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Sidelines
Kalani Simpson
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Elimimian won’t forget the whipping LaTech laid on the Warriors
SAY the words "Louisiana Tech" and Solomon Elimimian makes a sound. It's tough to find the words to describe the sound, but it's the sound of exhaling and eye-rolling and shoulders throwing and a jaw clenching. It is the sound Seinfeld made when he said "Newman!" It is the sound Homer Simpson made just as he was about to say "D'oh!"
"Man!" Elimimian said this week. "We've been talking about that all summer."
They have?
Louisiana Tech?
Really?
Even with the long trip, even with the exotic location, even with the constant reminder that the Bulldogs always have "athletes," even a week after 63-6, Tech doesn't seem to me like much to get worked up about. Yes, this game should be one to be underlined in ink on the schedule, for all the reasons above. But it isn't.
I would say this game has trap game, upset, ambush, written all over it. Except that it doesn't. The Bulldogs just don't give you much to worry about these days.
But of course I'm not Elimimian, who is still remembering 46-14, Oct. 8, 2005.
"They whipped our butt," he said.
"They just whipped our butt. That team won. They whipped our butt."
I'm sensing a theme here.
"That game just left a bad taste in our mouth," the Hawaii linebacker said. "I'm glad we get to go over there to Ruston."
The Ruston Chamber of Commerce should be all over a quote you don't hear too often. But Elimimian meant it in a different way.
And so this game might be more (and thus, with Hawaii at the top of its game, perhaps less) interesting than previously thought.
THE CALL CAME into the office the other day. Who is the only UH football player to have his number retired? A little surprising that people have already forgotten, considering all of the attention when Hawaii's first All-American (1935) just died in March. But it does give us an excuse to tell another story.
Tommy Kaulukukui was a humble man. But he always claimed that he had invented low-top football shoes.
His son Thomas Jr. and the other kids always rolled their eyes a little, shrugged it off. You know how when your dad tells you stories.
It went that everyone wore high-top shoes in those days, but Kaulukukui was so small they slowed him down. He took his baseball cleats to the cobbler, had the metal spikes taken out, had them set up for running on the football field.
"He approached the game in a very intelligent way," Thomas Jr. said.
Not long before Tommy Kaulukukui died, Thomas Jr. went to a dinner and talked story with a contemporary of his father's, Don Gedge. Gedge said he remembered how Tommy had always worn those funny low-top shoes.
Thomas Jr. had to laugh at that, when he recalled the moment.
"It was the first time I heard a corroborative story," he said.
FROM THE MAILBOX:
"Admitting (in Tuesday's column) you're an idiot first and then saying 'But if I don't go out of my way to stress that point I don't make that mistake,' makes you twice the idiot."
Comment: As long as the guy signs his e-mail "letzgobowz," he can call me anything he wants.