UH must be road Warriors

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

DALLAS — The handouts around campus invite Southern Methodist University students and alumni to "wear your Hawaiian shirts and bust out your beach chairs."

Along "The Boulevard," the tree-lined main thoroughfare of the SMU campus which likes to think of itself as the best stretch of Saturday college football tailgating in the southwest, they are ready to party tomorrow on what is being billed as "Fall Beach Jam."

Never mind there isn't anything resembling a beach for miles. Or, that the only sand to be glimpsed is the province of pre-schoolers in the sandbox at the campus day care center.

For the University of Hawai'i is in town.

And even if you are the 0-3 Mustangs, that is apparently an inviting enough prospect these days.

Sadly, two years removed from their Western Athletic Conference championship, the Warriors must once again prove they can win on the road. And the doubters are many, both here and at home.

After five consecutive road losses over two seasons, they are again thought of far and wide as the team that can't win away from the 50th State.

"I'm sure they (the Mustangs) are looking at us as a win for them," acknowledges defensive coordinator Kevin Lempa.

It is time for the Warriors to demonstrate they can take their game on the road for several reasons.

For one thing, this is a team desperately in need of a victory, any victory, anywhere. But particularly here and now. At 1-2 (0-2 WAC), the Warriors will be going nowhere in a hurry if they don't pull one out here tomorrow in a WAC game that kicks off at 6:05 a.m. Hawai'i time.

Never has a UH team stumbled to an 0-3 conference start and come back to finish with a winning season. The prospects this time would not be encouraging, either.

But win here tomorrow and there is considerable confidence to be gained.

"What we need right now," said head coach June Jones, "is to turn that corner. We're very close, but until you put up that 'W' you're gonna be in limbo."

Before the start of the season, this looked to be one of the Warriors' better possibilities to win on the road. But so did Nevada, where the Warriors were 28-20 upset victims.

Now, with but SMU and Tulsa as road stops, this might be as good as it gets for UH. Even without Tim Chang at quarterback, they are just 4 1/2-point underdogs.

And it was in Dallas and against SMU two years ago that the Warriors finally got out from under the burden of a seven-year, 24-game WAC losing streak.

Here they come once again to a point where they must draw the line. In the sand — or otherwise.