Texas Feminine Culture, Ritual of Football Explained
By JANNA ZEPP | Photos from FME News Service archives
Football season is upon us. I can’t explain the sport to you, in spite of my Texas heritage. It was never a religion in my home when I was growing up. But, I can explain some of the culture and ritual involved with attending football games.
For Texas women, a football game is more than a sport. It’s a chance to showcase ourselves.
Football season is an opportunity to show off your wardrobe and how well you accessorize. It’s a social event during which to forge feminine friendships. And it’s a real good place to swap gossip.
Whether it’s a high school or university game, you will see Texas women all decked out in their classy-casual finery. Every Hawkins High School football game to which I went, I never attended without my hair being perfect and having my lipstick on. Like my friends, I carried an arsenal of cosmetics in my purse for touch ups. To this day, I can draw my compact out of my handbag faster than a gunslinger can draw his pistol. You learn to be fast with the goods, lest you miss a play on the field.
At Austin College, we were pretty low-key at our football games. Saturday afternoon games in the late summer made it necessary to dress for comfort, but that didn’t mean we had to sacrifice style. My sorority and I attended in our jerseys and designer jeans. This was in the 1980s, so of course no hairdo was complete without a big bow that matched our Theta Sigma Chi jerseys. This showing of the “Greekness” was a prelude to spring rush. We only held rush in the spring at AC, so the fall was spent looking as good as possible to potential members. This is where we got the skinny on who was going to rush whom, what happened after the previous night’s party and which college professor was not getting tenure. We also got to eyeball rival sororities and what they were up to.
I went to work for Texas A&M University in the early 1990s. Attending football games was not a requirement, but I went. I mean, this is Aggie football after all. And the women were drop-dead gorgeous. Slim, long denim pencil skirts, English riding boots and Ralph Lauren turtlenecks, Dooney & Bourke handbags, designer sunglasses…the works. The women rooting for the opposing teams, if they were Texas schools, also were gorgeously attired. In 1991, it was the height of female football fashion.
The Texas-University of Oklahoma weekend was another big fashion event back in the 1980s. I don’t mean among the unwashed masses that descended on Dallas streets every October…no. I’m talking about expensive hotel suites with large screen televisions and catered eats. I went to one of these parties while still in college. My then-boyfriend’s parents sent out engraved invitations to the 1986 Red River Shootout soiree at the Fairmont Hotel. Attire: high casual in team colors. No kidding, folks; that was printed on the invitation.
I presume it is more casual now, as much of the 2000s have become. That’s a shame if it has. I wouldn’t know, but I’m about to find out as my own daughters are now in high school and have become more interested in going to school games on Friday nights for the social aspect.
They discovered Homecoming last year, and it’s been mums and boys and parties ever since, so I’m about to get re-educated on all of it.
And speaking of Homecoming (yes, with a capital H), I can’t talk about football fashion without mentioning the enigmatic Homecoming mum. My non-Texan friends continually ask, “What the heck is up with those gigantic Homecoming mums?”
It’s a mystery, y’all, but I’ll try to shed some light.
Homecoming mums are a Texas tradition, and I’ve heard that New Mexico and Oklahoma do it too. Essentially, the mums are flowers worn as a corsage to Homecoming games.
They have been around as long as I can remember and, when I was a girl, the mums represented the admiration a young woman inspired in people who know her. The size of the flower in the center of the mass of ribbons in school colors directly correlated to how much a fella loved his girl. The bigger the mum, the greater the love. The more mums a gal had, the more fellas who thought she’s the cat’s pajamas.
Now, a gal can receive a mum from her parents, her best friend, and her other relatives, not just her special love interest. Boys don’t figure in quite as much as they once did, but the fellas now get flowers of their own in the form of a floral garter custom made for them. But we’re talking about the mums that the ladies get right now.
Traditionally, the center flower is a giant, white chrysanthemum usually made of silk and sprayed with glitter. Some mums sport teddy bears in the center. Usually, the ribbons have names and messages on them in glitter letters. The ribbons also have a dozen or so plastic and metal trinkets, especially mini-cowbells, interspersed among them. The result is a bizarre mass of flower and foof that looks like a cross between a parade float and a space ship. Some even have battery-operated LED twinkle lights on them.
Our 1983 Hawkins High School Homecoming queen had so many mums on her, she looked like she was wearing Björk’s swan dress from the 2001 Oscars. Even now, I’ve seen girls hunched over from the weight of their mums, trying to walk up the bleacher steps without tripping over the great gobs of ribbons trailing behind them. Homecoming mums are as huge—literally—as they’ve ever been.
Back in the 1980s, whether a gal received a mum on Homecoming from her beau determined whether the relationship would last. In 1985, my first college boyfriend neglected to get me a Homecoming mum and got dumped shortly thereafter. Y’all might think that’s shallow, but he and I had an understanding and he breached a sacred tradition of Texas “coupledom” by omitting this gesture. By not remembering me with that goofy flower, he pretty much said, “I don’t love you and I don’t care if I hurt your feelings.”
I have never forgiven him, and thirty-plus years later, we still do not speak to each other.
The female side of football was complicated 40years ago. You were better off not trying to understand it beyond the observance of ritual and symbolism.
If you were a fella courting a Texas woman, you had to be real sure you let her have plenty of time to get ready to go to the game (she needed about 2.5 hours for hair and makeup in the 1980s, and I still do). You had to be real sure not to forget the flowers. Your relationship depended on it.
Again, I don’t really know what women do now regarding high school and college football games, but it does not appear to have changed much except in how casually we dress to attend. The last Homecoming game I attended was in Boerne last fall. My daughter has a beau who attends Samuel V. Champion High School down there and we went with them. The attire was all over the place, and everyone was appropriately dressed for the occasion. The mums, whether homemade or professionally done were fun, creative, gorgeous, and some were downright hilarious on purpose. The floral spectrum was broad and reflected individual personalities. So the tradition of football flowers and fashion continues…even if I still don’t understand the game at all.
