Scott Davis: Join the Resistance
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Scott has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. His columns appear on Gamecock Central each Monday during football season and other times throughout the year.
I woke up on The Morning After planning to disappear.
It’s what I’ve done best in life – slip quietly away whenever the going gets somewhere in the neighborhood of tough.
I’d avoid sports radio or message boards as though they were viral contagions. ESPN had essentially died for me four or five years ago, so I didn’t have any problem sailing past it when surfing channels. And I deleted all forms of social media a couple of months ago, so…whatever on all that.
The escape route had already been mapped. Whatever happened on Monday night wasn’t going to have anything to do with my life, and I’d make sure the world knew it didn’t.
Then, as is often true for us, I was saved by the wisdom of children.
My sister-in-law texted a photo of our seven-year-old niece wearing a Script Carolina T-shirt. Apparently, she woke up on Tuesday morning and declared she wanted to wear it to school that day. In my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina – Ground Zero of Clemson Nation.
Spectacular.
This was a beautiful (very sweet, very childlike, very loving) middle finger to classmates, teachers and anyone else in Greenville who might be wondering if what had happened on Monday night had somehow transformed her into a Clemson fan while she slept.
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It reminded me, sadly, of a moment when I was about her age on the morning after my first sports love – the Atlanta Braves – had been swept in the 1982 National League Playoffs by the St. Louis Cardinals. When that happened, I made a show the next day of not wearing my “Property of the Atlanta Braves Baseball Club” T-shirt to my fourth grade class – not because the series had mysteriously brainwashed me into becoming a Cardinals fan instead of a Braves fan, but because I was mortified that someone might point and laugh and call me a loser.
Looking back from the vantage point where I now reside, I can see that my fear of someone pointing and laughing and calling me a loser has pretty much been the single quality of mine that has led to most of my troubles in life.
And here was my feisty, undefeated, unbroken niece, smirking into the camera wearing a Carolina shirt.
“What a cool freaking kid,” I thought.
Then I walked to my dresser and pulled out a pair of thick garnet and black socks with the Block C Gamecock logo on them. I slipped them on.
And in that instant, my thinking completely changed.
I had joined the Resistance.
And I am asking you to join it with me.
Live Free or Die
When a rival wins a championship, most of us tend to withdraw, to recede away from the world and the pain that it brings. We check ourselves into a type of Sports Fan Jail where we’ll be left alone to cycle through various stages of grief.
There’s anger. There are self-pitying “Why me?” fixations. You’ve got plenty of time to think about them all in jail. And though nothing ever really gets solved in Sports Fan Jail, it’s a place where we can escape from it all and hide away while the injustice outside the prison walls rages on and on.
I had already checked myself into Sports Fan Jail and was in the act of closing the cell doors, locking the cage and staring somberly through the bars when my young niece intervened. The great thing about Sports Fan Jail is that, unlike the Hotel California, you can check out anytime you want and you can actually leave.
You are free, my friend.
In the words of Denzel Washington in “Training Day,” “Do you wanna go to jail or you wanna go home?”
I wanted to go home.
And my true home – the place where I feel most comfortable and most enjoy residing – is in getting under the skin of my Clemson friends and family members, simply by reminding them again and again that I don’t want to be one of them.
There aren’t many things I do well in life, but that is one of them. Now was the time – the most important time – to make use of my God-given talents.
Because make no mistake – that is what they want you to do: They want you to go away. They want you to disappear. And they think they’ve done enough to deserve your disappearance.
Subconsciously, every sports fan is thinking the same thing: If my team can just win enough championships, eventually all the people who are different than me – the people I don’t like, the people who wear caps and shirts with other team logos – will just be forced to disappear.
They are hoping they can win enough to make you extinct.
They are hoping you will finally, finally accept your fate, accept the facts, take a knee, wave the white flag and vanish.
Simply by staying alive, you perplex them. Your very existence as a Gamecock fan confuses them. You being there, wearing your Gamecock T-shirt, presents them with an existential crisis. Your existence quite literally does not make sense to them.
Don’t you know that they almost always beat us in sports? Don’t you realize they’ve won multiple championships in football? Aren’t you aware that your school is located in a hot, cursed, rough-and-tumble city instead of a college town by the lake?
When you stipulate that you’re aware of all those things and you still do not want to be one of them – indeed, would never, ever become one of them – it sends Clemson fans into paroxysms of confusion and rage. You know that look that grouchy old people have when they’re standing on their front porch and a car slides by pounding bass-heavy music?
That is the look Clemson fans make when they realize that their football team cannot win enough championships to make us want to be like them. They cannot win enough to make us one of them.
It’s a look of bewilderment mixed with hatred.
Now is the time to turn up the music on them.
Cancel the Extinction Event
There are no real rules in the Resistance, but I think we can start by refusing to withdraw. We can start by refusing to go away.
We can wear the shirts and the caps. We can inexplicably fly the flags over our front porches.
Yes, they will point and laugh. “These idiots just don’t get it,” they’ll tell each other, with smug, self-satisfied smiles.
Meanwhile, rage will flutter inside them. They aren’t going away? After all this? Really? What the hell?
Clemson turned their fortunes around a few years ago by branding themselves as the plucky, upstart, young, brash alternative to establishment powers like Alabama and Ohio State. Elite athletes believed the sales pitch.
Now? They are the Establishment.
And that gives all Gamecock fans the opportunity to do what we do best: Stubbornly refuse to give in. Light the fires. Frustrate the powers.
Let’s face it, if you’re a Gamecock fan, you’ve got a rebellious streak running wild inside you. Fighting the power is at the core of your genetic makeup. We are the sports world equivalent of punk rockers – losers, weirdos, leftovers, never-were’s, also-ran’s and others who, together, have built a family that in its difference is its own kind of beautiful. And beauty is what it is – our collective will to rage against the machine.
It would be so, so easy for all of us to be Clemson fans.
Sure, maybe you’re from the state of South Carolina, but there are many, many South Carolinians who hate the Gamecocks. Sure, maybe your parents or friends pull for USC, but many Clemson fans grew up in Gamecock-loving families. There are even graduates of the University of South Carolina who pull for Clemson.
You could, too.
Indeed, there is not a single person, institution, law or tradition that forces you to be a Gamecock fan. You are not doomed or cursed to be a Gamecock fan, because the truth is that you can stop anytime. You are, indeed, free to go.
But you don’t stop, do you, because you’re different. You enjoy being ornery. There is something in you that simply needs to not do what you’re supposed to do.
You already do those things. I am simply asking you to enjoy yourself while you do it.
Revel in your rebellious streak.
It’s in your blood. You are an American. You are descended from a people that lied in bushes waiting to spring on unsuspecting British redcoats because there was some weird, undying defiance inside them that just would not accept the world as it was.
You are The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” cackling in the darkness.
You are The Ramones at CBGB in 1975.
And this is you, now, a Gamecock fan in 2019.
You need courage. You need pride. And you need to summon that part of you that is just not going to bow to anybody or anything. That part of you already lives if you support the South Carolina Gamecocks.
I call on you to let it flourish.
Your football team won’t make it easy on you. Hell, your entire athletic program – currently mired in the deepest mediocrity – won’t make it easy on you.
But that’s not why you joined up, is it? You joined up because you don’t like people who take the easy road. They don’t understand what you understand, do they?
In the middle of the greatest action movie of all time, “Die Hard,” one of the terrorists finally inquires as to who he has been speaking with over radio – the person who has consistently and repeatedly frustrated their plans simply by refusing to die.
“Who are you then?” the frustrated terrorist ringleader blurts into his radio.
“Just a fly in the ointment, Hans,” says our hero John McClane. “The monkey in the wrench. The pain in the ass.”
Every time you wear that Gamecock shirt or fly that USC flag, this is who you are. By being alive, this is who you are.
The fly in the ointment. The monkey in the wrench.
This is the role you were born to play, my friend. This is the role of a lifetime. This is who you are. This is who you have always wanted to be.
And this is your moment.
Resist.
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