S P O RT S
BY: JOSH HELMER
So oner Super fans
Trio Seals Friendship in Crimson and Cream
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hances are if you’ve been to an Oklahoma Sooners coaches show over the past two decades you’ve bumped into them. Or, maybe you met this trio of OU super fans at one of the many Sooner sports they regularly attend. Carol Sloan, Marilyn McCallon and Patsy Shelley are synonymous with OU sports. But, you probably don’t know Patsy as Patsy. Not many in the Sooner sports world do. Patsy is known as Lumber Lady, a moniker she acquired calling in to sports talk radio stations throughout the 1990s. Carol and Marilyn became lifelong friends from their time working together at Southwestern Bell. The pair met Lumber Lady inside a Red Lobster at one of Bob Stoops’ coaches shows back in 1999. Their friendships quickly blossomed thanks to their common love of Sooner sports. “This is our life. This is what we do. My dad started me up coming to basketball and football games when I was
26 | February 2020
five years old. I’ve never known anything else,” Lumber Lady said. They’ve attended hundreds of games in Norman, but have made plenty of road trips as well. Lumber Lady has traveled to see Oklahoma’s men’s basketball team play in the Maui Invitational and also made a pair of trips to see the Sooners in the Final Four, when Kelvin Sampson’s Sooners went to the Final Four in Atlanta in 2002 and Lon Kruger’s team advanced to the Final Four in Houston in 2016. Carol and Marilyn were at the famous Bedlam football “Ice Bowl” in 1985, which the Sooners won, 13-0. “We loaded up a big, yellow van and put cement blocks in the back of that van and drove to Stillwater that game. We got so cold, we actually froze to our seats,” Sloan said. “Pretty much by halftime, the field was white. Sometimes they were slipping and sliding. I don’t know how they played the game or knew where the yard lines were. It’s something we’ll never forget. It was wild. We were crazy.”
She remembers seeing band members with instruments frozen to their faces and then vehicles spun out, turned backwards on their trip home to Norman. “It wasn’t so wild going, but it was wild coming back,” Sloan said. Lumber Lady goes back and forth trying to choose her absolute favorite football trip. “There’s nothing better than OU-Texas, especially when we win. That’s just a given. Any time you beat Texas, how glorious is that? The 2000 National Championship in Florida. Are you kidding me? We weren’t supposed to win anything. We were the laughing stock. Going in there, we didn’t have a shot. That was fabulous,” Lumber Lady said. As far as a group, that’s easier to pin down. Their favorite football trip they’ve taken as a trio was to Notre Dame in 2013 when the Sooners beat the Fighting Irish, 35-21.
