In Amarillo, Texas, there’s a saloon-style steakhouse called The Big Texan, where visitors dare to try the 72-ounce steak challenge.
Jason Kibbe and his brother, Dennis Putnam, a pair of professional movers who operate the University of Virginia’s football equipment truck, have passed through Amarillo often enough to know the rules by heart – “If you eat it all in an hour,” Kibbe said, “you get it for free” – but have yet to push their bodies to those kinds of limits.
“I can eat,” Kibbe said, “but I can’t eat that much.”
Kibbe and Putnam are based in Virginia but spend much of their life on the road for Hilldrup, a moving company led by former UVA star linebacker Charles McDaniel. This week, like four other weeks this fall, they were tasked with taking UVA’s truck – an 18-wheeler, wrapped in orange and blue, packed with everything from uniforms to folding chairs to coach Tony Elliott’s chewing gum – to the location of the Cavaliers’ next game.
The UVA truck backs up to the bowels of the Hardie Football Operations Center, where it’s packed by the equipment staff, with the assistance of Putnam and Kibbe, at least two days before a road game. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
On Tuesday evening, the duo arrived safely outside the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, some 2,800 miles from Charlottesville, where they departed Sunday afternoon, and well ahead of the 15th-ranked Wahoos’ Saturday matchup with the Cal Golden Bears.
Kibbe and Putnam are highway veterans. As kids, they rode along with their professional truck-driving father. “It’s in our blood,” Putnam said. Preparing for a long trip across the country comes with no trepidation.
Not much extensive planning, either.
“I drive 11 hours and then we switch,” Kibbe said late last week. “I go in the (truck’s) sleeper and sleep. And he drives for 11 hours, and we just keep rotating.
“We only use our maps when we get close to the stadium. We know how to get to the cities and towns that we need.”
On its way to California, the UVA truck stops at The Big Texan restaurant in Amarillo, Texas. While passing through the area, the steakhouse is a go-to eatery for Putnam and Kibbe. (Contributed photo)
Kibbe’s been driving UVA’s truck since taking it to Miami for the 2019 Orange Bowl, and this is Putnam’s first season as his brother’s co-pilot in a vehicle that hides nothing about its affiliation.
Earlier this week, Kibbe sent to UVA Today a photo from their dinner stop at The Big Texan off Interstate 40 in Amarillo. There, next to a large billboard reading “Free 72-ounce Steak,” was their 2023 Freightliner with “Cavaliers Football” and a couple of V-Sabre logos printed boldly on the side.
“People will honk or wave at you if they have UVA stickers on their car,” Kibbe said of the power of the truck’s visibility.
