Scott Davis: Embrace the Weirdness
GamecockCentral.com columnist Scott Davis, who has followed USC sports for more than 30 years, provides commentary from the perspective of a Gamecocks fan. You can follow Scott on Twitter at @scdonfire.
I don’t know why, but the cable movie channels have been running a relentless marathon of Jack Nicholson movies this month. Since I enjoy lying on the couch with a television running, and since I’ve always enjoyed Nicholson, it’s been a pretty fun few weeks for me.
I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Chinatown” in the middle of the night. When you’re an insomniac like I am, you pray for movies like this in the middle of the night. “The Shining,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Easy Rider” and “The Departed” have all been watched multiple times, as well. Don’t even get me started on “A Few Good Men.”
And since it’s August, and since my thoughts have essentially been consumed by South Carolina Gamecock football for the last couple of weeks, Nicholson’s performances inevitably started to mesh into everything I’ve always believed about South Carolina fans. Yes, folks, I even think about the Gamecocks when I’m watching movies.
I’ve come to a decision, after all this movie-watching, and that’s this: When you really examine the evidence, Nicholson is THE quintessential Gamecock. Really.
He always has been.
Stay with me on this. It’s all going to make sense shortly.
Let’s start with this: When you watch Nicholson in bulk, you’re really overwhelmed by the sheer weirdness of his characters. The crazy guy in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’? Weird. The drunk guy in “Easy Rider” who delivers a monologue about UFOs being real? Certainly weird. The unhinged writer who tries to murder his family with an axe in “The Shining”? Very weird.
For some reason, you love him anyway, not in spite of the weirdness, but because of it.
After awhile, you sort of forget that Nicholson is in fact extremely weird, and you start thinking he’s one of the coolest people who ever lived, precisely because he’s fine with being extremely weird. And weirdness in the movies doesn’t have a particularly long history. Hollywood usually produces perfect specimens of humanity that we long to be – your Carey Grants, your Clark Gables.
No one longs to be Nicholson, not unless they’re insane.
Still, we love the guy despite it all. If you need proof, glance at this YouTube tribute to Nicholson, which is simply titled “Jack Nicholson Laughing.” It’s a fantastic, and very strange, three minutes.
As for football, we’re getting ready to start a season in which there are less than zero expectations for South Carolina. This would certainly be the time to give up on the Gamecocks if you were a normal person.
But you aren’t normal, are you? You’re a South Carolina fan.
That means you’re a weirdo, whether you like it or not.
And with Nicholson as my patron saint, I’m asking you to embrace your weirdness as we embark on the 2016 campaign.
The Weirdo Way
You can trace movie weirdness back to a single actor, the man who started it all: Humphrey Bogart. There was no reason whatsoever for Bogart to become a star. This is a guy who wasn’t good-looking, had a lisp and had an odd assortment of teeth. If you were drawing up a movie star, Bogart wouldn’t have been it.
But he was.
And he was doing it at a time when being a movie star meant looking and acting like Clark Gable (and by the way, if anyone thinks I’m throwing hate towards Gable, they need to know that I’m the guy who had a poster of Gable playing poker and drinking whiskey in “Gone With the Wind” in my basement growing up, and I bought that poster with lawn-mowing money at a Cracker Barrel in Greenville).
The Bogart type was a rarity until the late ‘60s, though, when everything started to get weird. Paul Newman, my favorite actor of all time, managed to be a great-looking, charismatic guy and still be weird during those years.
Newman’s run in the ‘60s (I refer to “The Hustler,” “HUD” and “Cool Hand Luke” as the Holy Trinity) was a monument to weirdness. Over and over again, he kept running his mouth, annoying anyone in a position of authority, and refusing to submit to superior forces.
In those movies, you kept waiting – and waiting – for Newman to stop being weird and just accept his fate in life.
He wouldn’t do it.
And we loved him for it.
Gloriously, the Weirdness Movement crystallized a few years later when Nicholson emerged and took it to levels we’d never seen before. The guy spent most of “Chinatown” running around with a bandage attached to his nose and looking utterly ridiculous.
He delivered the greatest Weird Scene in movie history with this restaurant rant in “Five Easy Pieces,” which I could watch every morning and never tire of:
Just looking at him – looking at the way his eyes gleamed with a type of terrifying madness – you thought: That’s a weird dude.
And you also thought: Man, I love that guy.
Stay Weird
It’s never been a weirder time to be a South Carolina Gamecock fan.
And that’s really saying something, considering that Gamecock fans support a team that has won a single conference championship in its 125-year existence, and are no longer even a member of that conference and haven’t been for decades.
Nonetheless, these are weird times.
Our instate archrival is ranked number one in the nation in multiple preseason polls and played for the national title last year.
Our legendary coach bounced on us at midseason last year, preferring the beach and the golf course over losing football games.
Our first, second and (if you believe some media reports) third choices for a new head coach declined the offer, and we settled for a guy who’d been fired at Florida for, you know, not winning enough and stuff.
Vanderbilt is favored to defeat South Carolina in a college football game scheduled for Sept. 1.
Forget about Georgia and Florida – we are expected to lose to Vanderbilt, folks.
The SEC Network has led an almost gleeful, months-long campaign to let everyone know, just in case they’d forgotten, that South Carolina will be awful at football in 2016.
If you’re pulling for this football team right now, with everything that’s happened to it, and you’re actually looking forward to Sept. 1 with naïve, unabashed excitement, then there’s no other way to say it: You’re a weirdo.
So am I.
And like Nicholson, we need to just be fine with being weird.
Not only should we not be ashamed of it, we should be weirder than we ever have been. Now more than ever.
In all of those great movies, Nicholson just keeps running his mouth, over and over and over. Never stops, even though he clearly is in no position to be doing it.
Why doesn’t he just give up?
No one knows.
Indeed, in the climactic scene of “Five Easy Pieces,” a burly guy twice his size finally gets tired of him running that mouth incessantly, puts him in a headlock and shouts “Give up! Give up! Give up! Give up!”
He does not.
Neither will you.
And neither will I.
No, we’re going to keep running our mouths, keep being annoying, keep pretending we’re sitting on a gold mine even though we’re bankrupt – because that’s what we do and that’s who we are.
Most of all, we’re just going to keep bothering all those people who make fun of us, all those people who will never really understand us and don’t want to try.
“Why won’t they just shut up?” they’ll be thinking. “Why won’t they go away? They stink and always have.”
Sorry. We’re still here.
Give up, give up, give up, give up.
Not a chance.
