Someone asked me the other day, “McConaughey, what’s UT football mean to you?”
I thought of little orange dots.
It was 2013. I’m up in Iceland working on Interstellar. Remember those scenes on the ice planet? Dr. Mann? Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve seen the poster. Middle of nowhere. Engulfed by glaciers and frozen fjords. It was a dark 1 o’clock in the morning, with only the dim twilight of a setting harvest moon. Vast. Astonishing. Otherworldly. Like I was actually on another planet.
There I was, making an epic movie with Christopher Nolan and Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon. Life was perfect. What else could I want?
The game. I needed to watch the game.
We were playing Ole Miss.
The whole week, the teamsters were telling me, “Ah, don’t worry McConaughey, we got it all figured out. We’ll make sure the TV in your trailer has the game on.”
I said, “In the middle of nowhere in Iceland?”
“We got it sorted, McConaughey,” they said.
This particular workday was a “night shoot,” meaning the set up for the big shot after lunch would give me plenty of time to tune into my 1 a.m. Longhorn kickoff. Perfect.
…Except nobody could figure out how to get the game on. As I suspected, reception ain’t so good on the surface of Mars. Shit. What am I gonna do?
There was this one spot though, this one spot a few hundred yards away from basecamp in the middle of the frozen tundra, where folks said they’d hike out to just to coax a single bar onto their phone.
Still in my spacesuit, I grabbed a wobbly three-and-a-half-legged plastic chair and marched to the one bar pop-up spot. I held my phone to the sky, got that beautiful bar, and tapped into the ESPN drive chart. For the next three-and-a-half hours, I sat in that three-and-a-half-legged chair under the black heavens and watched little orange and blue dots ping across my screen.
What can I say? Had to watch my Longhorns. From another planet. It was well below freezing but it sure felt warmer whenever those little orange dots marched down the field.
At Texas, football is our front porch. We can be anywhere in the world, but if UT is on, we’re there. We’re back home again. Transported. Enraptured. Rooting for the burnt orange dots to cross our screen. What in your life is a must watch like that?
