Lifelong Illini fan 'excited and anticipating' new football season
Aug. 23—CHAMPAIGN — Marty Long likes to decorate her apartment to coincide with each passing month.
Her Illini football decorations went up some two weeks before Illinois will host Toledo to kick off the 2023 season.
"I'm excited and anticipating," said Long, 85. "I think it looks like and I hope it is that we're going to have a pretty good team."
The 1956 Champaign High graduate and lifelong Champaign resident came to love football when the Maroons tallied an undefeated 8-0-1 campaign during her senior season.
Her passion for the orange and blue came that same year while she participated in a school program that allowed students to spend part of the day getting occupational experience outside of the school.
"The lady I worked for took me to a game and that was it," Long said. "That right there, I became a fan and just kept seeing things I collect and what I have. And try to get autographs."
That collection now takes up an entire room — and then some — of her apartment in west Champaign.
It would be easier to note what isn't orange and blue in her home office lined with buttons, autographed pictures, dolls clad in Illini gear, blankets, bobbleheads, ticket stubs, signed balls and news clippings, among other trinkets.
Pictures of her and former Illinois football coach Mike White are among her most treasured.
"I liked Mike the best," Long said. "He was so personable, he started ladies' day at the Quarterback Club, he was nice to the fans and he was just a nice guy all-around."
Long, a longtime Quarterback Club board member, has been involved with the organization for longer than she can recall.
"You get more involved, I mean, the players come and the coaches come and you get to be closer to them than just at the games," Long said.
Memories of the 1983 Rose Bowl team stand out especially well as that team prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary at the Illini's season opener.
Long wasn't at that Rose Bowl — though she did attend in 2008 when the Illini played USC — but fondly remembers the buildup to Illinois' eventual loss to UCLA.
"They were so good and the players were all good," Long said. "Chris White never missed a field goal and Dwight Beverly, I loved to watch him because he'd get down in the end zone and he'd just jump over the players. I still yell when they get there, 'get Dwight, get Dwight,' because he did that and it was interesting. It was just exciting."
Long was an honorary coach for Illinois' football game against Wisconsin on Oct. 19, 2013. An itinerary, credential and program from that day is framed on the wall adjacent from a framed portrait of old turf at Memorial Stadium.
The turf — which forms the shape of an interlocking UI — hangs next to a laminated story that ran in The News-Gazette in 2001. She had a similar shrine to the Illini in her previous residence.
A quilt made up of many of her old T-shirts celebrating bowl game appearances and homecoming celebrations adorns her bed in the next room. It was a gift from a friend.
"I have a lot of friends that make me a lot of things or if they see something unusual they give it to me," Long said. "And I see something I want, I get it for myself."
There was a point last season where Long wasn't so sure if she'd venture back out to Memorial Stadium for another campaign. Those close to her assumed she would eventually relent and return to her perch along the 40-yard line.
And that's the plan as a new season draws near.
"If it's pouring down rain or snow, I won't be able to," Long said. "But, yeah, I'm going to go another year, at least. Maybe more than that."
