Football season is almost here and Tiger fans are ready to Drink Up! There's only one place to get set for Mizzou game day every week this season. Macadoodles does tailgating like nobody else. Get your crew ready to watch the Tigers take on the SEC in Eli Drinkwitz's first full season with a stop at Macadoodles on your way to Faurot Field. Whether it's beer, wine or spirits you're looking for, Macadoodles will make your tailgate the pre-game place to be in Columbia this season. Who does tailgating like nobody else? Macadoodles does.
Every week, PowerMizzou.com publisher Gabe DeArmond answers questions from Tiger fans in the mailbag. This format allows for a more expansive answer than a message board post. Keep your eye out each week to submit your question for the mailbag or send them to powermizzou@gmail.com. On to this week's inquiries.
Kwho13 asks: If you have 24 hours in some weird universe, you can pick a day full of any sporting event.. say Royals WS from midnight-3am, chiefs Super Bowl from 3-6am and so on.Any sporting event, worldwide, 24 hours.What is your dream 24?
GD: This is a great question. I could fill a full 24 with Chiefs games or with the Royals 2015 playoff run alone, but I'm going to try to spread it out and pick one game from most of the sports I watch or follow.
We'll start with the 2014 AL Wild Card game, which is the best sporting event I've ever seen live and likely will remain that way forever. There ended up being bigger games for the Royals in that two year run, but this game is still individually the best. And I maintain none of the rest of it happens without this game.
Next we go to the Chiefs comeback from 24-0 down to the Texans in the 2019 playoffs. I was already prepared for the offseason. Even texted some people that at least I could watch the rest of the game without hanging on every play because they'd ended the suspense so quickly. And the game was over at halftime. Just not the way we thought.
We'll stay football here. The easy pick would probably be Armageddon at Arrowhead in 2007, but just sheerly for the actual game, there have been quite a few better ones. There wasn't really much drama in this one until the last couple of minutes. So instead of that, I'll go with the 2010 win over Oklahoma. I'll admit, this one is as much about the whole day, from Game Day through the post-game euphoria at Faurot, but it was also a pretty damn good game.
Moving on to Mizzou basketball, man there are a lot of candidates here. I'd probably pick the two games against Kansas in 2012 as a matched set. I've always said that if you didn't have a rooting interest (or really even if you did) that was as good as college sports could be. Those two games had absolutely everything. Runner-up would be Corey Tate beating the previously unbeaten and No. 1 Jayhawks in 1998.
That gets me to about 16 hours of viewing, so I've got eight left. I've got to put a golf tournament in here. There are three rounds of golf I've watched in my life that stick out above all the rest. The 2009 British Open final round is the most invested I've ever been in a round of golf, but I can only watch the first 17 holes because I don't want to see Tom Watson's second shot land a foot too far and bounce over the green on 18. The 1999 U.S. Open in which Payne Stewart outdueled Phil Mickelson months before Stewart's death is one of my favorite golf rounds ever. And that would be the choice if it weren't for the 2019 Masters. Watching the temporary resurrection of Tiger Woods was the most fun I've ever had watching golf. One of the greatest sports stories of my lifetime.
So if we give the Masters five hours, I've got three hours left. That means I'm picking a wild card event here. This is the hardest pick because it's the last one and it means I'm leaving something out that should absolutely be on the list. In reality, we all know what I'd do is just cue up three hours of Patrick Mahomes highlights on YouTube, but I'm picking between two college basketball games here. I think two games stick out above everything else as the greatest single game I've ever watched. The runner-up is Villanova/Georgetown in the 1985 national championship game. It's the first title game I remember and it was absolutely historic. But the best single game in any sport (that I follow) in my lifetime has to be the regional final between Duke and Kentucky in 1992. I'd take three hours to watch that again.
Carnell75 asks: Who, in your time on the Mizzou beat , has been your most memorable interview? Your favorite interview? Lastly least favorite interview.. ( podcast, verbal, telephone all open)
GD: There are a few guys that have always stuck out. Sean Weatherspoon was a ball to talk too and so was William Moore. In hoops, Laurence Bowers was always one of the best and most thoughtful. But more than full interviews, what sticks out is just moments. Here are some of my favorites:
After Mike Anderson left, I got the final question in the press conference with the players. I asked "How do you reconcile the fact that your coach spent the last month telling us he was here for good and wanted to retire at Missouri and he just left for Arkansas?" Kim English, with a cold stare, popped his fist on the table, said "We reconcile by winning," stood up and walked out of the room. The 31-win season the next year was a hell of a follow up to the mic drop moment.
After the 2007 Cotton Bowl, I was talking to Lorenzo Williams. It had been his last game because he was a senior. But Missouri had a whole lot coming back next year and Williams told me he had told the underclassmen if they didn't win the national title the next year he was coming back to Columbia to burn all their houses down. I don't think he did it.
I'm not going to give you my least favorite interview (honestly I couldn't even pick one, there have been plenty of awful ones over the years). But one that has always stuck with me was when I covered Big 12 football media days when I was at KOMU. We ran the Larry Smith Show back then so one of the things they asked me to do was to get a few guys from other teams to do a quick promo for the show. Just a little five to ten second blurb. I asked Ricky Williams, who would win the Heisman Trophy that year, at the end of our interview if he could just say "This is Texas running back Ricky Williams and you're watching This Week in Mizzou Football with Larry Smith." He stopped and started about four times. He asked for the line again. He was obviously struggling. I told him not to worry about it. What I didn't obviously know at that time was the extreme social anxiety that Ricky had. It was really a peek behind that curtain that the big-time athletes have their own struggles and they're just college kids. Obviously at the time I didn't understand what was going on and just thought it was weird, but as more stories came out about Ricky over the years, it made a lot more sense. I've never forgotten that one.