And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

...that there is an old adage to the effect that you should be careful what you wish for, because the wish may come true.
Before Iowa's game with Michigan State for the Big 10 (or 12, or 14) conference football championship, I had mixed emotions. A win would mean a national championship title semi-final game. But a loss, if in a close game, should mean a No. 5 ranking and a trip to the Rose Bowl. And I am old enough to remember when the Rose Bowl, the Granddaddy of them All, was the goal for Big 10 teams.
So when that happened, I was really sort of pleased.
Until I saw the opponent was going to be Stanford.
Stanford seems to have a high scoring team, although they did lose to Northwestern, a team Iowa beat.
I find it hard to equate Stanford with great football. I saw two games in Stanford's sunken field. One opponent was Rice, and I don't remember the other, but it may have been another Texas school. I was amused at the stories year after year in the San Francisco papers about "the BIG GAME" every fall between Stanford and nearby California. It rarely meant anything outside the area, sort of like most Iowa-Iowa State games, I suppose.
An Iowa team beat California easily in the Jan. 1, 1959 game, while I was aboard the aircraft carrier in the Pacific. But I noticed they would meet again in Berkeley that fall, so joined the "feed a football player for a month" I-club, and secured tickets that way, and Iowa beat Cal with equal ease that day.
Thus inspired, my friend from Wisconsin and I went to Pasadena for the 1960 Rose Bowl. Enjoyed the parade even though it started with a sub-freezing temperature, and the pre-game build-up. But not the game, which Wisconsin lost big.
Iowa has lost twice in the Rose Bowl, the last in 1991, the last time an Iowa team played there.
A New York City tabloid, the day after the Islamic terrorists killed those 14 people in San Bernardino, CA, made fun of Christians for praying, saying God can't help. Rekha Basu, in Sunday's Des Moines Register, had a Hillary Clinton moment when she asked "what difference does it make" if they were Islamic. Which ignores the cause of the more than 60 acts of terrorism committed in the name of that religion in recent years.
In both cases, their answer was gun control.
This is being written on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, 1941, the "date that will live in infamy" cited by FDR that night. President Obama spoke to the nation last night about the California tragedy. I could not help but feel that he would have blamed Pearl Harbor on Republicans, climate change, and lack of gun control, as he did the California murders, and not radical national or religious actions.
It's a different world.