Adjacent News

It is a quiet cruelty, the way the language simply dissolves before it reaches the third tier of the grandstands. I stood in the press box at Jack Trice Stadium on Saturday, watching Morgan Scalley’s Utah defense clash against Jimmy Rogers’s Cyclones, and I noticed a terrifying absence. The vowels were simply not there. They had been devoured by the prairie gusts, leaving only the harsh, skeletal clatter of hard consonants scraping against the aluminum benches like dry corn husks in a November gale.

For three hours, we strained our ears to capture the full nomenclature of human endeavor, yet we received only truncated grunts and whistling diphthongs. Was it an administrative oversight by the athletic department? Had some budget committee in the lower basement of the administration building voted to lease fewer vowels for the conference opener, rationing the alphabet to preserve local electricity? I pressed my ear against the damp turf at halftime, listening for the lost echoes of syllables swallowed by the sod, but heard only the faint, mocking hum of distant combine harvesters.

In the fourth quarter, as the wind whipped off the nearby fields with the remorseless fury of a Greek tragedy penned by accountants, the scoreboard itself seemed to stutter. Names were reduced to mere breath. The referees approached the microphone not as arbiters of justice, but as monks whispering secrets into a tomb. A penalty was announced, though the crucial middle of the infraction vanished into the jet stream, leaving us to guess whether the crime was holding, murder, or simply existing too loudly near the sideline.

We return from Ames not with answers, but with a profound, aching emptiness in our throats. The games go on, of course. They always do. But they are played now in a dialect of wind and dust, where no one can quite finish a sentence, and the final whistle blows into a void that cares nothing for our grammar, our heritage, or our desperate, futile attempts to articulate the score.