The Super Bowl Shuffle (Meyer & Owens)
Well, they call me Sweetness,
And I like to dance.
Runnin' the ball is like makin' romance.
We've had the goal since training camp
To give Chicago a Super Bowl chance.
And we're not doin' this
Because we're greedy.
The Bears are doin' it to feed the needy.
We didn't come here to look for trouble,
We just came here to do
The Super Bowl Shuffle.
We are the Bears Shufflin' Crew
Shufflin' on down, doin' it for you.
We're so bad we know we're good.
Blowin' your mind like we knew we would.
You know we're just struttin' for fun
Struttin' our stuff for everyone.
We're not here to start no trouble.
We're just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle.
We’re not here to make no shovels,
We’re not here to eat no truffles,
We’re not here to blow no bubbles….
Okay, okay, I’ll stop….
It’s That Time Again
While the large metropolitan areas are eagerly awaiting the beginning of the new NFL season, small cities around the country like Gainesville, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge and Knoxville are bouncing off the walls in anticipation of 2011 college football, especially in the South. Football in the Southeastern Conference is hard to describe to the uninitiated. Packed stadiums for every game (except, maybe, at Vanderbilt), volume turned up to the max, a ton of close contests every week, frequent upsets and each season culminating in a win in the National Championship game in January. Five consecutive seasons have seen SEC teams win the Big One and if someone from the conference doesn’t win it will probably be because the SEC schedule is so tough the teams have killed each other off. Florida is coming off a rough season. Last year’s coach, Urban Meyer, deprived of many of the assistants who had helped him build his empire, had no answers and simply disappeared into the ethers. New coach Will Muschamp has assembled a crackerjack coaching staff to return the Gators to their usual eminence but the numbers are down, the squad is a little thin. But nobody on any campus has any losses yet so everybody can dream….and that’s what we football fans are—dreamers. So open the gates out there in Norman and let that Sooner Schooner roll. Hang on tight to Ralphie the Buffalo out there in Boulder. Crank up the steam machines in Columbia and Miami. And all of you in The Swamp—keep an eye on those matrix boards. Here come the Gators!
A Short History Of Football, Bill-Style
I started going to high-school football games at the Lawrence Memorial Stadium when I was a little kid. A bunch of us would go and we would all try—and usually succeed—to “skip in”, which means “not pay.” This required climbing over tall, pointed iron fences, but what the hell, we were kids, right? Kids can do anything. Oh, we had our challenges. Certain diabolical motorcycle cops would scoot by at considerable speeds, attempting to scrape us off the fences or pull us down. Once inside, there were security personnel to chase us down and, if successful, throw us out, which, while embarrassing, did not stop us from trying a second or third time. A couple times a year, famously for the Thanksgiving morning Lawrence-Lowell game usually attended by about ten thousand people, “skipping in” was almost impossible and successful offenders were rendered a high degree of respect in the kid community. When my grandmother married her second husband, Bob Vogler from nearby Methuen, they started taking me to games there, as well. Unforgettable to this day are the walks to the stadiums past lawns piled with burning leaves, forever, to me, the scent of Fall. Later, when I went to high-school, I never missed a Central Catholic game. The team was always good and rarely lost. Once, for a critical game with Malden Catholic, the brothers dictated that everyone would go and assembled an armada of twenty-seven (count ‘em—27) buses to make the 25-mile trip. The caravan made quite an impression on traffic as bewildered drivers tried to figure out who in hell could generate a cavalcade of this magnitude. When we got to Malden, we outnumbered their fans 2-1. Naturally, it was the only game of the year we lost.
In college, I was a reliable attendee at Oklahoma State games. When I got a short-term job in Champaign-Urbana, I watched the Fightin’ Illini and listened to their silly songs. In Austin, the Ranger staff was allotted two tickets to each game and nobody particularly wanted them except me. Once, I scalped a valuable ticket to the Arkansas game for $25, a huge impost in those days, suffering the slings and arrows of outraged would-be customers with my hefty asking price and endowing me with sympathy in later years for the much maligned scalpers. When I lived in Tallahassee for two years, I got to see Steve Tensi and Fred Biletnikoff beat George Mira’s Miami Hurricanes and, later, beat Florida for the first time in history. It was one of Steve Spurrier’s first games, a relief appearance backing up Tommy Shannon.
In Gainesville, I got to see Spurrier win his Heisman Trophy with a game-winning field-goal. And watch Emmit Smith bounce around like a ball in a pin-ball machine, often hit, seldom tackled. I was at the first Gator national championship game in New Orleans when, after experiencing their only loss of the year in Tallahassee, they ran FSU out of the Super Dome, 52-20, when then-coach Spurrier finally decided to run a few plays out of the shotgun. I was at the NCG in 2008 when Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin led the Gators to another National Championship against Oklahoma in Miami. So let it begin. Each year brings with it that season’s own surprises, its terrible disappointments and rhapsodic successes, three esteemed months of non-stop excitement. Not only that, but the Red Sox are still in first place.
On The Road Again
It’s nice to play at home, or course, but sooner or later the schedule insists your team go on the road, which means that you, the fan, must face the barbaric hordes of the enemy schools. These people are barely civilized or, in the respective cases of FSU and Georgia, not civilized at all. In Tallahassee, leaving any vestige of Gatordom on your car is like placing a kitty-cat in front of a wolverine. It won’t be there when you get back. For some reason, FSU and Georgia fans seem to get a little drunker and less hospitable than others and visitors are well-served to travel in armed groups.
Alabama fans, on the other hand, are downright hospitable. LSU fans, though occasionally belligerent, unfailingly invite visitors to their tail-gate parties, no small beneficence considering the Louisiana menus. People in Columbia are friendly, probably feeling a bit guilty for poaching Spurrier even though UF didn’t really seem to want him back. Some of my favorite trips were to Auburn, a five-hour journey over rural roads lined with cotton fields and, it usually being late October, vast pumpkin stands. In alternate years, Siobhan and I stop at her brother’s house in Chattanooga for a couple of days sandwiched around the Tennessee game a couple of hours down the road in Knoxville. Some Tennessee fans seem to feel truly offended when they are forced to sit near Gator supporters, possibly because we seem to beat them all the time. For a while, you had to wear impartial clothing to con them into selling you a ticket. This fact remained etched in the memory of Siobhan’s brother, Stuart, who kept wearing nondescript game garb even after the recession had tempered the UT fans’ prejudices. A couple years ago, Stuart wore a camouflage-like shirt and neutral shorts and hat to a game. Passing a porch full of rowdy suspicious drunks, he heard one of them scream after him, “HEY, NEUTRAL MAN! WHO YOU ROOTIN’ FOR?” Stuart gave them a large Gator chomp, to the considerable derisive comments of all.
Despite my significant caution, I once made the horrible mistake of getting tickets on the Georgia side at the annual brouhaha in Jacksonville, where the stadium is split equally between Gator fans and Georgia neanderthals. I was sitting quietly in my seat listening to the optimistic Dawg fans spout their venom when the heavens opened up and five very large young guys appeared wearing UF gear. They looked and acted like they had just walked out of a bachelor party as they moved—loudly—into the seats next to mine. The Georgia fans got a little quieter then. They got really quiet as the game neared its end, trudging off down the aisles as the bachelor party guys invited more and more UF fans into our section, more seats having become suddenly available as the Gators poured it on.
Happy occurrences like this are relatively rare, however. When you go to an out-of-town game, you have two choices, basically. Sit with your own fans in the end zone or buy the best ticket you can find, which will be among the hostiles. I generally opt for best ticket and put up with the abuse, which, since I am usually alone, I do not go out of my way to provoke. Out of sight, so to speak, out of mind. You are permitted to cheer for your team as long as it is within reason. Once, at Auburn, however, just as Florida took the lead late in a barnburner of a game, the rains came. I searched for and found a poncho which Siobhan had thoughtfully bought for me in anticipation of bad weather. Most of these things are red-orange, not particularly offensive to any fans. Mine, alas, was extremely white with little Gator logos scattered everywhere, making me an inviting target for drink cups and lighted matches. Siobhan doesn’t understand these things. I slowly gravitated to the Gator section and watched the final moments of the game in the safety of like-minded people. I buy my own ponchos now.
Scalpers
If there’s one thing Joe Public just doesn’t understand it’s that there is no such thing as an actual “sold out” game that is impossible to get in to. That is because creatures exist who have found a niche and aim to fill it. They are called “scalpers.” There are scalpers at every stadium and for any sport. There are even scalpers for concerts. Many of them—we’ll call them Grade C scalpers—merely show up early, buy tickets from fans with extras (maybe their friends couldn’t go at the last minute), and resell the tickets at a higher price. These guys usually stand around on street corners, arms extended, fists containing two or three tickets. When they sell them, they have the money to buy more. Grade B scalpers, on the other hand, are fans who are selling their own extras (too hot for the wife) or the aforementioned ducats from friends who couldn’t make it. These are the guys you want to buy from because they are not there to make money, but to go to the game. The sooner they get rid of the tickets, the sooner they get to go inside. These people will often sell tickets at regular prices or even less.
Then there are the Grade A scalpers, the guys with fistfuls of tickets, constantly in touch with one another, cell phones at their ears. The most prominent scalper in Gainesville is an antsy fortyish guy named, for scalping purposes, “Bobby Dee.” Bobby paces the sidewalks in constant search of a purchase or sale. He has arrived, however, already supplied with a large quantity of tickets given to him by season ticket-holders for resale. Bobby has developed these relationships over the years and has a good track record of getting top dollar for his customers. He is the last person I go to when I am buying because his prices will always be highest. His offerings, however, will always include primo seats and he will continue to have tickets right up to game time.
People often tell me they “couldn’t find any scalpers.” You have to search out their habitats, make a circle around the stadium, walk a few blocks off. At Florida, it is illegal to sell tickets on campus but not across the street so most scalpers will be in a legal area. At tough-ticket games where seats are rare, you may not see the usual arms-in-the-air scalpers. You have to look for activity, small circles of people in sometimes animated bargaining discussions. Often, buyers are unreasonably cheap and, after battling unsuccessfully to beat down the scalper’s price, will turn on their heel and leave. This is a good opportunity to make a buy—the previous bargainer has shown you the lowest price the scalper is willing to go to. Offer him a bit less. He may take it after the previous deal fell through. But, if it is a good ticket, be prepared to pay the price, and quickly. There are always customers who will compete for good seats.
A Word To The Wise
When you are going to a game or a concert, the first thing you must do is get a seating chart of the arena. You have to know where the great seats are, not to mention where the terrible seats abide. I ALWAYS get a seating chart, usually available via your friendly computer. One of the reasons I do this has to do with an unfortunate (turned blissful) experience at the 1996 National Championship game in the Super Dome in New Orleans. I went unprepared, no chart, and ended up buying a seat in the corner of the endzone. That wasn’t the worst of it. My particular area was an enclave of FSU fans, many savagely drunk and demonstrative. In other words, a No Fun area. I started walking around, went upstairs, tromped on down to the fifty-yard line and looked around. A large area had been roped off for Nokia people, they being the sponsors of the game. That being the case, many of the Nokia people would not be actual fans, just hifalutin’ invitees. Some of them might not even come. I decided to sit there, even though I did not have a great big name tag like the other guests. I was hoping they wouldn’t want to appear rude by tossing me. I had to move over a couple of times, but nobody scolded me and by the end of the first period it became obvious nobody else would be showing up. Thanks to those besotted FSU fans, I ended up with the best seat in the house. And Florida crushed FSU.
I don’t think there will be any National Championship games for us this year, but there will be exciting adventures, nonetheless, and sometimes exciting adventures have to be enough. It’s a mere three months, it will be over before we know it, so we must prize every game, every little bauble, while they last. I’m going over there right now to polish up my brick.
Come On, Gators—Get up and GO!
