him.

Scott Wilson says he has talked to Mack Brown a couple of times, but it was several years ago, in passing, at basketball games.

“I don’t know if he recalls me or not,” he says. “Coaches aren’t as accessible as they once were.”

Wilson understands his place. He understands about being a true fan. He knows it’s about loving your team in spite of itself.

“When I wonder whether they love me back, it sometimes bothers me,” he says. “But I keep doing what I’m doing. I’m loyal. I’ll stay loyal.”

Even if nobody is watching. Especially if nobody is watching.

A couple of years ago, standing over their dying mother as she was taking her last breaths, Wilson and his sister serenaded her with “The Eyes of Texas.”

She was buried in the family plot about three miles from the university. Wilson wants to be buried there too. He already has plans for his tombstone inscription.

“May God Always Bless The University of Texas” it will say.

That, and a $4,000 annual donation, will get him better seats for sure.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous Plaschke columns, go to latimes.com/plaschke.