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."
There's a special connection people feel for this university, a connection that doesn't have anything to do with whether the football team is winning or losing, or even playing. It's a connection that makes them declare their love for WSU in ways both odd and public. They drive hundreds of miles to get a flag on TV. They paint a new car in Cougar colors. They plant several hundred pounds of cougar-shaped concrete in their yard. They cover an airplane in crimson and grey to proclaim WSU from the sky.
"I'm almost embarrassed," says veterinarian and pilot Kim Nicholas, laughing. "It's not like I'm a crackpot.".......
