Sooner Superfans

Trio Seals Friendship in Crimson and Cream

BY: Josh Helmer

Chances 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 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.

“We rode the train from Chicago into South Bend. I can’t tell you how neat that was. Of course, the Notre Dame campus was phenomenal. We toured around and saw all that stuff. And we won the game,” Lumber Lady said.

Their love of Sooner sports extends beyond football. Carol also has season tickets to men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, baseball, softball and volleyball.

“I really like to support them because a lot of people don’t. We started with volleyball when nobody was going. We thought, ‘They need our support.’ Same thing with women’s basketball before Sherri got there. We’ve had a lot of fun doing it,” Sloan said.

Marilyn says it’s the growth of the players during their time at OU and the friends they’ve made through sports that make it exciting.

“College sports is just fun, because it’s evolving, it’s changing. You watch the players mature. You watch them come in as recruits and then you see them as seniors and they change,” McCallon said. “We’ve just met so many wonderful people through sports. And not just football, but all the sports. We have friends from baseball, softball, volleyball. They’re special friends. Everybody has a hobby or something they enjoy.”

One of the friends they’ve made is OU play-by-play voice Toby Rowland.

“I think they are tremendous. I always say that we don’t need any more critics and cynics. What we need are more fans. They are the very definition of a fan. I’m not just talking about OU. I mean in sports. We’ve got plenty of people telling us what we’re doing wrong and what needs to be done better, not as many people as there used to be that are just outright fans of their teams,” Rowland said. “When they win, they celebrate. When they lose, they try to lift everybody’s spirits. That’s what they do.

“They go to everything because they love OU. They love all the sports, they love all the coaches and they just want to be a part of everything. I love those optimistic, positive attitudes and how they just can’t get enough of the Sooners. They are among my favorite people on the planet.”

SportsTalk 1400 program director TJ Perry met Lumber Lady when she was part of a group of fans that bought air time to host a radio show called “Swarmin’ in Norman” to express their opinions that aired on Tuesday nights after Bob Stoops’ coaches show.

“Calling in wasn’t enough for them. I’ve known her since those days and our friendship just grew out of that,” Perry said of Lumber Lady. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been around anyone as positive as she is. I think that’s why so many people around here love her. It’s almost an infectious personality.”

Perry says that today Lumber Lady is more like a family member than a friend. She spends holidays with TJ and his wife, Katie, and attends their son Bronx’s baseball games and birthday parties. The group says they are looking forward to seeing what happens during the remainder of basketball season and into the spring sports schedule. They also have plans to visit Army next football season.

“She loves OU about as much as anyone I’ve ever seen. She’s going to support them through thick and thin. It’s something that she and Dru, her daughter, do to spend time together. They’ve been all over together,” Perry said.

Lumber Lady reflected on those trips with her daughter, Dru.

“A mother and daughter getting to do all this kind of stuff? Wonderful, fabulous. We just enjoy it. As long as I’m physically able, we’re going no matter what,” Lumber Lady said.

How do she and her friends remain so positive when others might not? That’s easy.

“We are fanatics. See, if y’all are griping and complaining, saying negative stuff about one sport, we’re on to the next one and we’re winning. We’re not just all about football. That’s how we’ve met all these different friends,” Lumber Lady said.

In the meantime, it’s about enjoying the moment.

“The thing I feel strongly about is that it isn’t about how many games we’ve been to. We have a lot of friends that say they’ve been to so many straight in number. That’s not important. The important thing is that we had a good time there,” McCallon said. – BSM