Old guys and their memories. Why don’t they just give it a rest?

Because we think our memories are interesting. That’s why. So we just throw some stuff out there, see if anyone cares, and if they don’t, well, go find something else to do, young Mr. Whippersnapper.

Thinking, tonight, about two events only a few months apart … three decades ago. Wow.

The 1980 Masters. (The 2010 version ended today.)

The 1979 Rams-Cowboys playoff game in Irving, Texas.

And why am I thinking of these, you ask?

Pull up a chair, set a spell, and let me do some recollectin’ …

The 1980 Masters was the one and only Masters I covered. It may have been the only golf tournament I covered from start to finish.

It was a fluky thing. I believe I have written on this blog, maybe two years ago, how I apologize to everyone who truly cares about “a tradition like no other”, or whatever … because I haven’t golfed in more than three decades. I barely care about the game. And, yes, I was at Augusta National for most of a week.

To all those people who would do almost anything to see the Masters at Augusta National, my apologies for not appreciating it sufficiently. Or at all. Sorry.

I was there during a hectic, three-month period when I was covering national stories for Gannett News Service. I had April through June, 1980. The Masters is in April. So there I was, with a last-minute credential (thanks, Wayne Sargent!). In May, I would do the Indy 500 and Kentucky Derby. I skipped the U.S. Open in June, though, and I don’t remember how that worked. I’m sure I didn’t mind. At all.

Augusta National … The place is green. Lots and lots of greenery. Except when broken up by blooming flowers. Verdant. But is looking at a nice lawn enough to keep a person occupied for five or six days? It wasn’t, for me.

I walked to Amen Corner and looked around. But I did not walk the course, neither before or during, because I was working in the press room.

The event and the venue was fusty and fussy, in my memory. It wasn’t clear to me where I was allowed to walk. Or stand. Or sit. Very strict rules about these things. Georgia (or that golf course, anyway) was like nowhere I’d ever been. As if it were out of some “Gone with the Wind” time capsule. It could have been 1880.

That big white clubhouse and the black servants and white club members … it made me uncomfortable. Way too antebellum. And that is back when the caddies were all black guys, too. Augusta National caddies; the Masters didn’t allow golfers to use their own guys. They had to hook up with these old black guys in white jumpsuits.

Yes. Curious.

Anyway, covering golf, if you do it like it’s supposed to be done (from when the first guy tees off to when the last guy completes his round) … makes for very long days. Like, 10-12 hours. For me, it dragged. Yes, it did. I had never covered a golf tournament, and I was amazed at how it all seemed to drag. I was relieved when it was finally over and Seve Ballesteros had won. I remember writing that he was golf’s next great player. Which he was … kind of.

I also remember barbecue beef sandwiches in the press cafeteria, picking up dinner at a Hardee’s (pretty much a Southern thing, back then) and staying, all alone, in the enormous home of a doctor who rented out his place during the week. (How much did that cost?!?) I saw the owner the day I left and we talked politics. Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter? Anyway, this is back when print news organizations spent money.

I have more vivid memories of another famous sports site in the news today. Texas Stadium.

Five months before the 1980 Masters, I was in Texas Stadium for the Los Angeles Rams’ playoff game with the Dallas Cowboys. December 30, 1979.

I actually had first been in the stadium a few months earlier. Back on Oct. 14, when the Rams got smacked around by the Cowboys in the seventh game of the season, 30-6.

That was when I first was impressed by Texas Stadium, because it was eight years old … but it was still cutting-edge.

I believe that the Cowboys, and that stadium, set the standard for the football palaces that were to take over the game within a few decades.

In 1979, remember, many NFL teams still played in “multi-purpose” stadiums, those horrid, round, bagel-shaped buildings that were bad for baseball and worse for football. Only one is still in use, the sad ol’ Oakland Coliseum. But back then, sheesh, most NFL teams played in yards they shared with baseball clubs — in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Houston …

The Cowboys, however, had opened this football-only Taj Mahal in 1971. And to go inside it was to look into the future. (I had been covering the Rams for three seasons, but most of the time I was in the L.A. Coliseum, which was already old and creaky back then.)

Texas Stadium was out in the middle of nowhere,  about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. Near DFW (Which was sort of an Eighth Wonder of the World as an airport.)

I remember getting to the press-box level … and being blown away. There were individual boxes for special people! Their own little viewing rooms! (Eventually to be known as “luxury” boxes.) Dozens of them.

The interior was carpeted. Both the press box and the luxury boxes.

The press box was enormous and had amenities I had never seen — such as a tiny television, to watch replays, at every seat. No craning your neck to look at one 13-inch TV hanging from the ceiling six seats away. My own little color TV.

It was posh, is what it was. And it was open in 1971. By 1979, Giants Stadium was up, and so was the Superdome in New Orleans, and they were nice, too. But Texas Stadium somehow seemed sleeker. The first place where I really felt as if they were playing an NFL game in someone’s really big living room. It seemed almost sinful, it was so plush.

Great game, too. The Dec. 30 game. Rams up, 14-5. Roger Staubach threw a pair of touchdown passes, and the Cowboys led 19-14 in the fourth quarter. Then Vince Ferragamo, the air-head quarterback with the rifle arm, gunned a pass over the middle to Billy Waddy, a guy with great wheels and ping-pong paddles for hands. But Billy hung on to this one and sprinted in to score on a 50-yard play.

The Rams, heavy underdogs after going 9-7 in the regular season, held off Staubach and the Cowboys in the final minutes. On third down, he threw a pass that was caught by guard Herbert Scott — an illegal receiver. It would be the last pass Staubach threw as a pro that someone caught. On fourth down he passed incomplete — and then retired four months later, right there in Texas Stadium, I do believe. I was there for his retirement press conference … but was it at a hotel? Hmm. Anyway.

The locker rooms at Texas Stadium also were deluxe. I’d never seen anything like those, either. Big, expansive, well-lit. Again, this was in an era when most NFL teams were trying to make do with a baseball clubhouse, and it didn’t really work, 43 players, a dozen coaches and all that equipment.

Just a wonderful place to see a game. To cover a game. Oh, and the Cowboys PR crew typed up 20 pages of player quotes. I had never heard of such a thing. Almost too easy, really, to cover a game, at Texas Stadium.

And today … they blew it up.

Here is the video of it; go to the 5:00 mark to skip the pre-explosion fireworks show.

Watching this doesn’t exhilarate me. It makes me sad. There goes a bit of my life, imploding into rubble. Such a wonderful yard and bang, bang, bang … it’s gone.

I currently live in a city, Abu Dhabi, where the average lifespan of a building is maybe 25 years. The extreme heat and humidity, well,  they just rot out buildings here. They get all mildewy and nasty after a couple of decades, and down they come.

Texas Stadium, though, lasted nearly 40 years and probably could have used for another decade. But it was in the way, and I assume no one wanted to keep it up, and presumably the land is more valuable for something else … so they just … blew it up. After all, they have that even posher thing, Cowboy Stadium, that has replaced it.

So, Masters, Augusta National, Seve Ballesteros and “when is this gonna be over?!?”

Versus a football palace, a great game on my beat, a huge upset (Rams, 21-19) that led to the Super Bowl, three weeks later.

I remember the Texas Stadium event much more keenly. And watching the stadium go down today brings it all back.

Sigh.