ESPN.com · 18m
The oldest grudge in football
I. Prologue
There's an old saying in the oil business: The best place to find oil is where the oil is.
For a long time, it seemed like a well in West Texas known as the Santa Rita No. 1 was not where the oil was.
It was more than 100 miles from anything else, on land that had been deemed a "petroleum graveyard." For more than two years, drillers pounded away at the hardscape, amid sandstorms and sweltering heat, managing barely four-and-a-half feet of progress a day. They worked 12-hour shifts to pulverize layers of caliche, continued through red clay, then caprock made of gypsum and rock salt. Their only company was roadrunners, rattlesnakes and the rhythm of the rig.
