This past weekend we traveled to Knoxville for the Tennessee game. It was my fourth trip to Knoxville, but in my previous trips I had stayed in North Carolina and just driven over for the games. This year we decided we wanted to experience more of Knoxville, so we booked a hotel close by and drove up on Friday.
Friday night we headed to the strip. The Strip is a series of restaurants and bars centered around Cumberland Avenue. It is very similar to five points in Columbia or the strips in Tuscaloosa and Gainesville. The bars are typical of college towns, and we spent the night at several. (Tin Roof, Cool Beans, The Goal Post and Half Barrel) We didn’t run into any hostile fans, but we didn’t run into too many who were eager to talk about the game. I don’t know if they would have liked to talk about the game if their team was better or if the people we ran into were just interested in hanging out with their own friends.
More than once on Friday night / Saturday early morning the power went out. The bartenders became agitated with this because the credit card machines and registers had to be reset. I don’t know how often it happens, but the reactions of the bartenders would lead me to believe it is not uncommon.
Read more after the break.
On our way home, we decided to stop for some fine dining, at the Waffle House. The first thing we learned there is that East Tennessee sweet tea isn’t too good. (That would be confirmed at other locations later.) The second thing we learned was that 30+ minutes is apparently a reasonable time to wait for scrambled eggs. That is probably not as telling about Knoxville as it is about Waffle House. After finally giving up on the food, we called it a night.
The next morning we headed back to the Strip for lunch. We found a sandwich and fries and noticed people tailgate on the Strip. There are those who go bar hopping for tailgating and those who set up traditional tailgates in the businesses’ parking lots. When there are 100,000 people attending an event, I guess they have to park everywhere.
Through a friend of a friend we were unexpectedly given a parking pass to a garage ‘kinda near the stadium’. We weren’t sure if we even wanted to tailgate in a garage, but we thought it was nice of them to offer it to us so we decided to go by and see where it was and what was going on. The garage ‘kinda near the stadium’ turned out to be Lot G-10 which is exactly next to the stadium. Seriously, look at a satellite map of Neyland Stadium, and you will see a parking garage between the Stadium and the river. That’s where it was. The top of the garage is expansive, and there was plenty of room to set up tailgate. We decided to stay.
Most of the Carolina fans were parking near Calhoun’s on the River and nearby locations like Ruth’s Chris. Those lots fill up early, but if we hadn’t gotten lucky with a pass, we were going to try to tailgate there. (I’ve been there before, and it’s usually fun and filled with its fair share of Gamecocks.)
We arrived a little more than 5 hours prior to kick off and while we weren’t the first ones by a long shot, there were plenty of spaces to choose from. We picked one over looking the river and couldn’t have been happier with our luck.
We set up the satellite and TV and began tailgating. The closeness of the Vanderbilt-Arkansas game attracted some nearby fans, and we made friends. Our neighbor, Tom, was a Volunteer fan from Knoxville. He had a grill mounted to his truck’s hitch and was beginning to cook some 40 lbs of wings and other chicken. He invited us to come eat with him, and we spent most of the afternoon splitting time between his tailgate and ours.
Their fans were quite hospitable although we did get more than a few quizzical looks from Vols who wondered what we were doing in their reserved parking area. Most of the Tennessee fans didn’t have very high expectations for their game against us, but they felt pretty good about the prospects for the program under Dooley.
We walked into the stadium and found our seats 15 minutes before kickoff. We were in the South Carolina section in the upper deck near the end zone. Neyland Stadium is huge. It seats just over 100,000 and is the biggest sea of orange you will ever see. They have a jumbotron that is really big and really nice. I’ve heard rumors that our new one will be about the same size, and if that’s true, we’ll all be pretty happy.
Usually the sine qua non of Neyland Stadium is the playing of Rocky Top. The band plays it early and often. In past years, when Tennessee was making more plays, you heard the song almost non-stop. Because of our defense’s play we didn’t really hear it that often. If you haven’t been to Knoxville when the Vols are playing well, you can’t really comprehend just how nice it is to not hear Rocky Top. As a side note, the Tennessee band did put on a very nice halftime show. The music was fine, but the marching was impressive.
Tennessee’s football team enters the stadium by running through the band. They call it Splitting the T. The band is doing their pregame playing, and then they form a T with the bottom of the letter at the goal post in the endzone. Then when the team comes out, the band spreads out, still in the T formation but now with room for the players to run to midfield and then to their sideline. I was glad to see our team wait for Tennessee to finish their entrance before coming on the field.
Derek Dooley, the Volunteers’ coach, has been wearing orange pants during games. Something of a viral campaign has begun around the saying ‘Fear the Pants’. During a TV timeout in the first quarter, a section of the stadium put on a flash mob performance with cardboard squares that spelled out Fear the Pants on one side and had a picture of the pants on the reverse. The highlight of the display was when the camera zoomed in to reveal longtime Tennessee Coach Johnny Majors sporting a Fear the Pants tshirt under his jacket.
The Public Address announcer at Neyland is Bobby Denton. Apparently he has been announcing the games for more than 40 years. He knows how to rile up the crowd, but he often disagrees with the scoreboard operator. When the scoreboard shows South Carolina being faced with a 3rd and 3, he will announce it as 3rd and 4. In the same situation for Tennessee, he would call it 3rd and two. He’s a nice addition to the gameday experience and has some unique ways of calling the game. When Ace Sanders would fair catch a punt, it was announced as “Sanders asks for the fair catch.” When Connor Shaw ran the ball the announcement was “Shaw, quarterback, keep.” On the long drive in the third quarter, he announced several times that the Gamecock carry was by “Wilds, again.”
After that drive the stands, which were never completely full, started to thin out. Another interception in the fourth quarter thinned them further. By the end of the game there was mostly garnet left.
Among the garnet sections of the stadium there were people updating their section with the Clemson score. Everytime someone got a text or checked espn, they’d share the score and time info with the section. As the South Carolina fans left the stadium chants of Game and Cocks mixed with chants of Georgia and Tech.
When we returned to our car most of the parking garage had already left. We set up the TV again to watch the last 10 or so minutes of the fourth quarter of GT-Clemson. Several other Gamecocks stopped by to watch and a couple of Clemson fans somehow materialized. We couldn’t quite figure out what these self described Clemson fans were doing at a Tennessee-South Carolina game while their team was playing. When it became clear that Clemson wasn’t beating Georgia Tech, they became annoying, and we asked them to leave.
We decided it was probably time to move on ourselves, so we packed up and left for the hotel. I don’t know how much of the traffic management can be credited to the police and how much was a factor of an early leaving crowd, but leaving the stadium was very easy. It was pretty much the opposite of Georgia.
The 2005 game was special because of that being the first time we beat Tennessee in Knoxville. This year’s game didn’t have that kind of historical importance, but it was a very enjoyable game with hospitable fans. We’ll almost certainly be back in two years.
