JAKE'S TAKE: This Thanksgiving is about more than Ole Miss and the 'Golden Egg' for me

Today is Thanksgiving and in a few hours No. 12 Ole Miss and Mississippi State will tee it up and kickoff another edition of the Egg Bowl rivalry down in Starkville.

More importantly, for me, today is another Thanksgiving I get to spend with my dad, Britt Thompson, who is one of the biggest Ole Miss fans you will meet.

Why is this Thanksgiving the most important one? Well, for a few hours on the afternoon of August 3 there was a high probability I was never going to get to experience another one with my father.

Let me Tarantino this and go back to the beginning now that you have seen the end of the story.

Mid-afternoon on that day in August I was sitting at a coffee shop in Oxford hours before attending an evening practice the opening week of fall camp for Ole Miss football. That was until a phone call nearly changed more than my plans for the rest of that day.

On the other end of that call I heard words uttered no son or daughter ever want to hear: “The doctors want all of the family up at the hospital. It’s bad.”

The hospital being the North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo and the critical care floor, to be exact. A day that started out with my dad having a scheduled stress test turned into a potential procedure to put a stint in then changed into an emergency quintuple bypass surgery.

Yes, you read that right. Five bypasses.

When you get the order for all family members who can make it to get to a hospital urgently, it is never a positive reason.

I hung up, called Chuck and told him that I would not be attending practice that evening, and put the ‘Fast and Furious’ tag on the front of my car to good use on Highway 6 East.

The drive to Tupelo takes just under an hour but for me it felt like 50.

Throughout that drive emotions of all kinds washed over me. Mostly sadness, worry and concern. For anyone who has faced this kind of worry — where you assume you will not see your loved one again — all kinds of thoughts and memories flood over you.

I could not lose my dad. He is my best friend.

Maybe that is strange for a 37 year-old man to say, but give me a bible to put my left hand on and I will swear by it over and over.

We do as much together as we can. He is my movie buddy. We see everything together. Marvel cinematic adventures, award season darlings and everything in between. It has been that way since I was 10 when dad took me to my first R-rated movie, “The Rock.”

*There will be no Nic Cage slander found here*

At 65 years old he still sits and watches my hobby of professional wrestling right along with me and gets as involved with it like he is 15 years old again watching Jerry Lawler dominate Bill Dundee in the Mid-South Coliseum.

I could not lose my best friend, there was too much left for us to do.

But more importantly, I could not lose the reason I am an Ole Miss fan, graduate and beat writer. In that order.

You can thank my father for reading these words written by me and all the words prior over the last two years. Or longer for any Oxford Eagle readers from the last 10 years here.

My dad and mom are Ole Miss graduates. They met in Oxford, married 43 years ago and had me six years after. I’ve been an Ole Miss fan since I could retain knowledge.

A path in journalism was not always my life plan and never did I imagine covering Ole Miss as a career.

I graduated from Brandon High School in 2004 and was a trainer/manager for the football and soccer teams. From there I was going to go to Southern Mississippi and major in sports medicine. If I could not be an athlete I wanted to be around sports however I could.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to Hattiesburg. I was introduced to an idea of going to Delta State University and being on the ground floor of the first class to go through its Sports Medicine program.

So, I did what any pleasing child/friend/student does and went where I thought everyone felt was the right move for me. I went to Delta State. Go Fighting Okra

Well, by August of 2006 I was living in Panama City Beach working full time at a gym and pro shop at one of the resorts where my dad also worked as well.

More like the Okra fought me and it was a TKO.

For three-plus years I worked in the real world but my parents knew I needed to get back on track and get a college degree. But where and for what?

“You talk to me about sports all the time. Why don’t you go do that?” my dad retorted one day during one of many discussions about my future.

So… we ended up in Oxford winter of 2010 and by April that year I was moved in and ready to resume my studies that fall. After a nine-year journey that would make Bilbo Baggins tell me to hurry up with I got my undergraduate degree in journalism in 2013.

My dad is why I do this job. He has gotten to experience some of his best Ole Miss memories and moments through me.

He read about his college baseball team finally making it to Omaha and win a national championship through my words and videos. He saw his favorite college football team rack up 10-wins in a regular season and return to a Sugar Bowl, through my words. He is seeing that potentially happen again, through my words

I do not take that for granted nor did I want that privilege to end. Not on August 3.

I arrived in Tupelo and sat with my family for over three hours while my dad fought for his life on an operating table.

Finally a phone call to the waiting room was for the Thompson family and by now everyone reading this knows the good news. My dad made it through with flying colors, impressing the surgeon.

“He should not be here,” were his exact words to us post-operation.

The road of recovery has been long and started off bumpy, but last week he celebrated his 65th birthday, one we did not think was coming on that August afternoon. Today he gets to experience another Egg Bowl through my words.

Because he encouraged me 13 years ago to make my passion of sports a career.

For that I am thankful. Not just today but every day and every day forward I get to spend with him on this Earth.

Enjoy the start of another holiday season with family, food, fellowship. While doing so do not let one second go by without savoring it properly. Nobody knows when that phone call is coming and what lies on the other side of it.

I love you, dad.