A LITTLE BIT OF OREGON IN ARIZONA

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of stories on the “Road 2 Natty.”

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — John Marston was a month old when he experienced his first Duck football game at Autzen Stadium in October 1970. He does not remember a thing about it.

Marston was 40 when he experienced his first mass Duck football party at his own bar in Scottsdale on Saturday. He’ll never forget it.

“I love it,” Marston said, glancing around at a sea of Ducks who filled The Well Bar on palm-tree-lined North Scottsdale Road. “Really? Look at this. It’s amazing. I’m in heaven right now. It couldn’t happen any better. I own an ‘Oregon’ bar in Scottsdale. Oregon’s going to the national championship, which I thought I’d never see. And it’s in Arizona. In my backyard.”

Oregon Duck fans have arrived in the Phoenix area this weekend, for the biggest UO football game ever, in case you hadn’t heard, and the first place many of them came Saturday was to The Well Bar, where the official UO pep rally will be held today.

Marston, a 1988 Churchill High School graduate, was born Sept. 11, 1970, at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene to the late Jay Marston, and Peggy Marston, both former Lane Community College teachers. He moved down here in the late 1990s and never left. His mother lives here now, too. He has owned the bar since 2006 and has a 3-year-old boy, Jayden, with his girlfriend, Robyn Hansen, who was decked out in full UO garb and tending one crowded bar Saturday.

And when Oregon football is on TV, The Well Bar is the place to be — if you’re a Duck fan in the middle of Arizona State Sun Devil country.

“We had 103 Duck fans here for the Civil War game,” Marston said of the UO victory over archrival Oregon State on Dec. 4 that put the Ducks here this weekend, with a 12-0 record, to face No. 1 Auburn in the BCS National Championship game in nearby Glendale. “And our capacity is 59. Don’t tell the fire marshal.”

Marston, who was wearing a yellow T-shirt that had an image of the Oregon Duck taking a bath in a sudsy beer mug and the words, “Well Bar Tailgate Party, The Natty, 2011”, said he obtained tickets to Monday’s game from his Budweiser representative.

Marston estimated that at least 1,000 Duck fans came through his bar Saturday. Many of them were out in the parking lot, where T-shirt and pennant sales were going on, hot dogs and hamburgers were barbecuing, and Duck fans were downing their favorite beverages and screaming, “Go …. Ducks!”

Among the evening crowd was LaTina Thomas, UO quarterback Darron Thomas’s mother, who arrived here from Houston on Saturday with her husband and Darron Thomas’s stepfather, Billy Wilson, the two having driven all the way. They heard about the party at The Well Bar from Bob Jones, who was Darron Thomas’s football coach at Aldine High School in Houston.

“I love it,” LaTina Thomas said, adding that she usually isn’t up so late. “But I love it. Everybody’s so nice.”

Jones said the mass of Duck fans who have arrived in the Phoenix area to see the UO play for its first-ever national championship reminds him of where he grew up: Nebraska.

It’s the same passion red-clad Cornhusker fans show for their team, Jones said, especially in the mid-1990s when Nebraska won back-to-back national championships.

“It’s great,” said Jones, wearing a yellow 2010 Rose Bowl sweater. “It’s a great time for Oregon and all the families.”

When Marston heard that Thomas’s mother was among those enjoying the party, he took down one of the large “Welcome all Duck fans!” banners hanging in the bar’s patio area, signed it, and presented it to LaTina Thomas and her husband.

“We’re a little piece of Oregon in Scottsdale,” Marston said.