Scott Davis: This is Us
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.
This weekend belongs to all of us now.
It’s part of us forever now, part of our own flesh and blood, part of our souls.
None of us will ever forget it. We’ll never want to, and we won’t have to. South Carolina 88, Duke 81. In Greenville, South Carolina.
For this team to do this, in this city, after everything this university and this athletic program has been through the last three years, defies all logic, all reason and just about everything we’ve been conditioned to believe in as lifetime Gamecock fans.
This is magic, sorcery, wizardry. This is a movie. It is not real life. It can’t be.
But it is. This is who we are now. We’re a team that makes the Sweet 16 and drills the most storied program in the game to get there. This is us.
We don’t expect happy endings or fairy tales around here. That isn’t supposed to be our lot in life, not as Carolina fans. We’re the hearty strivers, the toilers who just hang around and survive despite everything. That’s our story: We hang around. We’re the people who carry on.
We aren’t the people celebrating at the end.
Today, we are. Somehow, we now have our very own fairy tale. And it’s ours now and we’re never letting it go. It is ours.
It started out as a nice little story: South Carolina is FINALLY back in the NCAA Tournament. And they’re playing in Greenville in front of their own fans. Good times, everybody.
Cute, inspirational storyline, easy copy for out-of-town national reporters to write about from Greenville, something meaty for the TNT and TBS announcers to chew on during the broadcasts – but that was supposed to be about it. Had Marquette conquered the Gamecocks on Friday, few analysts or broadcasters would have been shocked. Most Gamecock fans wouldn’t have been surprised, either. We hadn’t won a postseason basketball game that counted since 1973. When it comes to the ‘Cocks and the Tournament, it is what it is, as an old friend of ours used to say.
Then something odd happened. South Carolina played one of the most relentless halves in the history of its basketball program to run away from the Eagles and win its first NCAA Tournament game in 44 years. I watched and found myself waiting – and waiting – for Marquette to make a flurry of threes, for the Gamecocks to clunk four or five free throws in a row, for the world to slip back onto the axis where we expect it to reside and the game to slide away from our team at the end.
It didn’t happen. It didn’t come close to happening.
These Gamecocks – not a single one of whom had ever played so much as one minute in the NCAA Tournament before Friday – calmly went out there and buried the Eagles in workmanlike fashion as though that’s just something they do.
And that really WAS supposed to be the extent of the excitement. Because Duke awaited in the Round of 32.
Duke.
Winners of five national titles under Coach K. Winners of more than 100 games in the NCAA Tournament (by comparison, South Carolina entered the 2017 Tournament with fewer than five wins in the history of the Dance). Winners, just a week ago, of the 2017 ACC Tournament.
“You mean we finally win a game in the Tournament and we have to play Duke?” my mother-in-law grumbled Friday night as the whistle blew to make the Marquette win official. “Why? We can’t play somebody else?”
No, we couldn’t. It was Duke or go home.
There are certain uniforms and logos in sports that simply mean everything: The Yankees in Major League Baseball, the Lakers and Celtics in the NBA, Alabama in college football.
For college basketball, that uniform is worn by the players at Duke.
It’s not like South Carolina was going to mess around and beat those guys. Those are the guys who find themselves cutting down nets at the end of the season, the guys who hang banners and flash rings. So, we all spent the weekend congratulating ourselves on a nice, surprising run, celebrated that Marquette win with uncharacteristic joy and looked forward to officially thanking Sindarius Thornwell, Duane Notice and Justin McKie for giving us a great four years. Spurs up and thanks for the memories, fellas!
This team had other ideas.
I talked about Gamecock basketball pretty much every moment that I was awake over the weekend I spent in my hometown of Greenville, and not once did a single person talk to me about the Duke game. It’s almost like it wasn’t even happening – that getting the monkey off our backs against Marquette was a mini-championship in and of itself and the Duke game was sort of like a high-profile exhibition that didn’t really count in the final standings, like when the top golfers play each other in a skins game as a treat for the fans.
Instead, my conversations usually started with giddy chatter about how awesome it was that we’d simply made the Tournament and actually won a basketball game in it, before settling onto the sheer impossibility that the whole thing had unfolded in freaking downtown Greenville in front of an ecstatic crowd that at times verged on slipping into religious fervor.
But the story wasn’t over yet and we didn’t know it. The ending hadn’t been written yet.
And it’s possible the ending still hasn’t been written.
Either way, it’s a story I can’t believe happened. But it doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not. Because it did happen.
It happened, finally, to us.
I already told you: This weekend belongs to all of us now. It’s yours and it’s mine. And we deserve it.
Memory Makers
As a sports fan, your entire identity ends up being built on memories.
You remember sitting with your Dad nervously rocking back and forth while you try to survive the end of a baseball game.
You remember hugging a good friend after an unexpected win, calling a family member after an unforgettable win or a devastating loss.
You remember scenes: Steve Spurrier’s white visor bobbing above a sea of reporters at midfield after South Carolina stunned Florida in 2005. Whit Merrifield skipping along the infield after blooping a base hit to secure USC’s first baseball title.
Now we have this: Frank Martin walking around the court in Greenville, in a near-daze, just after the game ended and quickly realizing the magnitude of the moment, then turning to look at the crowd and suddenly waving his arms like an excited child. The innocence – the perfection – of that moment is why I will keep watching sports as long as I’m alive.
This is why we never give up on this. This is why: The sight of the players rushing towards the crowd to sing the South Carolina alma mater.
The sight of some guy in a Gamecock jacket bouncing around mid-court in the post-game melee and acting like he might just lie down and wait for angels to carry him to heaven.
The post-game locker room, with the players mobbing Martin as though they wanted to hug him so tightly they could take a piece of him with them.
Freshman spark plug Rah Felder sprinting through Duke players like he owned the arena and fully expected to embarrass every opponent who foolishly wandered into his path.
Justin McKie dunking with violent ferocity after a pass that sailed the length of the court.
Sindarius Thornwell driving, meeting a wall of resistance and dropping a left-handed floater into the hoop at a moment of maximum importance, a moment that screamed “We need our best player to put the ball in the hoop RIGHT NOW.”
A lifetime of these scenes piled up in one 40-minute basketball game.
“We’re going to have to watch these guys shoot free throws to win this basketball game” my best friend texted me with around three minutes left. The boys in black walked to the line again and again as the clock agonizingly crept towards zero. And the ball kept going through the net.
We all kept waiting for them to fold, and we’re still waiting. The guys on the floor simply acted as though they belonged. Now they’re in the Sweet 16.
And why in the world would we doubt them now? No, they don’t need to prove anything else to us, don’t need to keep adding happy endings to the fairy tale. They’ve already won the biggest game in the history of the program (and let there be absolutely no doubt about that fact). If they decided to wave goodbye to us and take a bus back to Columbia, we could only thank them for the last few days.
But do you doubt this team? Still? Now?
After this?
Is there a team in America that wants to play them right now?
I know they don’t doubt themselves. At the end of the game Sunday, it was Duke’s players who kept looking to the refs with agonized faces, hoping for a foul call that wasn’t coming. Our guys? Cold assassins ready to finish the kill.
The world has been flipped. We don’t know where this journey’s going to end, but we do know it’s going to continue into the Sweet 16.
Do you really doubt this team? Still? Now?
It’s time to let this fairy tale be written.
We are here. We are alive, and we are well. Believe it.