Scott Davis: The Moment arrives
Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (below) year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.
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We’ve all had that moment – the moment that hooked us.
Whether it came when you were in college at South Carolina, or whether your father carried you into Williams-Brice Stadium when you were a scrappy toddler, or whether you started growing a fondness for wearing garnet and black deep into your middle-age years, you had The Moment.
There was a moment when you were watching the South Carolina Gamecock football team, and they did something unforgettable, and the home crowd in Columbia was swaying and hooting, and the noise inside the old ballpark on George Rogers Boulevard was swelling up into the heavens, and you took a look at the scene, and you knew you were locked in for the duration, come what may.
“These are my guys,” you thought. “These are my fans and this is my team. This is home. This is family.”
For me, it happened in 1984 during the unforgettable “Black Magic” season, when the Gamecocks rolled out to a 9-0 record and rose as high as No. 2 in the nation. Specifically, I remember watching highlights of the South Carolina-Georgia game at Williams-Brice as an 11-year-old boy that year (a 17-10 Gamecock victory) and thinking, “Before I die, I’m going to a football game in that stadium.”
Many others my age recall a game against – ahem – the North Carolina Tar Heels in 1981 when the Gamecocks walked into Chapel Hill and stunned a No. 3-ranked UNC team in front of a despondent powder-blue-and-white-clad crowd.
Whoever you are and wherever you are, you had The Moment.
The Moment is the place where your life as a fan starts. You never forget it. Sometimes, when things aren’t going well, you curse The Moment and wish it had never arrived.
Sometimes – like when South Carolina unexpectedly denied archrival Clemson a spot in the College Football Playoff last season in that game at the end of the year – you gaze back towards The Moment with tears in your eyes, grateful for everything it has given you.
There’s a kid roaming the Palmetto State right now who’s getting ready to have his or her own moment with the South Carolina football team this season. That kid’s life is about to change, hopefully for the better.
I envy that kid.
Because it’s all happening now.
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A Visitor from Blacksburg
Gamecock head coach Shane Beamer even had his own Moment. Sort of.
I opened my mailbox this week to find Beamer’s smiling face on the cover of Carolinian, the university’s magazine for alumni like me. Inside, the coach vividly recalled his first visit to Williams-Brice at the age of 10 back in 1987, when he traveled to Columbia to watch his father Frank coach the Virginia Tech Hokies against the Gamecocks.
Maybe Beamer’s Moment didn’t make him a Gamecock for life that day – after all, he was there to root for his Dad, and the poor Hokies limped away from the Palmetto State on the wrong end of a 40-10 blowout – but it did stick with him as he moved through childhood, college and then began chasing his own aspirations for a career in coaching.
“I remember we had a police escort,” he told the magazine, “and all these buses came down Assembly Street in the opposite lane – because, you know, they shut down the road. And I’m 10 years old. I’m like ‘Oh. My. God.’ And then you go into a stadium like that? It just really resonated with me at that young age.”
Most of us know the feeling.
There’s an instant in time when we realized there was something special about this place. And we can always return to it.
The Moment lasts forever.
[Win a Spencer Rattler-autographed South Carolina Gamecocks football]
New Season, New Moments
After what seemed like an eternal offseason, the 2023 South Carolina football season at last kicks off on Saturday night in Charlotte. Across the field, an old villain will be waiting – those North Carolina Tar Heels, once again.
None of us knows yet exactly what we can expect from this South Carolina football team.
There’s reason to hope – some explosive weapons on offense, some new playmakers arriving to campus over the summer – but there’s enough inexperience and depth challenges at various positions to keep us guessing, too.
Anything is truly possible.
Right now, though, the possibility that is at the forefront of our minds is that The Moment could very well arrive early. Like Saturday night.
Whether we’re inside Bank of America Stadium or watching on television from a den somewhere deep in the American night, we might – we just might – see something happen that stirs us from our seats.
Maybe Spencer Rattler hits Juice Wells in stride on a deep ball and the Gamecocks find the end zone before anyone’s had time to figure out what just happened. Maybe a defensive player in garnet and black steps in front of a pass from Tar Heel QB Drake Maye and waltzes toward glory for a Pick Six. Maybe Xavier Legette does his thing again and returns a kickoff to the house.
If it happens, the ABC cameras will pan across the upraised arms and jubilant bodies of Gamecock fans throughout the stadium, and there will be a kid somewhere – or even an adult – who will study that riotous throng and think, “Those people – they’re my family. They’re my people.”
They’ll have just had their own Moment.
And they’ll never forget it.
Here’s to a happy season filled with Moments like that.
May they flicker in our minds as long as we live.
Tell me about your own Moment as a South Carolina Gamecock fan by writing me at [email protected].
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