Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Thirteen days. That’s how long until the Kansas football team plays the most competitive, most gut-wrenching, most intense game it will play all season. That’s how long until a rabid mob of fans from Lawrence and Columbia will gather at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., to cheer their teams on in something equal parts football game and Civil War re-enactment. That’s how long it is until the Border Showdown.
With a rivalry such as the one between Kansas and Missouri, it’s hard to argue that there’s a better one in all of college athletics. Sure, there are some pretty big ones, Michigan and Ohio State and Florida and Tennessee come to mind, but those don’t even come close.
William Quantrill and his band of Bushwackers, famed enemies of Kansas freedom fighter John Brown, burned sections of Lawrence to the ground in 1856. Did angry mobs of Buckeye Rebels ever burn down Ann Arbor, Mich.? I don’t think so.
Those same Bushwackers killed almost 200 civilians during a series of raids on Lawrence. I’ve heard of Bleeding Kansas, but Bleeding Florida or Bleeding Tennessee just doesn’t seem to ring a bell.
Go down the list of big rivalries: Army and Navy, Oklahoma and Texas, Miami and Florida State, Georgia and Georgia Tech. Not one comes close to matching the amount of sheer animosity that exists along the Missouri-Kansas border.
Sorry, Kansas State, it’s just not the same when our football teams play. The Governor’s Cup is nice, and we’re certainly out to win, but it’s just different with Missouri. When we play the Tigers, we’re out for blood. We’re not out only to defeat Missouri, but to spend the year declaring our dominance.
That’s because our rivalry goes beyond athletics, beyond the universities themselves. It might as well be stamped on every Kansas and Missouri birth certificate; it’s in our bones. The rivalry is different for those lifelong Kansas natives. I can’t describe how grateful I am that my parents decided to move 20 minutes from Lawrence instead of 20 minutes from Columbia. I’d be wearing black and gold and proudly spelling my school’s name wrong as a chant my whole life. By the way, it’s spelled M-I-S-S-O-U-R-I, not M-I-Z-Z-O-U, Columbia.
Granted, anyone looking at this rivalry from the outside might have a hard time understanding the criticism. It says a lot that even now, 144 years after the Civil War ended, so much hate still burns on either side of the Missouri River. Look past the corporate “Border Showdown” and the exchange of the Indian War Drum. Friendships are broken, families divided and fisticuffs exchanged because of what so many see as a quaint sports rivalry. As far as we’re concerned, we are continuing the same battle Quantrill and Brown started 153 years ago.
Former Kansas football coach Don Fambrough described it best when he told Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel, “It’s a goddamn war. And they started it!” No kidding, Fambrough. It’s a war and Jayhawkers intend to win.
— Edited by Anna Kathagnarath
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