Scott Davis: Gamecock in Exile

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.

All my life, I’ve pulled for a team, a university and a state that few people around me cared about.

I could sit here and pretend it hasn’t shaped my outlook on life, but that would be a lie.

It has.

It’s affected everything, really. My desire to see underdogs succeed and my empathy for folks who just can’t get it together? It’s because of my team. My absurd, passionate, over-the-top, unreasonable love for my state and my hometown? It’s surely in part because of my team. My persistent, undying willingness to just simply NOT be the person everyone around me wants me to be?

Well…that may not be because of my team. That may be because I’m a confirmed weirdo.

But my team has certainly encouraged me.

And now I’m thinking about my team again. Because it’s July.

And that means, unbelievably, that it’s almost football season. Again. And if you’re like me, you sometimes wonder if you even want to get back into this whole grind again. After all, what are the rewards? What are the things about it that make you feel good?

Why do we keep doing this, after all?

You know why. You do.

It’s July, the SEC Media Days are over, and now it’s time for the real thing. Now it’s time…

I had the worst 2016-2017 football season that it’s possible for a human being to have.

A team and a university and a fan base that I deeply despise won the national college football championship. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t make it go away.

They exist and I can’t do anything about it.

A team that I’ve cared about since my Dad first took me to one of their games in 1982 lost the Super Bowl in the most humiliating fashion possible. No one will allow me to forget about it, nor should they. I personally felt humiliated. In a strange way, it was like I had actually lost as a human being, even though I hadn’t.

That happened and I can’t do anything about it.

My own college team – my alma mater – went 6-7 and was fairly lucky to do even that.

And yet…

Here we are with September on the horizon.

I can smell it – I can smell football. And, unbelievably, I want it to be here. I’m not sure why, but I want it to be here.

So do you.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Gamecock fan in exile. I’ve been the only person around me who cared about this team.

It’s been strange.

But it’s the only thing I’ve known and I wouldn’t trade it.

Because I do care. I do. I always have.

Don’t you?

Of course you do.

Whatever This Is, It’s Not Me

My Dad raised me to be a fan of the Furman University Fightin’ Paladins.

I wore purple and attended Furman games in Greenville’s ancient Sirrine Stadium way back in the 1970s – a stadium that is so old it’s actually been refurbished and now serves as the playing field for Greenville High School (my Dad’s alma mater).

We didn’t really have a dog in the fight for the annual SC-Clemson game.

Indeed, when Clemson was on its way to winning a first national championship in football in 1981, I was all of eight years old. That’s the most impressionable age you can be as a sports fan – really everything that has happened to me as a sports fan was because of what I saw and perceived as an eight-year-old kid.

So way back in 1981, as the Tigers were closing in on a title, my Dad was given tickets to the Clemson-Maryland game and decided to take my Mom, sister and me. I can’t lie – it was a scene: Orange everywhere. Thousands of balloons flying before kickoff. The Hill. The Tiger Rag.

And they were winners.

Here, just 25 miles from my home.

Winners.

I was eight years old, and eight-year-olds like winners.

And…I just remember looking around, taking it all in, seeing the orange and the overalls and the Hill and the Tiger doing push-ups, and thinking: Nah.

No.

It’s a no.

The one thing I can remember thinking that day was: “Whatever this is, it’s not me.”

I didn’t know much, and I was eight, but I knew I didn’t care about what I was seeing.

And that was fine as long as I was a good little Furman fan. Because ultimately, the fate of the Paladins didn’t really bother anyone at my school, my church, my neighborhood, my family Thanksgiving gatherings.

But one thing did bother just about everyone I knew at the time: The University of South Carolina.

Folks who grew up in single-university states (like Arkansas, or Georgia or Tennessee, even though they theoretically have other major universities within their borders) are often surprised when I say this, but USC was not beloved where I came from.

The people I grew up with couldn’t understand it: The fact that it was in a “city” and was “urban” (whatever that means), the fact that it was “out of touch” with “real South Carolinians,” the fact that its sports teams just didn’t win much, the fact that its mascot was a chicken – everything about it, they didn’t get.

Going back to the late 1800’s when the Governor of the state of South Carolina tried to close the school because he hated the “elites” there, there’s just been something about our little university that some folks in our state haven’t embraced. There are times when I can’t think of any other flagship state school that has as fragile a relationship with its own people as our does.

And in Greenville, deep in the heart of Tiger Country, the local media played to their audience, so the daily newspaper and all of the TV channels were saturated with Clemson coverage.

Instead of seducing me, all this attention made me loathe Clemson more (I told you – I’m a weirdo). Every time I was taunted in the schoolyard for pulling against them, I pulled against them harder. Every time I didn’t wear orange to a church youth social, it felt like a quiet victory.

Every time everyone around me wanted me to love them, I loved hating them.

When I looked around me, every day, all I thought was: Nah.

No.

It’s a no.

Underdog Forever

I lived in Columbia for seven years in the 1990s – sadly, the worst decade in history for South Carolina sports. It was the only time in my many years on this earth that I coexisted with other Gamecock fans, with people who understood what I understood and still understand – and unfortunately we had nothing to celebrate together.

The football team lost 21 games in a row in the ‘90s (seriously). The baseball team defined mediocrity. Basketball was awful, then had a flurry of goodness and then went right back to being awful, which is somehow even worse than just being awful all the time.

For those of us that were there, we were – and are – like scarred war veterans who have been together in battle and seen the losses pile up. We are the only people who understand it. There’s no other way to say it: You just had to be there.

As an adult, I moved to Atlanta and found myself in Bulldog Country.

Don’t get it twisted: Georgia Tech has buildings and students in the city of Atlanta, but it doesn’t have fans.

The only team anyone cares about here is the University of Georgia.

And once again, I feel like the only person within 100 square miles who cares about the team I care about.

Sometimes I envy them, Georgia fans – people who grow up in a state that actually loves its university, people who’ve never doubted, who’ve only known to love the team that represents their home.

Once in a great while, a highly touted Georgia high school athlete leaves the state’s borders for a university in another state. But it doesn’t happen that often. Most kids who grow up in Georgia dream of playing for Georgia. They dream of wearing red and black and hearing the band play “Glory, Glory.” They always have.

For us, that just wasn’t the story that was written. Say what you want to say, but it wasn’t.

And yet….

Living here in Atlanta, I feel all the old feelings, everything I’ve always felt.

I feel like I’m the only person in the world pulling for the right team.

I feel like I’m the only person who gets it.

I feel like I love my state despite its sometimes ridiculous, twisted history. I feel like I miss Greenville, South Carolina and Columbia, South Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina – sometimes once a day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes all day, every day.

I feel like I love our often derided state – the state that actually volunteered to leave the most successful civilization in human history, way back in December 1860.

I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who cares, but I’m not.

You care. You care like I do.

It’s July and it’s almost September and we still care, and we’ll still care next September.

For more than four decades, just about everyone around me has tried to get me to stop caring about this university and its sports teams.

God knows they’re going to keep trying.

And they will keep failing.