Scott Davis: Opening the Gamecock Scrapbook

Columnist Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective.

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There it was.

There it was in a dusty bin from the attic, one plastered with masking tape that read “Scott’s Memorabilia” on it.

It was crusty at the edges and a little fragile, but the flimsy paper was still shiny on the outside.

I unrolled it, even though I already knew what I’d see.

In living color was a photograph of ‘90s Gamecock legend Steve Taneyhill raising his arms in celebration to a dumbfounded orange blob – the Clemson crowd in the Upstate. The picture was taken at South Carolina’s 1992 football defeat of the Tigers in Death Valley, and with expectations high for the following season, it was placed directly on the 1993 USC football schedule poster.

I was a student in Columbia at the time, and dutifully hung it in my dorm room the day I found a copy on campus.

So did a couple of million or so other students, it seemed. I couldn’t walk a step in the autumn of ’93 without seeing it somewhere.

As the years passed and Gamecock football coaches came and went, the poster became a collector’s item of sorts. Never mind the fact that the 1993 team ended up going an ignominious 4-7, and coach Sparky Woods was fired after the collapse (the final record was later changed to 5-6 after Alabama forfeited its ’93 wins).

Anyway, the ’93 team wasn’t the point – the picture was.

Taneyhill standing on the Tiger Paw, lifting his arms to the Clemson sky.

Quite frankly, I forgot I still owned the poster. It hasn’t seen the light of day in over a decade, and wouldn’t have seen it this time had my wife and I not been moving to a new house and started unearthing boxes in the attic that had been hidden away for years (presumably forever).

There were other old gems in there, too – ticket stubs, forgotten schedules, signed footballs, a pennant I bought at the SC Bookstore in the early ‘90s.

As I looked through the collection, memories inevitably flooded back of a long-gone USC, the one I attended more than a quarter-century ago: The grim, doddering Honeycombs. Stuffy’s. Elbow Room. Garrett’s. Rockafella’s.

My body was sitting in metro Atlanta in 2019, looking at an old sheet of paper.

But my mind was in Columbia in 1993. At least for one brief second.

If you graduated from USC – or even attended the school for a short time – you’ve had moments like this one.

Part of it is the ease with which we all get swept away by nostalgia as we age. Nostalgia, of course, lies to us.

I made fun of my Honeycombs dorm room relentlessly when I was living there. I even took a photo when the Towers were torn down a few years later and relished seeing the sight of old buildings in ruins. How could I not? The place was damp, cold, loud and a little seedy. My alma mater would be far better served by newer and better buildings.

Yet the other day, looking at that faded poster, I felt an odd twinge of sadness that the place it once hung was gone forever. Shouldn’t some other kid from the Palmetto State be doomed to a few semesters there like I was, almost as a character-building ritual?

South Carolina’s athletic teams were, almost to a team, relatively dreadful throughout my time as a student there. You know things are bad when the high point of your collegiate experience is a football victory over West Virginia in something referred to as the Carquest Bowl.

Baseball struggled in its transition to the SEC. Football posted year after year of something in the vicinity of 5-6. Basketball withered and died under Steve Newton (and, for five seconds or so, Bobby Cremins) before slowly coming back to life with Eddie Fogler.

Pretty much my entire time at the school is summed up by that poster of Taneyhill in Clemson, heralding the ’93 season. With the school entering the Southeastern Conference, you felt like something exciting was happening – but the cold reality of what actually was happening was a 4-7 record.

Still, I can remember name after name from the Carolina teams of that era.

Asim Penny. Ron Nealy. Obrad Ignjatovic. Troy McKoy.

All it took was one glance at an old poster, and those names came right back to me. Those places came right back to me.

Those moments came right back to me.

I know you know what I’m talking about.

What unlocks the old USC memories for you? Drop me a line and tell me about your personal Gamecock scrapbook. (scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com)

It’s here.

It’s really, really here.

We’ve been talking about this finale for years now (literally). I didn’t think it was actually going to, like, take place or something.

But apparently this Sunday night is going to do it – last call in Westeros. Is it me, or does it seem like there’s still at least another 15-20 hours of story left to figure out, and only an hour-and-a-half in which to do it? Let’s bend the knee to…

Most Valuable Player – Plenty of possibilities here, but I’ve got to go with The Hound, who finally got the chance to deliver revenge to his older brother (who seemed to suddenly morph into Jason from the “Friday the 13th” movies). We’d been waiting for Hound v. Mountain for years, and when it finally came, it ended as it absolutely had to, with the two siblings descending together into flames. Have I mentioned that I’m going to miss this show?

Least Valuable Player – Anyone who actually believes Cersei is dead. You didn’t really buy that the show’s greatest villain was carried into eternity by falling rubble, did you? At no point while watching the episode did I ever, ever contemplate that was supposed to be an actual death scene (we emphatically did not see a corpse), but commentators everywhere declared the queen dead in their Monday morning recaps. I’m not biting. Until I see her decapitated head rolling around the ruins of King’s Landing, I have to assume she still lives.

Just like my Gamecock memories.