El Dorado, Hooten's Football Town of the Week

When Chad Hooten contacted me to interview for his television show on El Dorado football, I hesitantly agreed. I'm not hesitant to discuss the Wildcats and their success, I'm just not much of a public speaker. I nearly passed out when I had to give a presentation in college. I haven't gotten much better since. But, El Dorado football is a subject I can probably talk about in my sleep. Plus, Chad asked several times and has been more than gracious with us at the News-Times over the past few seasons. So ... I stepped in front of the camera. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the subject fully. It wasn't about El Dorado football. Hooten is doing a story on El Dorado being one of the top football towns in the state. Uh oh! Okay, it's not that I don't think El Dorado is a good football town. I just think it's a typical football town. Wildcat fans have shown to be fairly fair-weather when it comes to football. When the team is No. 1 in the state, the fans probably rank that high as well. I was amazed at the showing of purple a few years back when El Dorado played at Springdale Har Ber. The fans traveled in droves to Jonesboro and Fort Smith and even to Greenwood last year. Very few communities would make those trips the way El Dorado did. However, if the team isn't as good, the fan support can dip faster than the temperature in October. Even I was surprised last week, though, when the Wildcats drew one of their weaker crowds in recent memory. Chad Hooten had his camera ready to show the state one of the best football crowds around. Instead, he got a sparse contingent for a key conference matchup against rival Texarkana. It was embarrassing but only a little surprising. Even when the Wildcats were in the middle of their three-year run of championships, people would ask me, "are they going to win this week?" I'd say, "Probably. You coming to the game?" "No," they'd answer. "I'll wait until they play a good team." Perhaps spoiled is the word I'm looking for to describe the fans. It's not enough to have a good team. It has to be a championship team. Then, it's not enough to have a championship team, they have to be playing a great opponent. For the most part, that's typical of most communities in this state, especially at large schools. Fans are only as passionate as the team's record. Had I been better prepared, I would have said something like that to Hooten when he had the camera rolling. Actually, I probably would've declined the interview had I known it was about the fans instead of the team. Instead, I talked my way around it as best as I could with my limited public speaking skills. And, I didn't lie. El Dorado's fans are as good as most of the larger communities in the state. But as last week's crowd at Memorial Stadium showed, that's really not saying that much.