Published: September 05, 2008 10:31 pm      

COLUMN: The calm before the storm

GREENVILLE, N.C. — So this is the calm before the storm.

Seems as though we have a bowl for everything, so might as well call this matchup between West Virginia and East Carolina “The Postal Bowl.”

You know, “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night, etc., etc.”

Hannah may make it wet and breezy, if 50 mph winds can be called “breezy,” but, hey, this is football. The worse the weather, the more one looks forward to the game, for something goofy is sure to happen.

Bad weather and football go together like Britney Spears and motherhood, like peanut butter and catfish sandwiches, like John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

You want something to remember, play in a hurricane or the remnants thereof.

West Virginia has a history here. They recently played at Maryland and Central Florida in the wake of hurricanes, electricity still off in areas of town, trees and signs scattered everywhere. And, of course, their game with South Florida a couple of years back was postponed due to a hurricane.

But playing in the debris of a hurricane is not the same as playing while the local greenery is being turned into debris. That is the stuff of which legends are made.

Think Lee Corso doesn’t remember one particular night when the weather turned bad. The former Indiana coach turned into a poor man’s Dick Vitale in football, was doing a game between Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech at Lane Field in Blacksburg, Va., when a bolt of lightning roared out of the sky and struck a car in the parking lot.

The thunderstorm was so violent that the game had to be postponed. Imagine Corso’s surprise when, after the game, went to the parking lot to learn it was his rental car that had been zapped.

“It started up, and he drove it a little bit before it just died, and he realized it was his car that got hit,” Chris Fowler, GameDay’s host, said after the incident. “Lee got out, hitched a ride with some fans, and the car-rental people brought him a new car.”

Seems like Blacksburg is foul weather capital of the world. In 2003 the remnants of Hurricane Isabel came roaring through on a Tech-Texas A&M game and according to reports that day as the turkey legs became complete soaked.

ESPN.com reported that nothing seemed to bother Hokie fans.

“I was here in 1995 when it was 20-below and the wind blowing 30 miles an hour,” Bradley McCall, 25, an insurance salesman from Roanoke who had missed only two games in 10 years said then. “When the Hokies are playing, I’ll be here no matter what.”

And then there was Lee Wagstaff, who ran a dairy farm in Clarksville, about 100 miles away on the North Carolina border, leaving 250 head of cattle and his wife deep in Isabel's path.

“My wife's been calling me on the cell phone all day,” Wagstaff, 43, said with an embarrassed laugh. “The power’s been off.”

Why wasn’t Wagstaff at home protecting his farm?

“Hey, it’s a Tech ballgame, man!”

As long as they’ve had bad weather, they’ve played football. It’s said that Noah was on his ark with two of every kind of animal, but the truth is there was only one goat and one mule. Army and Navy were playing that day and their mascots wouldn’t miss the game.

The weather has managed to take any number of football games and turn them into “instant classics” simply because of the conditions in which they were played.

Think of an NFL championship game and the battle between Dallas and Green Bay on “the frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field comes to mind. Minus-13 degrees, the underground field heating system frozen, the surface a sheet of ice and Bart Starr sneaks into the end zone to create the Packers’ mystique.

Dec. 13, 1982, Foxboro, Mass., snow falling, New England and Miami battling scoreless until 4:45 is left. The Patriots are about to kick a field goal when Mark Henderson, 24, on leave from Norfolk State Prison on a work-release program, cleared a path with his snowplow for kicker John Smith to kick his game-winning 23-yard field in what has come to be known as “The Snowplow Game”

You can go back as far as you want in history to find how weather tested the creativity of a football coach.

In 1934, at the Polo Grounds where the field was frozen and had turned into a skating rink as the New York Giants and Chicago Bears played for the NFL championship, the Giants’ coach Steve Owens had a brainstorm, if the word storm can be used here.

He sent equipment manager Abe Cohen off to purchase sneakers to give his team better traction than the tradition cleats did on the frozen field. The Giants were facing a Chicago team that had won 13 straight and had gone 33 games without a loss, outscoring their opponents 286-86 along the way.

But facing a team that had good footing, they could not stop the Giants, who scored 27 fourth-quarter points and won, 30-13, in “The Sneaker Bowl.”

Snow, ice … ah, rain, and isn’t it nice to know that this one involved the aptly named Bob Waterfield.

In 1949 the Rams were one of football’s most prolific passing teams but the weather grounded them as the Philadelphia Eagles tossed a 14-0 shutout.

We could go on forever. ... Gale Sayers scoring six touchdowns in the mud, Leon Lett touching a blocked kick during a Thanksgiving Day snowstorm that cost the Dallas Cowboys a victory or fog rolling in off Lake Michigan and the Bears and Eagles played on.

And finally there was the unforgettable meeting between Michigan and Ohio State in a driving snowstorm in Columbus, a storm that took offense out of football. It became so absurd that the Buckeyes’ Vic Janowicz, a Heisman Trophy winner, punted an incredible 21 times for 685 yards as Michigan won, 9-3.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.