Sooners popular among Hispanic fans<br/><span class='hl2'>Bedlam game will be broadcast in Spanish</span>

When Erik Rodriguez moved with his family to Oklahoma City five years ago, he sat down with a cousin to watch football — a game he had never really seen with "these dudes in red and another team in yellow.”

"Who are they?” Rodriguez asked his cousin, who had lived in Oklahoma for a while.

"That's OU,” his cousin replied.

"And OU was destroying them real bad,” Rodriguez recalls. "Ever since then, I've followed ‘em.”

Now a 14-year-old freshman at Northwest Classen High School, Rodriguez's passion for University of Oklahoma football has grown. He knows the players, watches every game, eschews soccer or combines it with football in pick-up matches with friends and is still trying to track down the OU jersey and hat that were lost when his family moved houses.

And Rodriguez is not alone. The Oklahoma City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce estimates that more than 300,000 Hispanics now live in state — with a large portion in Oklahoma City — and the number is growing rapidly. Many of them are sports fans who find themselves in the same situation as Rodriguez. While soccer is still the traditional sport to play and follow, OU football has steadily become a close second, especially in younger generations. And people are starting to take notice.

Saturday, for the second time ever, Tyler Media's KTUZ-FM "La Zeta” 106.7 will broadcast the OU-Oklahoma State football game in Spanish. The radio station's decision to carry Bedlam comes after its first foray into Sooner football — OU's 51-13 victory over Miami on September 8 — received overwhelmingly positive responses from the community.

From soccer to football

For Jessica Martinez-Brooks, the decision to cheer for OU is an easy one. After all, she's a 1999 graduate of the university, and her husband, attorney Michael Brooks-Jimenez, graduated from the OU College of Law in 1995.

In fact, OU's Hispanic on-campus enrollment has nearly quadrupled in the last 20 years, contributing to the surge in fandom. But while many local students and alumni like the Brookses gained their allegiances through school ties, most Hispanic OU fans are simply a result of osmosis.

"The majority of people that are OU fans live in the OKC metro area, and that's where a large concentration of the Hispanic community actually lives and works,” said Martinez-Brooks, the community outreach director for Oklahoma City Community College. "Therefore, whether it's their coworkers or it's their friends — they see all of these people wearing OU hats and shirts. Then they start to follow game days. They start to listen on Monday morning to "Did you see what Sam Bradford did?” or "Did you see that play in the fourth quarter?”

"They get excited about it, and they want to learn more about it.

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