Who's Winning?

The most vivid memories I have from childhood involve Gator football...SEC football. These aren't slide shows of partial images jumbled up with bits of conversation and thoughts that may not be congruous. Nothing is obscured behind embarrassment, lost to boredom or flattened by the years. Just pure...almost cinematic memory. For those games, I know where I was, the sequence of events, the emotional impact of those moments and how they lingered like it's happening now.

Still, there was one mystery about these games that confused me for years...a lot of times it was just me and the radio.

Where was my Daddy?

To be sure, the fondest of these memories are with him. There's a Saturday night in 1983, Florid v. LSU in Baton Rouge...me and him huddled in a corner of my parents bedroom because that's the only place the radio would pick up the game. We strained to hear the call between the static and the vibrating roar of the crowd. It was intense...like two souls in a suburban bunker during the Cuban Missile Crisis desperate for news.

As the game wore on what we could make out wasn't good. The Gators were winning but LSU led by quarterback Jeff Wickersham was driving the ball deep into Florida territory. I was already trying to convince myself that the Gators had enough time to score once they got the ball back when Wickersham dropped back for what was sure to be a touchdown pass...INTERCEPTION. Wilber Marshall, legendary Florida Linebacker and future NFL Hall-of-Famer, had miraculously snatched the ball out of the air.

It's the very last highlight of these clips. I'd never seen it before writing this.


Florida wide-out Ricky Nattiel said "all hell broke loose on the sidelines"...and on Cascade Dr. in Tallahassee. We made such a ruckus that it scared my Momma and she yelled at us from across the house. We didn't care. That moment is still one of the most joyous outburst I can remember.

Then there are moments like this one from 1984...Georgia.

The Bulldogs had moved the ball to the two yard line...first and goal. Setting up one of the most dramatic moments in football...the Goal Line stand. With four chances to move the ball a couple of yards...mentally you concede the touchdown.



I remember every moment of it...the jawing after the first play and how my heart fell when I thought they'd scored on second down...then elation as it looked like a fumble...and the crash back down when they recovered the ball. That was a cosmic sign. They were going to score...DROPPED FOR A LOSS. Fourth down!

I'd been laying on some pillows in front of the tv the whole time...squeezing the pillows, banging on the pillows, beating my head against the pillows. I can still remember the feeling of my coupled fist pressing against my forehead as I instinctively moved into a position of prayer...one more time. I could hear the lawnmower outside and I thought about trying to get Daddy but there wasn't enough time...please just one more stop.

Pillows flew...a moment only dampened by the absence of my Daddy.

I showed him the video the other day. He asked me..."When was that boy...when did that happen?" "Ha..it happened while you were cuttin' the grass."

It wasn't until I got a little older that I realized he just couldn't stand watching sometimes...he just couldn't take it. We bought him a brick at Florida Field a couple of years ago with the inscription..."Who's Winning?". Some of the greatest Gator moments of the 80's I listen to by myself...and as a consolation I got to deliver a lot of good news.

It wasn't always good though...and it's a cold night in the fall of 1982 that sticks out the most. I was sitting in a chair in our kitchen, lit only by a small fluorescent light above the sink..listening as the Gators lost to flippin' Vanderbilt. That was about as low as it could get.

Just one week before me and Daddy were ridin' high as Cheech and Chong. The Gators were ranked 4th in the nation and we were going to Florida Field for the first time to watch the Gators beat up on unranked LSU. It didn't go that way...an unknown LSU back named Dalton Hilliard left that game a superstar and we left broken hearted. Obviously the Gators were pretty tore up about it too...losin' to Vanderbilt the next weekend...flippin Vanderbilt.

BUT...It all helped set the scene for the next year, there's always next year...me and Daddy huddled in the corner around a radio desperate for revenge hearing the words INTERCEPTION..a moment me and him have never really stopped celebrating.

Next up...Adam and the Georgia Bulldogs.