Most of you know I am a huge Oklahoma Sooners fan, especially their basketball team. As luck would have it, they just so happened to be playing a series of exhibition games in Belgium and France while we are in Paris. (This was not the impetus for us being in Paris, I promise!). But of course, since they were here… why not go?
Yesterday was the morning of the game, and Marcy and I were at the Musee d’Orsay looking at Monets and Van Goghs (kids were asleep at home). As I’m trying to figure out the difference between impressionism and colonialism, I turn to my left and five feet from me is the OU Head Coach, Lon Kruger. Immediately I thought, “Vincent Van Who?” I walked over to him like an 8th grader about to ask his crush for a date to the dance. Once I told him I was a huge fan, and that I knew the difference between Blake Griffin and Taylor Griffin, he was incredibly nice and accommodating. I told him about our ATW trip, and he was genuinely interested (or at least a heck of a faker). I told him we’d all be at the game that night, and he told us to come early and meet the team, get pics, etc. Boy did we ever.
After an exhaustive Google search to locate the time and place of the game (believe it or not, the Sooners visit was not exactly the water cooler talk around Paris), we took two trains and 20 metro stops to a gymnasium about the size of your typical middle school rec center. We walked in and saw a bunch of French guys with 5 day beards lazily jacking up 3s. I swear one of them was smoking a cigarette. After about 10 minutes, somebody put up on the digital scoreboard, “Welcome to the Sooners of de Oklahoma Universitee”. Then I knew we had the right place. We grabbed four seats on the front row (two feet from the court) and waited, hoping we wouldn’t get flicked with ashes from the Euro shooting guard.
A few minutes later, the team started filing in. Luckily I had thought to bring my OU cap on the trip, otherwise I would have looked like just another French shmoe. The cool thing is, apparently Coach Kruger told the team we were coming, because ALL of them came up to us to greet us, and several of them asked about our five month trip and where we were going. As I told him about where we were going, Buddy Hield (one of the nicest kids and best players on the team), kept saying over and over “Big time… big time…. big time…. big time.” Big time indeed. We were the only OU fans there (and we were LOUD), and I can’t tell you how great they made us feel that we were there. OU’s strength coach and former player Joseph Szendrei (YoYo) offered us tix behind the bench for the OU-UT game in January. You can bet we’re looking forward to that.
Needless to say, all of us were sky high. The game was almost secondary, as we won by 40, and it wasn’t that close. We looked great and I think we’re going to have a great season and be fun to watch this year, but unfortunately I think that me, Zack, and any three other guys from my Try Harders softball team might have been able to take these French guys to OT. Just kidding. Kind of.
The Sports Information Director also took a video of the four of us, and interviewed us about our visit. Click the link for the article and the video… it’s pretty cool.
http://www.soonersports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=31000&ATCLID=209140418
Finally, this morning I woke up, and got a text from my buddy Greg who lives in Norman. It read, “You made the news!!!!” And he sent me a link from one of the local stations featuring the infamous sportscaster Bob Barry Jr. mentioning “The Carpenter Family from Oklahoma (?) being at the game” (of course he had to get it wrong), along with a short video. Hilarious! I won’t include that here, but let me know if you want me to email it to you,or any of the 100 other pictures we took with the team. Anyway, a fabulous night that we could have never planned, but that worked out great. We’ll never forget it.
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