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Scott Davis: We Are All From South Carolina

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.

The sun was just sliding into view in a pink sky over the Atlantic Ocean one morning last week when I realized something.

I’d gotten old.

I never meant for that to happen. Like most of us, I just assumed I’d stay young for somewhere close to forever, and then when I no longer was actually young, I’d still look and feel and act like I was – just because I was going to somehow be the one human being in world history to beat the odds.

It was my birthday.

I was walking along the beach at Surfside, S.C. – somewhere between the Surfside Pier and the Garden City Pier – and feeling reflective (always a dangerous sign). How in the world had I actually gotten to be (number redacted because I’m vain) years old?

Wasn’t I just roaming these very same beaches as a 10-year-old kid like five minutes ago?

Six or seven years back, I started spending a few days each summer at Surfside with my wife’s family, always right around my August birthday. At some point on these annual vacations, I started walking the beach for an hour or longer every morning at sunrise, which is exactly the kind of thing you’d imagine an old guy to do.

There was no getting around it: I was old.

And since I moved to Atlanta several years ago, the morning beach walks started becoming a full-fledged moment for me each summer – a time to contemplate not just my own existence, but also my bizarre, everlasting, sometimes unrequited and always interesting love for the state of South Carolina.

When people ask me where I’m from, I always say, “I live in Atlanta, but I’m from South Carolina.”

Back when I still lived in the state, I used to say that I was simply from “South Carolina.” Meaning the entire state, not just one town or region. The reason I said that is because it really is true.

I grew up in Greenville. I spent many weekends and sometimes nearly entire months wandering around the sea islands in Beaufort County growing up, which became a second home of sorts. We always did a week each summer on the Grand Strand with my Dad’s extended family. I lived in Columbia for seven years, sometimes going to class at USC and more often going to Five Points. My parents have lived at Lake Greenwood for more than two decades. I worked at a newspaper in the Pee Dee area just out of college, covering school board meetings and small town festivals in the cotton and tobacco fields. I’ve spent more time in Charleston than the cast of “Southern Charm.” And for six years, I lived at the foot of Caesar’s Head mountain in Greenville County’s northernmost reaches, a stone’s throw from the North Carolina border.

There’s not a region of the Palmetto State that I haven’t touched, or that hasn’t touched me profoundly.

Sometimes you have to leave a place to know exactly how much it really means to you.

Unlike the millions of other Southerners who whine about the traffic and the airport and the sprawl, I actually like the city of Atlanta. I’ll be here indefinitely, so I might as well enjoy my time here. I like the restaurants. I like being able to be at a Braves game within five minutes.

But even if I live here for the next 40 years, I will never be from Atlanta.

I am, always and forever, from South Carolina.

It’s taken a few years of summer beach walks for me to appreciate exactly what that means. It matters to be from somewhere. It’s like an invisible tattoo affixed to your body and soul. It’s yours, and it is always yours even if you aren’t there anymore.

And as the South Carolina Gamecocks get ready to take the football field in just a few weeks, I appreciate even more something that we occasionally forget: They belong to this state. They are ours. They play for our home.

And home means more to me now than it ever has.

If you love this team, even if you came from somewhere else to attend the school, or if you just like their uniforms and therefore you wish them well, then I have news for you.

During football season, you are one of us.

You are from South Carolina.

When the first notes of “2001” start, and the band is swaying on the field at Williams-Brice, and the boys are crowding the tunnel and readying to run, we are all from South Carolina.

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Dum Spiro Spero

If there’s a more unique, original and downright weird place in the world than South Carolina, I’d like to know where it is.

It was one of the founding settlements in what would eventually become the United States of America. Then it was the first state to leave the United States of America. It was one of the richest locations in the nation, then one of the poorest.

For around 100 years, it seemed progress couldn’t find it. Today, its largest cities are growing at a pace that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

Throughout the never-ending ups and downs, its people have clung to a fierce pride, often when it made little sense to do so. The state’s unforgettable motto is “Dum Spiro Spero” – while I breathe, I hope.

While I breathe, I hope.

It’s a motto I live by, too. I always have without ever really knowing why.

It’s the motto that South Carolina Gamecock fans certainly have always lived by.

They’ve always been able to find a way to hope.

No matter how bleak things get – and at times they have been very bleak indeed – these fans can reach down and find a place deep inside where there is hope.

Like those beach sunrises I enjoy each summer, that hope always peeks through the dark and eventually lights up the entire sky.

I don’t know if the Gamecocks will go 4-8 or 10-2 this season. But I know that when they take the field on September 1, I will feel a surge of hope. And pride. And comfort.

I will feel all of the things I’ve always felt as a South Carolinian.

You will, too.

You won’t be able to help it. It will sweep over you naturally, without you knowing why, without you even trying.

You will hope.

You will do it because you are from South Carolina.

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