Tramel's ScissorTales: Fiesta Bowl travelblog includes trip to OSU football's team hotel, the Plaza
Berry TramelOklahoman
The Scottsdale Plaza Resort consists of 404 rooms and suites, and virtually all of them are adorned in orange this week. The Plaza is OSU’s headquarters hotel, and the entire 40-acre campus has been handed over to the Cowboys.
Football team. Administration. Support personnel. Families. Boosters. Fans.
I went over to the Plaza on Thursday to interview athletic director Chad Weiberg, and the Plaza is all things OSU. Meeting rooms, event spaces converted to dining halls for the squad, even desk clerks wearing OSU shirts.
The Plaza is not as nice as the Camelback Inn – such a place has not been invented – but is more conducive to hosting a football team in town for a big game, the Fiesta Bowl against Notre Dame. The Camelback is all spread out. The Plaza is more condensed.
The Friday ScissorTales check in on OSU assistant coach Charlie Dickey's love affair with the Fiesta Bowl and Notre Dame's propensity to use two quarterbacks. But we start with the Cowboys' team hotel.
The Plaza still is very nice. Five swimming pools. A full-service salon and day spa. Fragrant gardens filled with desert flowers. Elegant Spanish Mission-inspired architecture. Stunning views of Camelback Mountain and Mummy Mountain.
The Plaza has plenty of outdoor space, and Mike Gundy pointed out earlier this week that his squad has made use of tennis courts for some outdoor meetings, as a Covid precaution.
The first phase of the Plaza was built in 1976, with the final portion completed in the 1980s. It long has been a Fiesta Bowl team hotel.
I made myself useful at the Plaza. Trish the Dish had dropped me off to chat with Weiberg; she went down Scottsdale Road to a shop she had spotted.
As Weiberg and I chatted outside the Plaza following the interview, the OSU buses took off, heading for practice. A couple of minutes later, Richetti Jones, the Cowboys’ director of player development, came bursting through the doors and said, “Where are the buses?”
Turns out, OSU moved up practice a few minutes and thus left a few minutes earlier.
Jones was a defensive end on OSU’s great 2011 team. He spent 2012 as a video analyst for The Oklahoman, and he was great. Jones returned to OSU a year or so ago to join the football operations staff.
Weiberg pointed out that a couple of staff members, including defensive line coach Joe Bob Clements, had been jogging the 2½ miles to Saguaro High School, where the Cowboys are practicing this week.
That didn’t sound like such a great idea to me, and that didn’t sound like such a great idea to the gregarious Jones. So I told him we’d be glad to give him a ride.
The Dish was going to take me back to the Camelback and catch a shuttle to OSU’s practice, but she instead could take Jones and I to Saguaro High School. He said sure.
Jones always was a delight to cover. Funny, insightful, pleasant. And he was the same on the 10-minute drive. Completely charming, the Dish thought.
He told us that his job consists of being a big brother and mentor to OSU players. Guide them, advise them, counsel them. “I get paid to be myself,” Jones said.
When we got to practice, the Cowboys had yet to take the field. I chatted with a variety of OSU personnel – old friend Chris Thurmond, who was on John Blake’s OU staff a quarter century ago and now is a Cowboy analyst; photographer Bruce Waterfield, who supplies us with many an OSU photo; Sean Maguire, the PR man for Cowboy football.Soon enough, a Fiesta Bowl representative reported that the media shuttle had arrived – we were allowed to view the first 15 minutes of practice – and asked what to do with the press corps. Another Fiesta Bowl rep said to sequester the media in a room in the high school.
The whole thing puzzled me, but sure enough, they took the 30 or so reporters into the Saguaro band room.
Nobody said a word to me, so I just stayed there chatting. But it was quite strange. The Cowboys were just warming up, not even collectively. Why did the media have to be hemmed in, out of sight, until the official start of practice?
It seemed more of a Fiesta Bowl issue than an OSU issue, but heck, who knows?
Soon enough, my colleagues joined me, we watched about 13 minutes of stretching and some spirited semi-scrimmaging by the third string, and then we were ushered out.
I’m no fan of football practice. It’s mostly a waste of my time, unless I get to talk to people. It’s good for photographers and videographers. And some beat writers can pick up some tips that help their reporting. But it’s clear that no one wants us there. I’d prefer to just be banned all together, then we could just spy if we really wanted to. Which we don’t.
After the shuttle dropped us off back at the Camelback, I bunkered down in my room and worked.
We had no formal interviews Thursday, since the governing College Football Playoff canceled all live interviews and thus Fiesta Bowl Media Day. That’s a bummer, but I understand.
The Dish was out shopping, and I cranked out a ScissorTales and my column on Spencer Sanders.
The Fiesta Bowl hosted a media party Thursday night, but I rarely go to those things. I usually have a better offer and I certainly did in the desert. For dinner, we met Carl and Susie Baerst at Tarbell’s, an upscale place in Scottsdale. The Baersts are OU graduates. Carl is an engineering graduate; the Dish spent 30 years as an OU engineering fundraiser and we got to know them through a variety of functions. They live in Phoenix, just a couple of miles from the Camelback.
Charlie Dickey loves the Fiesta Bowl
Lots of people say they love bowl games. But OSU offensive line coach Charlie Dickey loves a particular bowl game. The Fiesta Bowl.Dickey grew up with the Fiesta Bowl. He’s a Scottsdale native, and his family has been Fiesta Bowl ticket-holders since the game was born 50 years ago.
Dickey was at the first Fiesta Bowl, matching Arizona State and Florida State. Dickey was at the 1975 Fiesta, and when ASU’s Danny Kush kicked a late field goal to give the Sun Devils a 17-14 upset of Nebraska, Dickey was on the field, having snuck down. Dickey was at the 1986 national-championship game between Miami and Penn State, though he had been at the Rose Bowl the day before, watching his sister cheer for the Sun Devils.
"I have a lot of satisfaction in seeing the Fiesta Bowl become what it's become,” Dickey told fiestabowl.org. “It's a community bowl. No one knew what it was at first and now it's one of the big bowls and has been in the rotation for the national championship. Who would've thought that was going to happen way back in the early 1970s?”
Dickey’s grandfather, also named Charlie Dickey, bought eight Fiesta Bowl tickets when the game was born. For that 1971 game, Dickey’s grandfather rented a bus for his friends and family, ordered fried chicken and other delicacies, and tailgated before and after the game.
“He was very flamboyant and he enjoyed the tickets to the big new game because he could deliver for his friends,” said Bette Dickey, the mother of OSU’s Charlie. “He loved being with his family and friends, and I think that in his heart, he bought the tickets to be able to spend time with his grandson at the game.”
Father, son (Bud) and grandson turned the Fiesta Bowl into an annual rite.
“I loved it, the whole atmosphere,” OSU’s Dickey said. “What is better than watching football in the stadium on Christmas Day sitting in the stands with my dad and my grandfather?”
Dickey’s Fiesta Bowl ties go even deeper. He played football at Arizona and eventually became his alma mater’s offensive line coach. The 1993 Wildcats played Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, with Dickey on the staff.
“It was an awesome experience,” Dickey told fiestabowl.org. “There was a lot of emotions. Walking on that field, I remember being in the middle, standing on that logo and I looked up at the seats where I used to sit and soaked it all in."
Dickey’s mother said she and Dickey’s father had tears in their eyes. Dickey’s grandfather died in 2000, but Bud and Bette Dickey continue on with the Fiesta tickets.
Their son returned again with Kansas State’s 2012, and now he’s back with the 2021 Cowboys.
And here’s a kicker. The Cowboys are practicing at Dickey’s high school alma mater, Saguaro.
Mike Gundy’s youngest son, 17-year-old Gage, was headed from the Scottsdale Plaza to Saguaro the other day to lift weights while the Cowboys practiced.
But Mike Gundy decided to have some fun and bust his offensive line coach.
“I gave him a hard time, because we knew that this was his home and he played here, very tradition-rich high school,” Gundy said. “We were walking out to get ready to get on the bus. And I said, ‘hey, Coach Dickey, do you know how to spell the high school that we're practicing at today? I just need to know if you know how to spell it so he (Gage) can put it in his GPS.’
“And he spit it out real fast on how to spell it. He said, ‘Coach, that's my high school.’”
And this is Dickey’s bowl game.
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