Go On Back to Georgia

King Bee pointed me to Mark Schlabach's latest column on the best game he ever saw, the 2001 Georgia Tennessee game in Knoxville. I'd have to agree with him and say that was the best game I've ever seen in person. Wife somehow scrounged up two primo seats in the lower level of Neyland for the game and I drove down from the leisure of third year law school. The pregame was somewhat ominous because I had gotten royally ripped the night before at a party after literally hundreds of UT fans told me how they were going to disembowel us and put our heads on pikes the next day. Seriously hungover, I was struggling to find the correct stadium much less row and seat.

As a Dawg fan, I expected the worse. Georgia hadn't won in Knoxville since Herschel was a freshman, so I intended to take the beating like a man. Georgia just wouldn't cooperate. Not only did they fight back after the Vols jumped out to a big lead, they eventually took the lead, an occurrence almost unconceivable since Robert Edwards broke his foot in 1995. I remember we all celebrated when Jermaine Phillips made a crucial interception late in the game that stopped a decent Vol drive, but it was just the beginning of a wild last few minutes. As you can read in the column, Travis Stephens took a screen pass 62 yards for what almost every Georgia fan thought was the death blow that UT had routinely delivered to the Dawgs. I remember our seats were so low that I couldn't see Stephens after he crossed the 20. I just looked up at the orange wall of UT fans who were celebrating as if orange track suits were raining from the heavens and Peyton Manning was about to marry their daughters. I have never heard a louder stadium, ever, than Neyland on that play. It was the sound I would imagine produced by 100,000 poor people winning the lottery at once. I also remember this fat, greasy Vol trainer in short pants coming over in front of our section waving goodby to us and saying "Go on back to Georgia" over and over. Hatred is clothed in orange. Tennessee led by 4 with :44 left.

After a somewhat suspect Fulmer decision to squib kick, Georgia got it back at the UGA 41 and quickly marched down to the UT 6 on two clutch, impossible catches from Randy McMichael. Most SEC fans remember the play that won it for Georgia as the "Hobnail Boot" play because of Larry Munson's call of the play. (You can listen here after a scroll down.) Little known fullback Verron Haynes was left wide open after a play fake and caught an easy toss from David Greene.
In the UGA section, everything around me exploded. I'm not much of a celebratory screamer, but everyone else around me went into orgasmic, ecstatic fits of pleasure. Wife and I just looked at each other, rendered stupid and mute from the miracle. Here's a picture we took about 20 seconds after the play.
We went from a swift kick in the testes to the type of pleasure only illegal narcotics can duplicate.

Few things are as sweet as a road upset to a college football fan. In terms of the football game, big road games are high risk, high reward. Everything is stacked against you, so when you win, the fans stay in their section after the game is over to soak it all in. I'm sure we were in Neyland at least forty-five minutes after the game as the band played on.

Later that night at Toddy's in Knoxville, their live band played Rocky Top. I drug wife out to dance and she protested that she didn't like the song (although I'm sure the sobriety of her dance partner was what she was really protesting). I told her that we may never get another chance to dance to Rocky Top after a Georgia victory in Knoxville again. Thankfully, I've been proven wrong since.