PASADENA, Calif. –A scruffy man walks into a saloon.
“Bartender, a bourbon, please,” the man says.
“Sure thing, partner.”
They sit in silence for a while as the man stares at his drink. There is nobody else in the establishment.
“Say, anything wrong, partner?” the bartender asks after he can’t take any more silence.
“It’s this Wild West, my good man. It’s got me down.”
Another pause.
“Why’s that?” the bartender asks.
“Well, there was another shoot-out Saturday, down here at that dang-nabbed Rose Bowl. And nobody even took notice. Back East, they don’t care about all the shoot-outs we have out here. Dang.”
“Yeah, I guess,” the bartender nods, hoping the conversation ends there.
“I mean, those kids were trading shots like they were cattle rustlers sitting around a camp fire with their flasks. They were shooting quicker than Billy the Kid, big long shots that went a great many miles but still found their mark.”
“Yep, it’s true.”
“Then there was that big shoot-out up in Husky territory. That Jason Johnson kid gave it his best, you know, but he fell in the end.”
The two sit in silence for a while.
“Then there was that shoot-out across the way from the Rose Bowl, right down there in Los Angeles. I heard the California team got robbed in that one. They made all the right shots, but they still didn’t make it out of that Coliseum alive. Dang it all.
“See, it seems to me that everyone with their newspapers, and their highfalutin’ Internet, and their fancy-pants television, all them people wanted to talk about was some boring town meetings in Texas and Florida and other such places. Dang it, when are they gonna turn those television cameras this-a-way? Out west is where all the action is. Out west is where people are losing their lives every danged Saturday. When are they gonna give the West Coast the respect it deserves?”
“I, uh, dunno, I guess,” the bartender said, flustered by the entrance of a new gentleman into the bar.
This new gentleman is well-dressed. He carries a cane, the top of which is polished to shine like a mirror, and leads a pit bull by a leash with the other hand. The well-dressed gentleman sits at the other end of the bar from the scruffy man, who still hasn’t touched his whiskey.
“Danged right-coasters,” the scruffy man says as the gentleman orders a drink.
“What was that?” the gentleman asks.
“You heard what I said,” the scruffy man says. “You easterners are all the same, with your fancy canes and fancy bulldogs, coming in here like you own the West Coast.”
“Sir, I will have you know that back east we have only the finest of everything.”
“Yeah? Give me a shoot-out over a trench war any day, even if it means we have to sacrifice some teams. Give me a thriller over any kind of Saturday chess match.”
“Sir, let me ask you, what do you prove when you win a shoot-out? Hooray — you are a rag-tag bunch of shooters that can beat up on other rag-tag bunches of shooters! You can get lucky!”
“Ahh, but what about a team of shooters like Oregon? What about a so-called ‘rag-tag bunch’ that can win shoot-out after shoot-out? That can win shoot-outs even when they look like they should lose, when the casualty list grows, when the other bunch seems to control the advantage? What of that?”
“No rag-tag bunch will ever be able to compete with the trench-warfare style of East Coast bunches.”
“Yes, that may be, but we won’t know until the events of Jan. 1. Until then, I’ll take my shoot-outs any day, even if they reek with danger and the possibility of failure.”
“Nothing will ever be more fun to watch.”
With that, the man leaves a dollar for the bourbon, puts on his coat and waltzes out the door, surely heading for a better life than the gentleman, a spicier life than that boring, other, East Coast existence.
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