A Football Rivalry Brings Folks Together

On this glorious mid-September football weekend, I’m thinking of the ties that bind. And how they can stretch from North 52nd Street in Omaha to Goldenrod Avenue in Corona del Mar.

That, my friend, requires some heavy-duty binding.

Innocently enough, a reader aware of my Nebraska heritage and allegiance to Husker football directed me to a house on Goldenrod. She suggested I’d find a funny little story there.

The pitch was that the house was owned by a family with strong Nebraska ties and that upward of 25 people or so were using it as a bivouac before today’s Nebraska-USC game at the Coliseum.

However, my spy said, one of their sneaky in-laws had arrived early and planted a USC flag atop the house.

A sucker for intra-family treachery, I sallied forth Thursday night.

But you never know how things are going to go. The night took a kooky turn that I’ll get to in a bit, but first, let’s clean up this NU/USC thing. It tells us a little about how sports loyalties can form such a strong part of our personal identities and enjoyment of life.

There’s a large cast here: Doug Ralston of Dallas owns the house and is the son of Curt Ralston, the family patriarch who still lives in Omaha and is a longtime Husker fan who remembers going to the 1941 Rose Bowl when Stanford beat Nebraska. The Goldenrod house is used as a second family home. Doug was a student at SMU in 1970 when Nebraska last played USC and remembers trying to find the highest point in Dallas so he could pick up the game on the radio.

Doug’s son-in-law is Bill Rietz, a new father who got a postgrad business degree last year from USC. A scamp, he thought it’d be funny to greet the incoming Husker contingent with the Trojan flag hanging from the family house.

“I have friends around here who asked me why I had a Southern Cal flag and not a Nebraska flag,” Curt the patriarch says. “I told them it was an accident.”

By mid-evening Thursday, Rietz’s brother-in-law, Ben Ralston, was looking for the proper tools to replace the USC flag with something more Nebraska.

All good-natured fun, underscoring nothing more profound than sports rivalries can spawn mischief. But allow Ben to get serious for a moment:

“I’m 27 years old, and a lot of us here didn’t go to the university, but as a family we have been bonded together by Nebraska football. Nebraska doesn’t have pro sports, and everybody from there has allegiance. We all come together as a family, and it’s a huge deal to be around Nebraska football.”

I, of course, know in my bones what he’s talking about. It’s not unique to Nebraska, but we Huskers like to think we have a particularly special patent on it. In ways that a place like Southern California could not, Nebraskans from farms and factories and corporate board rooms have a common bond in their devotion to the Big Red.

Cute story, but now for the kooky part. In the midst of this family banter in the dining room, someone introduces me to another guest, a longtime family friend from Omaha named Steve Hayes.

I look deeper into his eyes than he may have noticed and say, “Benson High, Class of ’67.”

Perhaps thinking he’s just met the Amazing Kreskin, he acknowledges it.

“We were classmates,” I say.

His three daughters, who were seated nearby, said later he turned white.

“52nd and Ames,” I said later, giving him the coordinates of the apartment where I lived while in high school.

“52nd and Hamilton,” Hayes replied, and I presumed that’s where he lived.

I tell him and his daughters, all in their 20s, I remembered him because he was one of the “cool” guys from our graduating class of 700, while I was an outsider looking in. He says he remembers me, but I say that’s impossible, because I was invisible. “I mean, I don’t remember you, but I remember you,” he says. “I remember your name.”

I stop taking notes and turn off my recorder. The wine from the hosts starts coming more frequently (red, of course).

For much of the next hour, I drop name after name, mostly of Benson cheerleaders I remember ogling from afar. True to my memory of Hayes, he knew all of them. He tells me one became a minister, another sells real estate, another one had ballet talent.

Referring to the high jinks between Bill and Ben over the NU/USC flags, Hayes says, “This is like North High and Benson,” referring to the rivalry. We recalled the bunny, dyed green for Benson colors, that someone from North tossed onto the basketball court during a game.

Hayes tells me about dangling one of our classmates from a ledge by the school gym. The next day, I Googled the classmate and found out he resigned last year as CEO of ConAgra with a $2.4-million payment. I remember him from junior high. The good news: nice kid. Another of our classmates became a U.S. senator.

Hayes and I feel like slackers.

“I can’t believe this,” Hayes says, every 10 minutes or so. “What are the chances?”

Since neither of us is a mathematician, we couldn’t compute the probability that two Benson Bunnies from 52nd Street would be introduced 40 years later in a house a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean.

I left and walked in the cool night air to my car. High school seems like a million years ago, yet Hayes’ face seemed as familiar as if I’d seen it last week.

Such is the power of ... whatever it is. Homeland? High school? Boyhood?

All those things, maybe. All crashing back as a wave of Big Red fans descends on Southern California, my new homeland.

Next year, the teams play in Lincoln. The Ralston/Hayes collaboration invited me to their party in Omaha.

I think I’ll go.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.