Scott Davis: First Loves Last Forever
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 told my Dad to wake me up if it happened.
I was eight years old. I would be nine in a couple of months. And I wasn’t a sports fan.
At least I never had been.
The year was 1982. I was a dreamy, weird little kid who spent most afternoons at school with my head somewhere north of the clouds. I loved movies. I was interested in dinosaurs, superheroes, monsters like Dracula and the Wolfman, and oddly, U.S. presidents. And…that was about it. If it didn’t involve those subjects, I struggled to give it my attention, no matter how hard I tried. Every Sunday, I’d lock my eyes on the preacher at our church, will my mind to pay attention, and then slowly, surely, feel my head drifting back towards the clouds.
My father had done just about all he could to turn his strange son into a sports fan. He took me to high school football games. He dutifully enrolled me in tee ball. Each Saturday in the fall, he’d drag me up to his alma mater in the Greenville foothills for Furman football.
In those early years at Furman, I wandered the stands during the games, took naps on the bleachers, ran around the concession areas with Batman figurines, and pretty much did anything other than glance towards the field, where the Fighting Paladins would be battling The Citadel or Chattanooga or East Tennessee State.
Then in the spring of ’82, lightning struck.
The Atlanta Braves – long the South’s greatest athletic embarrassment and by far the most inept franchise in Major League Baseball – started winning. They opened the ’82 season in April by sweeping San Diego. Then they beat Houston a few times. Then a few more times. Before anyone knew what was happening, they’d started the season 7-0. Then 8-0.
Somewhere around the time they won their ninth straight game to start the season, the reality of the situation finally filtered down to my tiny eight-year-old skull. Everyone seemed to be talking about the Braves. And even though I didn’t think I cared about baseball – or football or basketball – I did care about investigating something that everyone else seemed passionate about. What was the big deal?
I sat in my den, flipped on the TBS Superstation on our hulking den TV and watched the Braves beat Houston to go 10-0. The old Astrodome gleamed on the television like a vast spacecraft. It looked to my young eyes like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon. I loved the shocking pop of the Braves’ powder blue road uniforms. I marveled at the uncomfortable-looking crouch that Atlanta’s young centerfielder, Dale Murphy, pulled himself into when he stepped to the plate. Braves second baseman Glenn Hubbard looked tiny next to everyone else on the field, but he had a Grizzly Adams beard and seemed willing to fight anyone.
He immediately became my favorite player.
Within minutes, I was hooked.
The Braves tied the Major League record for opening season wins by claiming their 11th straight the next day. If they won again, they’d be the first team in the game’s long history to win 12 in a row to start a season.
I thought about the game the entire day at school. In a matter of days, I’d started claiming the morning Greenville News before my Dad even had a chance to look at it so that I could read about the team and cut out pictures of the players, which I had begun to place in a scrapbook. All of the weirdo little boy obsessions I’d once channeled into dinosaurs and Batman, I immediately transferred to the Braves.
That twelfth game was back in Atlanta in the late, great Fulton-County Stadium (where I would eventually attend hundreds of games). It was a school night, and I told my Dad, “If I fall asleep, wake me up if they win.”
I did fall asleep. They did win. Dad did wake me up.
As crazy as it sounds, that is as happy a moment as I can ever remember.
That Old Familiar Feeling
Once the 1982 Braves happened to me, there was no looking back.
I suddenly started caring about tee ball, where I roamed second base with a newfound swagger (just like my hero Hubbard). I incorporated the Atlanta Falcons into my daily life, going so far as to hang a poster of Falcons QB Steve Bartkowski in my bedroom. I started paying attention to Furman football and found that I felt like fighting someone if they lost.
And then, in 1984, I got knocked sideways by the South Carolina Gamecocks.
Just like with those ’82 Braves, nothing was expected of the ’84 Gamecock football team. But oddly, they started the season by winning. And winning again. And then winning again. By the time they toppled longtime nemesis Georgia, it was obvious even to the Clemson fans among us that something unusual was happening at Williams-Brice Stadium.
The Gamecocks? Sure, Clemson had recently won the national title, but South Carolina? They didn’t ever do anything except disappoint, right? Right?
That familiar feeling started tingling inside me. I wanted – no, needed – to know everything there was to know about this team.
Why did they play two quarterbacks equally? Why did they call their defense “the Fire Ants”? What was up with those wacky garnet and black uniforms? And the coach, the guy who mumbled, smoked like a chimney, looked angry and wore all black – was he a professional CIA assassin or a leftover from an Old West movie?
As the ’84 season wore on and the Gamecocks inched towards a national championship, it became increasingly clear that I’d never be the same again. Every win started feeling like a validation of me as a person, as someone born and raised in the state of South Carolina. I was a good person who could succeed in life because I was from South Carolina and South Carolina was winning.
Remember, I was 11 years old.
Life, of course, doesn’t unfold like 11-year-olds believe it will.
The Gamecocks rose to No. 2 in the country, then inexplicably lost to a terrible Navy team as I fell into the black hole of a little kid’s emotional abyss. I remember wandering aimlessly around my neighborhood after that game, lost in grief. I had innocently just assumed the Gamecocks would win forever, that I would win forever and my state would win forever.
The next Saturday they played Clemson, whose fans made sure to let them know they were failures and always would be. I remember seeing signs up around Greenville all that week – “South Carolina, This is Your Orange Bowl!” You could almost hear them cackling when you saw them. Clemson – just three years removed from 12-0 and a national title, something the Gamecocks now would be unable to claim.
My parents took my sister and me to the Greenville Mall that Saturday, where I snuck away to a Sears, found a gigantic stereo in the electronics section, and dialed up the game on the radio. I sat in that Sears for the entire first half, listening by myself as Clemson compiled a 21-3 halftime lead (where were my parents all this time? This was 1984, folks).
Distraught, I decamped to the Waldenbooks and tried to look at magazines for an hour, but I couldn’t stay away, and eventually slipped back over to Sears and my stereo, which was still blaring the game to an empty showroom.
You know the rest.
The Gamecocks emerged from the coffin, quieted Death Valley, pulled ahead of their archrivals in the closing seconds and won 22-21.
No one at school or church or at the barber shop would be making fun of the South Carolina Gamecocks – or me – in the winter of 1984.
Less than a decade later, I enrolled at the University of South Carolina as a student.
Do you think that is a coincidence?
Never Forget
You never forget your first love.
My wife even remembers hers – the 1985 Chicago Bears (can you imagine a more loathsome group of athletes to fall in love with than the Super Bowl Shufflers? Then again, she fell in love with me, so maybe her track record isn’t too good.)
To this day, I still feel a warm surge when I see the old powder blue Atlanta jerseys from 1982.
I feel a wave of comfort and peace washing over me. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. It feels like…home.
I feel the same way when I see that cursive “Carolina” black hat that Joe Morrison used to wear. That’s why I nearly started weeping when someone gave me that exact cap for Christmas a few years ago. As long as I’m alive, I’ll always wish USC wore those garnet helmets with the black jerseys that say “Gamecocks” across the chest.
That’s what they were wearing in 1984 when I fell in love.
I still have that Braves scrapbook I compiled as an eight-year-old child, just like I still have wrinkly, ill-fitting Carolina T-shirts from the early ‘90s that I wore in college.
We talk about these old sports teams like some people talk about their high school years. They take us back to that same place of hope, innocence, belief, faith. We remember exactly what we were doing when an unexpected win happened, or how we struggled to cope with a foundation-shaking loss – just like we remember the prom or homecoming.
And as the 2018 season slowly approaches, some eight-year-old kid somewhere in the Palmetto State is getting ready to be infected by the sports virus. He’ll be watching the Gamecocks with his Dad at Williams-Brice and wishing he were somewhere playing video games, and without even realizing it’s happening, he’ll be looking at coach Will Muschamp wearing all-black on the sidelines (just like coach Morrison did), and watching Deebo Samuel return a kick or a catch a long pass, and all of the sudden, something will just…click inside.
He will care. And he will never stop caring.
I’m old now. I know what this boy – or girl – is getting into as a lifelong sports fan. There will be moments of indescribable joy, of course. But there will be so many losses – so many agonizing losses that you believe will change you forever – and this would be true no matter which team he fell in love with and decided to follow.
He will always remember the losses, every single one of them.
But when he’s finally my age, he will also remember the moment he started to care.
And he will always, always, always be glad he did.
It’s almost football season again.
And someone somewhere is getting ready to fall in love for the very first time.