Editor’s Note: without getting too deep into it, I’ve found myself in an odd spot in time where I have a lot of time on my hands and need a good distraction. As a result, I am starting a Sunday series of a story I’ve referenced multiple times here but have never elaborated on, so here it goes. This is Part 1 of a Sunday series that I’ll continue posting here for several weeks…or as long as it takes to tell this story. I hope you enjoy.
Part 1: Auburn Sucks
Like all Auburn games I had experienced, it was dark, and it was cold. The results of the game that night and the strange intersection of “time and chance happens to us all” would make the memory of it even colder.
The year prior, I had been on a bus throughout the day on a long trek from Athens to Auburn, Alabama, with hundreds of fellow Redcoats, to go on only my third long road trip as a band member into hostile territory. I had taken short trips to Tennessee and South Carolina before, and our usual long trips to Jacksonville for the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. The first was in Jacksonville, in a deluge of rain where my number 4 reed on my saxophone chipped walking in to the stadium and I never played a note. We came in an underdog, yet somehow found ourselves in the game late, and when we just had thought we had hit a late touchdown with a chance to tie with a two-point conversion and our quarterback had literally thrown his arm off with fifty plus passes…in the rain…we were crestfallen when we realized that the son of a bitch Spurrier had called a timeout right before the touchdown. We lost, and we were wet.
Two weeks prior to the 1994 Auburn game, we had to take a rare detour from the traditional site of the game from Jacksonville to visit Gainesville and the Swamp. They were renovating the Gator Bowl to get ready for a NFL franchise, so for two weird seasons, we would play the rivalry at our campuses. In retrospect, neither was memorable as a Dawg fan. It was for the Gators.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about it. That could be the alcohol, it could be I hated being there, or it could be that Steve Spurrier went to quick work to destroy Eric Zeier and the 1994 team in short order. Zeier threw a pick six prior to halftime, which the Florida defender returned something like a hundred yards and ran through six Georgia guys to tightrope down the sideline, and as the team entered the tunnel below us for halftime, one of our fellow Redcoats threw a wax cup full of water in the direction of the team and beamed Head Coach Ray Goff square in the head. I didn’t see it, but heard about it, and Dwight Satterwhite, our director of bands, told us on the bus afterwards that our funding would likely be pulled and the Redcoats would cease to exist. What a moment. I was there to witness and be a part of the end of a tradition. Somehow, I felt proud, because that was the only thing to feel after the massacre that occurred in enemy territory that night.
We lost 52-14. It was one of the worst defeats in the series rivalry. Believe it or not, it would get worse when they came to Athens a year later, when they beat us 52-17, the worst loss in home Sanford Stadium history, a record for points allowed in our own hallowed grounds.
Who gives a shit, I thought. It felt like the football program should’ve folded in Gainesville and never played another competitive snap. It had been so long since Georgia was really, really good that it seemed like an exercise in futility to field a team for the 1995 season.
Anyway, the next week, as we were all practicing on the artificial turf next to Butts-Mehre, Satterwhite ordered us to all gather near the director’s stand. A moment later, Ray Goff himself came out and took the stand and spoke to us. I can only remember two things he said, the first being “whoever threw that cup, raise your hand because we could use a quarterback right about now”. We timidly laughed. I don’t know who it was, but I’d bet dollars to donuts it was my buddy Eric, who was one of the nicest people you ever met but turned into Adolph Hitler levels of hatred when it came to football games. And he did, in fact, have an arm.
He spoke a little bit more, appreciating our contribution to the gameday atmosphere and his appreciation as a former player himself, and ended by saying that he knew the season was a disappointment, but don’t give up on the team, and “we’re gonna come out next week and do something special”.
You know, I’ll be damned, he was right. On that late night in a cold Auburn, Alabama, the extremely horrible 1994 Georgia Bulldogs tied the undefeated Auburn Tigers, 23-23. They were on a 20 game winning streak and we were terrible. Later in life, I came to enjoy watching Premier League Soccer and could grow to appreciate a tie, and I think it started in Auburn, Alabama on November 11th, 1994. It was the sweetest thing I experienced as a part of a travelling band supporting the football program, and somehow, that’s just plain sad.
But it was Auburn, and if you’re a proper Georgia fan, you know Auburn sucks.
Now that’s using the slang vernacular of the time, but there’s good reason for it. For one, let’s start with the fact that Auburn is so Georgia adjacent. I had family in Columbus, and they were one part Georgia and one part Auburn. When I realized that Auburn was a stone’s throw away from Columbus I kind of understood why, but to my little number 34 jersey wearing seven year old self, I couldn’t see why they’d pull for anyone other than the state team. We’re Georgia, after all…why pull for anyone else. They’re so close they could be in the state but there’s a better team to get behind, right?
There was the famous 1986 Between the Hoses game, where Georgia upset a number 8 ranked Auburn team and the grounds crew turned the hoses on jubilant Georgia fans who were storming the field, like we were rioting and about to destroy the whole town. And we’re not talking about your everyday, run-of-the-mill water hose, we’re talking about industrial strength, bone-breaking water hoses and pressure. On a cold November night, to boot.
On top of that, Auburn had played spoiler to Georgia’s National Championship hopes several times. The best I can recall started in 1971 with Pat Sullivan and the #6 Tigers beating the #7 Bulldogs in Athens. Again, in 1983, Al Del Greco and Lionel James beat Georgia, again in Athens, with the number 3 Tigers defeating the number 4 Bulldogs, thwarting a chance for a National Championship, yet again. In 1985, Auburn came to Athens behind Bo Jackson and beat the Dawgs and started a three year run of misery of losing to Auburn that took the program into a downward trajectory.
Then, there’s the age of the rivalry. Starting in 1892, Auburn and Georgia have been facing off since Georgia’s first year of fielding a football team. In fact, Auburn has two mascots (an odd Alabama trend, it seems), stemming from the idea that an Auburn grad brought an Eagle to the game that he had found wounded while a soldier in the Civil War, and it had let loose during an early game, giving birth to the Auburn battle cry of “War Eagle”. The game has been played at both campuses, as well as Montgomery, Alabama, and locations in Georgia including Columbus, Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah. It has a footprint all over the place, so that help to make it so memorable for both sides.
To be honest, we could play Auburn on the rings of Saturn, and despite the lack of gravity on a gaseous planet, Auburn would still provide the black hole, because, well, Auburn fucking sucks.
*****
At any rate, it was November 11th, 1995, at the game kicked off at 5:00 pm. It was already cold, and would get colder as the game went on. But this game was different because of something altogether unique. Led by former Georgia Bulldog Billy Payne, Atlanta was selected in 1990 as the host of the 1996 Olympic Games. Man, did we make our mark on the Olympics that year. From having the stupidest Olympic mascot, Whatizit, or “Izzy”, to the Richard Jewell bombing in Centennial Park, we screwed it up six ways from a proper Sunday. As with all Olympics, though, not all of the events would be held in Atlanta proper. Some events were held in my hometown of Clayton County, well south of Atlanta at the time, where some water events would take place and some artificial areas were created to host Olympic Events. Some were in Atlanta and required renovations to existing facilities, some of which remain in Atlanta today.
As luck would have it, they needed a place to host Olympic Soccer, and they felt that Athens and our home football stadium, Sanford Stadium, was the best place for it. Problem was, the pitch for a soccer field required a little more space, and that would mean removing the famous hedges (note: playing in Athens means playing “Between the Hedges”, which are rows of privet hedge that line the sidelines of the football field and are quite famous and signature to our home field).
The hedges were as symbolic of Georgia football as Herschel Walker and Vince Dooley. The oval G. The University of Georgia Arch. It was sanctimony. Ringing the Chapel Bell on campus was a tradition. You could grab the rope and dangle from it like Quasimoto as a drunkard, you could walk under the Arch even if you hadn’t graduated from the University, and you could cuss Coach Dooley up and down. But you just don’t mess with the hedges, or Georgia’s beloved English Bulldog mascot, Uga.
There’s things you just don’t do as a Georgia fan. It’s one part superstition, one part tradition. The hedges were special. If teams beat us in Athens, they would do the most disrespectful thing, which it to tear pieces of the hedge off and put it in their mouths. No need to plant a flag midfield or piss on the endzone, or screw your sister, touching the hedge was insult defined. You just didn’t do it.
So, to my horror, as we entered the lower passageways on November 11th, 1995, there were Georgia fans…GEORGIA FANS…who were already reaching out and tearing out the hedge pieces. Since the Olympics were coming that summer and would cut them out anyway, many felt it appropriate to get a piece of history before it was gone forever. It was out last home game on the season, and they’d be gone. Get it while you can.
We entered the student section, as both myself and my buddy had left the Redcoat Band because we wanted to watch football as fans, not performers. It was cold as I mentioned, and the game was colder. Stephen Davis from Auburn ran all over us to the tune of 156 yards and The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry ended in another win for the Tigers/War Eagles/Rednecks yet again. By the time we hit the concourse out of the stadium and back to our tailgate near the traditional space by the Redcoats practice fields, the hedges were nearly gone.
My instincts, as a Georgia fan, said to just keep walking. On the other hand, they were gone already and were about to be gone forever, and my raising from my father, who had grown up on a farm, told me something different. “Don’t get a leaf…get a root bulb”. Finding a section of the fence (which I didn’t even know existed because you couldn’t see it amongst the previously flourishing hedge) that had already been bent in, I leaned over, dug my hands deep into the field below, and dug out a few root bulbs. Nothing pretty, but I knew what I could do with them.
The next day, I drove home to my parent’s house in Stockbridge, Georgia, and my dad and I planted the bulbs into the ground. About thirty feet away from the old blue faded metal swing we had brought with us from our old house in Jonesboro, and in the shade near dad’s prize yard, sat a few root bulbs that were genuine, authentic, Sanford Stadium hedges. Within a year, we had a few blossoming hedges, and, as privet hedges oft are to do, they turned into more and we had a whole blossoming by summer.
It was nice to think that we had a piece of Georgia football history growing and living in our back yard, near the swing that was a part of our family history since I was born.
Six months later, my dad and I would be sitting in that swing and having one of the hardest conversations of my young life.
That proximity of Georgia football history wouldn’t be comforting, but would only be oddly, mockingly, ironic.
