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Independence Day Arrives for Pinkel Every April
Published: 11/29/2007 4:30 PM
Last Modified: 11/29/2007 4:30 PM

Missouri beat writer Graham Watson was nice enough to ask me to write a guest blog for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and I thought I would be lazy and reprint it here instead of coming up with an original thought.
Question: Is it plagiarism if I Xerox my own blog? Perhaps. John Fogerty, as a solo singer, was once sued for sounding too much like Creedence Clearwater Revival, never mind that he was once the lead singer for the band.
Anyhow, here's the guest blog:

Want to know how big Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel is these days?
People celebrate his birthday (April 27) in Togo and Sierra Leone every year, although it also could have something to do with the fact that April 27 happens to be Independence Day in Togo and Sierra Leone.
FYI, Pinkel was born two years after comic strip character Beetle Bailey was born. Beetle Bailey made his first newspaper appearance in 1950.
And why is that pertinent information? There is a statue of Beetle Bailey on Missouri’s campus. My father-in-law is Bill Boillot, a Mizzou alum who lives in Camdenton. He gave me a quick campus tour and said the Beetle Bailey statue was once located next to a famous student hangout that burned to the ground. And, of course, he pointed out that Beetle Bailey was created by cartoonist Mort Walker, who attended Mizzou.
Guess who deserves a statue next to Beetle Bailey? Pinkel.
Pinkel should be immortalized in bronze because he has taken a program that some view as a longtime underachiever to the top spot in the national polls. The Tigers are close enough to a national championship that, for once, they can tell you BCS stands for something else besides Basketball Coming Soon.
Missouri was mediocre in football for an eon despite the luxury of being the only Division I-A football school in the state. You think Alabama, Florida or California would like that kind of edge?
Somehow, Missouri didn’t capitalize on its Lone Ranger status. Former Oklahoma State coach Pat Jones has a new book out in which he recounts tales from the Big Eight era and said this about the circa-1979 Tigers: “When they took the field to warm up, you could have put crimson and cream or red and white on them and they would have looked every bit as good as Oklahoma or Nebraska.” And yet Mizzou did not perform on game days like the Big Reds.
Incidentally, Jones is one of the all-time entertaining good-guy coaches and probably would be out of place in the coaching profession nowadays, since many coaches act as if they have been taking diplomacy lessons from Hugo Chavez. Incidentally, I am pleased to hear the Missouri media believes Pinkel has gotten much better to deal with over the years. He’s one of my favorite coaches to listen to during the Big 12’s weekly teleconference. Karma goes a long way, folks.
Back to Pat Jones for a second: He tells great stories in his new job as a sports talk show host in Tulsa (this is a man who once said the University of Tulsa’s old locker room smelled like a “wet dog”) and you should buy his book, but the guy who authored it with him is a complete hack who probably reads Spider-Man comics and is such a nerd that he named his son (Kal) after Superman. Trust me on that one.
Jones predicted Missouri would flex a skill position advantage and beat Kansas last week. He was right. The Tigers have so many weapons of mass production that George Bush is considering deploying troops to Columbia. But do the Tigers have enough firepower to beat Oklahoma on a neutral field?
I don’t pick games with my head or my heart because both are flawed. In our weekly Tulsa World picks contest, I crunch some numbers (points fared, points allowed, etc.) and come up with some sort of math-based prediction. I don’t mind math, just so long as you don’t mix it with the alphabet. That’s just unnatural, and you can even tell it to the cretins who hug algebra books. Anyhow, the number-crunching result in regard to the Big 12 championship game looks something like this: Oklahoma 34, Missouri 30.
Las Vegas favors the Sooners by three. I wish all of us could be as good at our jobs as Las Vegas oddsmakers are at their jobs. A replica of New York City, a pyramid and an Eiffel Tower were built in Vegas thanks to the many people who thought they were smart enough to beat the dealers, one-armed bandits and oddsmakers who reside there. Use my picks to wager on games and perhaps you could afford to build a roadside Port-a-John.
But this guest blog is not about anyone or anything named John. It’s about Gary Pinkel, a man who shares a birthday with Ace Frehley, Jack Klugman and Casey Kasem.
Regardless of whether Pinkel wins or loses on Saturday night, people will be partying in the streets of Togo and Sierra Leone on April 27. Let’s make that the deadline for whoever is in charge of constructing the Pinkel statue.




Reader Comments 1 Total
Fred Dunn (5 years ago)
I disagree about Pinkel's birthday significance. My birthday is Dec. 26 and people often tell me that I missed Christmas. My standard reply is "No, I didn't; I was born on the second day of Christmas and my birthday is celebrated in six countries." I did forget to mention the two principalities.
Gary Pinkel is still running second, Independence Day or not!
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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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