I agree. That’s what gets me. OU has always had this black hat image, like we cheat. I hear it from ku fans all the time. Yet, all of these other programs with sustained success are cheating their asses off. KU are the biggest cheaters out there, along with UNC, Duke, Kentucky, etc.
It’s such hypocrisy.
KU had that one old guy on radio, Max "something" who was the consummate homer. When I was in school, OU had a rather centralized (OKC area mostly) radio network, so you couldn't get night games if you lived further away than Chickasha. So we'd try to find a KU or KSU network if OU was playing them (or the blowtorch KFAB out of Omaha for OU-Nebraska games). If we were playing KU, you'd have thought everyone who ever suited up for them was a "fine lad" (and you could say the same for the NU homers in football).
I don't mind a "homer" as long as they're honest. There was some talk that KU cut down the nets in the LNC when they played a first-round Big 8 tournament game there in '83. Then OU apparently did that after that OT win in Lawrence that clinched the regular season title. I wasn't in Oklahoma at the time, so I don't know about the first situation. But I did read that ol' Max flat out denied that KU's saintly team did such a thing in Norman, but it was the worst thing in history the next year in Lawrence.
The Kansas City Star put out some vicious anti-OU propaganda before the '84-85 season - I saw that personally when I found a copy of it. It was basically "lock the doors and hide the kids" when OU was coming to your gym. And one of those more local idiots, a guy named Chuck Woodling, took the occasion of Wayman Tisdale's death to trash him and the OU team all over again because of the situation in '84 up there.
I also remember my own brother coming back from the '85 league tournament up in KC saying, "I can't believe how much they all hate us up there..." Think maybe a very biased, KU-centric media had something to do with it?
As for Arizona, they had a local guy at their paper in '88 who had once worked in the Utah area (I saw some of his work at the UNM Library, when I was working and taking classes there). This guy was not only a big-time Wildcat homer, he was also blatantly dishonest about something that had to do with OU football once.
When the 1989 OU team was going to play in Tucson, he wrote a libel-a-day series that week that included his being so happy that "cheating" OU got hammered by the NCAA a few months earlier. And the big lie that he told about covering an OU football game had to do with an OU-Utah State game from 1974. I was at the game, so I know he was lying. OU destroyed them, but Switzer subbed early and often. He even went off on one of his walkons who called a timeout with OU on their five yard line and sent in Steve Davis to "take the knee." But this clown from Tucson claimed that Barry left his starters in almost the entire game to "run it up" - when it was nothing like that.
Footnote: same guy impugned the character of Billy and his team in 1990 when OU went out to play Arizona. It wasn't as blatant as how he trashed OU football, but it was typical of a media that had to have "good guys" and "bad guys."
