BYU-Utah: The Way They Were

TOM CHAMBERS, NEWS HOUND

A visit with Doug Fabrizio on KUER, last week, got me thinking of memorable BYU-Utah games. There were a lot of them: Beck-to-Harline, Scott Mitchell beats the Cougs, Hall-to-Collie, Staley down the sidelines, Doman’s dive, the Flaming Kaneshiro, Ratliff to the rescue, McMahon goes scoreboard, Popcorn’s long return, Erroll Tucker’s snow run….
But maybe the most memorable for me was the 1993 game — and I wasn’t there. I was in New York for a Jazz game against the Knicks. I had come down the hotel elevator in the late afternoon just as the Jazz were assembling in the lobby to catch the team bus to Madison Square Garden. Tom Chambers — not normally an excitable (or friendly) guy, especially with reporters — said, “Did you hear Utah beat BYU?”
I waited for the punchline.
After a long, fairly stupid pause, I said: “No.”
“Thirty-four, thirty-one,” said Chambers.
“Noooo way,” I said.
This was shortly after “Wayne’s World” had been released, but he actually didn’t say, “Way!”
What he did say was, “Yes, Utah beat BYU.”
Clever guy that I am, I said, “Wow.”
Soon Karl Malone joined in, as did several other players. It surprised me how interested the Jazz players were in the football game. Some, such as Malone, worked out at Rice-Eccles Stadium in the off-season. Chambers had played at Utah. There seemed to be pretty strong pro-Utah sentiment on the team.
Andy Toolson (former BYU player) might have been able to balance it out, but by that time he was no longer with the Jazz.
Anyway, the disbelief and distance combined to make the 1993 BYU-Utah game one of the more memorable in my career, though I didn’t see a single play.
All I saw was the reaction.
By the way, the Jazz won that day, too, 86-72.