Jay C. Upchurch

Happy 100th birthday, Oklahoma! There is certainly no shortage of deserving names on the who’s who list where the 46th state of the union is concerned. Near the top of that eclectic mix are the athletes and sports figures with Okie ties, who have impacted our state’s history with their various levels of notoriety and […]

The list of accomplishments Tommy McDonald realized as a college and professional football player is nothing less. Not only did he play his way into the College Football Hall of Fame during his days at the University of Oklahoma, but as an encore, McDonald fashioned a career in the National Football League splendid enough to […]

At no point in recent memory has any college football season produced so many jaw-dropping upsets, so much overall pandemonium in the polls and such a level of mass paranoia among high-profile programs hoping simply to survive another volatile week on the endangered species list. Whatever happened to the good ol’ days when two or […]

In his 21st full season on the PGA Tour, Scott Verplank has had a year to remember. Not only did the former Oklahoma State standout win the Byron Nelson, but he ended the year with 10 top-10 finishes and a career-best $3.1 million in earnings. Things really didn’t begin to click for the 43-year-old Dallas […]

Even before Oklahoma officially became a state on Nov. 16, 1907, teams from the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University were battling it out for gridiron supremacy. In fact, the first-ever meeting between the then-fledgling rivals occurred on the banks of Cottonwood Creek, near the state’s original capital city of Guthrie, on Nov. 5, […]

DENVER ” I could get used to this World Series champions stuff. It’s seriously cool. Used to be, I began each spring with renewed optimism, maintained high hopes through the dog days of summer and eventually got some sort of reality check about mid-September. That’s usually about the time my Boston Red Sox went into […]

Steve Davis gets it. In this sports-crazed world, where fans pay outrageous ticket prices and line up around the block to get a close-up glimpse of their favorite players ” the bottom line is not lost on the former University of Oklahoma quarterback. “The fans are important. Without them, college athletics and professional sports would, […]

There may come a time when Robin Ventura decides he is ready to return to baseball in some capacity, but three years after officially ending his 16-season Major League playing career, he is doing just fine doing what he’s doing: nothing. OK, not exactly nothing. Ventura, 40, is keeping himself busy being a husband and […]

What gives with all the craziness in college football these days? Over the past two weekends, no less than eight ” count ’em, eight! ” top-10 teams have taken it on the chin. That kind of carnage is basically unheard of, but so far in 2007, upsets have been the rule rather than the exception. […]

Joe Tunnell dedicated 40 years of his life to high school football and to his players, and in the process, deeply etched his name into Oklahoma’s landscape. Prior to his retirement at the end of the 1999 season, Tunnell won more games as a head coach than any other Oklahoma prep coach before him. Although […]