Porta Potties May Be Inconvenient, but at Least Children Won't Be Traumatized at Liberty Bowl

Repressed memories of War Memorial Stadium forcing young Arkansas boys into inappropriate situation come back

Author:
Kent Smith
Publish date:
Dec 28, 2022 9:30 AM EST

In this story:

FRISCO, Texas. – With lack of water still a significant issue at the Liberty Bowl just hours before Arkansas and Kansas are to lock up for a chance to say they had a winning season, stadium officials are busy making sure a reported 400+ Porta Potties and 80 hand sanitizers are set up and fully functional in the facility.

It's supposed to be enough to ensure that everyone who wants to be able to see the game now legally can.

While not ideal, an incident yesterday brought back repressed memories that leave no doubt that at least the men of Arkansas have dealt with worse conditions.

It's all because of LA Fitness.

On the way home from grabbing lunch, my son and I stopped in to check out their facility on a corner less than two miles from our home.

Not only was it convenient, it had an indoor lap pool, which is something we're in desperate need of since my son is training to become a competitive swimmer.

An overly enthusiastic sales manager was anxious to show off the locker room they had installed in lieu of racketball courts and a basketball gym, so he wisked us through the ceiling to floor wood locker area claiming it was the quickest way to the pool.

Spoiler alert: It wasn't.

As we wound our way through, my head was on a swivel, on the lookout for sickos who haunt these places looking to shock people around them by wandering around with their unmentionables on full public display.

My hand was at the ready for a quick covering of the eyes should such men appear, but it seemed we escaped someone intentionally exposing himself in a room that could contain children.

But then we got to the car.

"I can't unsee what I just saw," my son said as we buckled ourselves into the car.

After a bit of questioning, I realized in my efforts to protect my 10-year-old, my head swiveled left at a point when it needed to swivel right. Fortunately, the man happened to be facing away from us as we passed by, sparing my son the experience of some hairy dude sporting full frontal.

However, as we drove home, I couldn't help but wonder if he had been traumatized the way I had been as a child.

You see, I had the unfortunate experience of attending a handful of games at War Memorial Stadium in the 1980s. For a small boy in the lowest of single digit elementary grades, nothing could be more messed up.

Everything was fine until at one point, I needed to go to the bathroom. It was then that I was escorted into a room that smelled worse than the worst gas station bathroom imaginable.

The source of the smell?

A giant feed trough filled with ice perched dead center of an open room.

As my child-sized mind recalls it, this trough was roughly the size of a Golden Corral buffet bar and all around it were grown men circled tightly, urinating in each other's direction off the uneven surface of ice.

No part of me wanted to be in this room. The thought of trying to squeeze in shoulder to hip among those grown men turned my stomach.

Then I was supposed to try to go to the bathroom while eyes nestled inches above bearded mouths that stunk of whatever had been smuggled into the stadium stared across at me?

Creepy.

What if I glanced away and accidentally saw my dad?

I would be messed up for life.

At no point in my life before or since was I more OK with just going to the bathroom on myself.

I will never forgive the people who ran War Memorial for being too cheap to install basic urinals.

So, as fans test the deep blue waters of the Porta Potties in Memphis today, please don't complain.

Children aren't being forced to allow grown men to show them their private parts or steal looks at those of the child over the disgusting concoction of quickly melting ice and hot urine.

That's a huge win for the War Memorial Stadium east of the Mississippi known as the Liberty Bowl no matter how anything else goes today.