This story goes back a few years.... back when Lou Holtz was football coach at Arkansas. For those of you who do not know the geography of the state, it is more or less a square or rectangle with Little Rock in the center (great place to put a state capital) but the University is up in the Northwest corner of the state, one count shy of the very corner with Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri.
For those of you who have never traveled up Hiway 71 through the Boston Mountains prior to the new Interstate spur... it was a nightmare in those floppy-fendered Fords and Chevys through all the switch-back turns.
Well, back to Lou Holtz.... in a speech trying to explain what it was like trying to get out and recruit and otherwise do what coaches are supposed to do and living somewhere just beyond Tim-Buck-Too, he came up with this bit of prose: "Hell, it's 30 minutes to Little Rock by Long Distance!"
Explain that to the kid at Best Buy.
(I had not looked up the population figures and retail sales figures in a number of years. I left Arkansas about 50 years ago. Any day now those two or three counties of NW Arkansas where Walmart and Tyson and others have grown up will be a larger metro area than is Little Rock. How times have changed.)
For those of you who have never traveled up Hiway 71 through the Boston Mountains prior to the new Interstate spur... it was a nightmare in those floppy-fendered Fords and Chevys through all the switch-back turns.
Well, back to Lou Holtz.... in a speech trying to explain what it was like trying to get out and recruit and otherwise do what coaches are supposed to do and living somewhere just beyond Tim-Buck-Too, he came up with this bit of prose: "Hell, it's 30 minutes to Little Rock by Long Distance!"
Explain that to the kid at Best Buy.
(I had not looked up the population figures and retail sales figures in a number of years. I left Arkansas about 50 years ago. Any day now those two or three counties of NW Arkansas where Walmart and Tyson and others have grown up will be a larger metro area than is Little Rock. How times have changed.)