I don’t know if you were paying attention, but there was a big football game this weekend called the Salt Bowl. It’s a 37-year tradition of a contest between rivals the Benton Panthers and the Bryant Hornets. You may have heard me say before that I live in Benton, but my kids go to Bryant schools.

This presents all kinds of conflicts, but it can be beneficial too. In the case of the Salt Bowl, it meant that I could hang out with people from either side. I do hate to exclude people from friendship based on the athletic skills of a few high school kids.

For a few years, I sat on the Benton side, because a cousin of mine, Blake Poole, was a running back on the team. My son, Ian, was at Bryant, and didn’t care for football as much as guitars, so it was okay for me to dress in maroon. Blake graduated in 2007 and I realized that I was just rooting for him, not the team.

Although Ian wasn’t into football, he was on the Cross Country and Track teams. In the 9th grade, he ran for the Hornets in that bold royal blue. Then over the summer, we moved to the next neighborhood and decided we were darn close to Benton High School so he might as well go there. My daughter, Gracie, wasn’t school age just yet. So for a year, Ian was a Panther and we bought clothes in maroon.

I don’t know if it was the age of 15, or if it was something in the water, but the boy went crazy in his sophomore year. I will spare you (and him) the story, and just say he re-enrolled at Bryant for 11th grade, and is there as a senior now. I didn’t intend to talk about my son’s high school career, except to reiterate that we are Hornthers through and through.

Because of our designer cross-breeding, I was able to take someone up on an offer to bet on the Salt Bowl… against… Benton. [insert dramatic orchestra music here]

See, I live in Benton, and I’m tight with the community here, so I will probably get a lot of flack when my fellow Bentonites read this. But the fact remains: a bet for Bryant to win a football game against Benton is a safe one.
This started with a few of my e-friends. Your what? I just made that up. They are people that I’ve met in various places online. Two of these people are Jason Tolbert, founder of TolbertReport.com, and Natalie Ghidotti, owner of Ghidotti Communications, and President of the Arkansas chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. They believed in their Panthers.

Natalie posted in a Twitter message “I have faith that the Panthers will make us proud tonight!”

I had recently seen Jordan Johnson, the son of former State Representative Janet Johnson of Bryant, at a Rotary meeting, and you know he was for Bryant, right? Even though he is confident in the Hornets, he decided to hedge his bet by getting me on his side. I did not have a problem with that, knowing the past few Salt Bowls had favored Bryant.

Late in the afternoon before the game, Jordan asked me about an informal Twitter and Facebook poll I was running. “Which team is favored to win the Salt Bowl?”

Jason chimed in, “Yes, we need an offical point spread here. Cotham's in the City is on the line.”

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that the bet was lunch in Little Rock, where everybody works, plus something extra that either Jordan or Jason tacked on – I’m not sure. I tweeted back to all involved, that if things went according to poll, it was not looking good for the Panthers.

Game time came, and I had a unique view, since Jim Landers was to do a halftime interview me and “Angry” Patrick Beam, as board members of Within REACH, about the upcoming benefit festival, SalineOWeen. (See SalineOWeen.com)

I had never been in the press booth before, and it was cool. Not just the aerial view of the game, but it was literally cool, because of the air conditioning, while everyone else was sweating it out in the stands.

I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to the game action because I was looking around and thinking about what I was going to say in the interview. I had a stack of cards in front of me that told all about SalineOWeen, except for one thing. I had handed out hundreds of them before someone noticed that I forgot to include that the event would be held at the Saline County Fairgrounds. Duh. Well, maybe that will be the thing to make people curious enough to go to the website.

Hearing the crowd getting louder, I looked up at the scoreboard. Bryant had run one in. Minutes later, a second touchdown was made by the Hornets. I was feeling pretty good and tweeted that I was hungry for some Cotham’s. This info showed up on Twitter and Facebook, and the replies started to come in with people wanting to know the score, how many people were present, and the weather, since the forecast said it just might rain. I was just thinking of that famous hubcap burger at Cotham’s.

At halftime, the score was 38-0, and I heard from a non-official source that there were 26,000 people there. Patrick and I did our interview, and the game started back up. I was exhausted and wanted to go home, but having to trudge through the crowd to the other side of the stadium, I decided to pass out as many more SalineOWeen cards as I could, explaining with every card that it’s going to be at the Saline County Fairgrounds, and I left that part out.

Finally back to the car, the game was well into the second half. By the time I got through a burger drive-through (I was hungry for a hubcap, but Rally’s would do) Jim Landers was saying on KEWI 690 that Bryant had received the trophy again this year. The final score was 38-7. I looked at Twitter, and there was a message from Jordan. It was something to the effect that he and I were looking forward to Cotham’s, courtesy of Natalie and Jason. And he mentioned the other thing that was tacked on to the bet: “Be sure to wear blue.”


This column by Shelli Russell published in the Benton Courier on August 16, 2009.
See more of Shelli's columns here.