 Al
Sorensen '89 proudly displays the concrete cougar in the front yard of
his Pullman home. "Once you're in the Cougar family," he says, "you're
always in the Cougar family." Photo by Hannelore Sudermann
Fall 2005
It was nearing midnight one Wednesday in October 2003, and Tom
Pounds ('81 Engr.) was up with his mother at his home in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, piecing together a giant flag with his
university logo. At dawn the next morning, he began a two-day drive
to the University of Texas campus in Austin to stand in a mass of
unruly football fans and wave the Washington State University
banner on a pole for a few minutes on TV.
Each fall football weekend, ESPN sends a crew to the biggest
game to present a live televised show prior to kick-off. On this
weekend, Pounds had a mission.
"I don't know why I did it," says the first Cougar to wave a WSU
flag on camera for an ESPN Gameday broadcast miles from where a WSU
game was being played. "School spirit?"
By driving 800 miles and displaying his school logo in the midst
of a screaming, waving crowd and on television, Pounds started a
national movement. Nobody asked him to. No one paid him. And close
to no one knew about it.
"Here I was, 45 in the midst of a bunch of 20-something kids,"
says the electrical engineer. "I got funny looks, and people swore
at me."
Pounds didn't care that WSU had nothing to do with that Saturday
game between Texas and Kansas State. "It was just something fun to
do," he says. "I'm always up for something unique."
Cougar fans around the country noticed the WSU flag and wondered
why they were seeing it on a broadcast from Texas on a day the
Cougars were playing in Pullman.
Brent Schwartz, a student at Northwestern College in St. Paul,
Minnesota, was taken with the idea. Two weeks after Pounds's
display, the younger Cougar fan drove 250 miles to wave the flag
during the broadcast for a game in Madison, Wisconsin. That
weekend, the Cougars were playing in Palo Alto.
Then John Bley, whose father Johnny was captain of the
Washington State College football team in 1935, volunteered his
daughter to take that same flag and wave it during the next
broadcast in Bowling Green, Ohio. The Cougs were playing Oregon
State in Pullman.
"My dad had died a year before," says Bley, of Olympia. "I
called my daughter up and said, 'This is a goofy idea, but college
kids like to do goofy things.'"
From there it snowballed, as the flag that Pounds made was
Fed-Ex-ed around the country for Gameday events. The banner didn't
make it to every single broadcast in 2003, but by 2004, a cadre of
volunteers was eager to drive hundreds of miles at their own
expense to wave the flag in the background of every broadcast. It
was all voluntary and all informal-a thankless duty, since the
flag-wavers were never visible on camera. "When you consider the
show is an hour and a half, with commercials, close-ups, and taped
segments, the actual live time on the air with a crowd shot is
actually only five minutes," says Pounds. "It's only then that you
hoist the flag and you wave it like crazy."
Why did they do it? "You're trying to explain the
unexplainable," says Bley. "There's just something that seems
extremely unique about the experience at Washington State and
Cougar football. Maybe it has something to do with the location [of
the school], or a team that continues to confound. The fans get
attracted to that, and they do extraordinary things."
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