EdDawg: Classic City Native

EdDawg-raphy

I was born in Athens, 1968.  Should I stop there?   

I lived in the same house with the same two parents for 20 years.  I went to school with the same bunch of kids almost all the way through graduation from UGA.  I graduated from Clarke Central in 1987.  I then earned a B.A. degree in English from THE UNIVERSITY. 

I suppose native Athenians can matriculate elsewhere, but why, in God’s name, would you want too?

Also, I was at UGA during what I suppose to have been the “glory days” of the Athens music scene.  REM was really getting rolling, Widespread Panic was 3 bucks every Wednesday at the old Uptown Lounge…Dave Matthews was a nobody playing for nothing every few months, Uncle Tupelo played all the time for nothing… 

Man, did I have fun? Yup!

There is no reason, nor a set of circumstances that led me to become a Georgia Bulldog. 

I have always been a Georgia Bulldog.

BAPTISM

In the middle 1970's, I was maybe 6 or 7 and at my first home football game:  a very, very, drunk young brunette co-ed (in a floppy leather hat) spilled nearly an entire fifth of bourbon on me.  Never have been able to get that smell out of my nostrils—coed perfume/liquor.  No lasting ill-will against the bourbon, or the brunettes, for that matter, as I would go on to indulge heavily in both whilst attending UGA!

EARLY MEMORIES

It was a Bulldog household.  I was pretty sure, during the Herschel years that the Sugar Bowl was our sacred franchise, and that we were the designated representative of the SEC to play in the national championship game every year.

GEORGIA BASKETBALL:

Oddly enough, it was also primarily a basketball household.  My Dad has had Georgia basketball season tickets for 45 years.  So, for me the names of Guthrie, Durham, Smith Harrick, Fox, are much more important than say, Goff, or Donnan.

DOMINIQUE WILKINS:

I saw every home game in which #21, Dominique “the Human Highlight Film” Wilkins played at Georgia.  There will never be another basketball player like Dominique Wilkins: fast, smart, hungry, agile; a player who can beat anyone off the dribble, or pull up and drain a jumper.  He played at the University of Georgia.

COACH MARK FOX:  The man can recruit.  The man is an excellent in-game coach.  The man inspires his players to achieve.  Last year his unranked team whipped #8 Tennessee.  His team scared the poopy out of Kentucky twice last year. 

He signed the best player in Georgia for 2011. 

DAMMIT!

SUPPORT GEORGIA BASKETBALL!

SUPPORT COACH FOX!!!

A Prodigal Son Returns:

In all honesty, my vigor as an in-the-blood-Bulldawg is much greater now, as a 40-something exile to southern California, than it ever was in my youth, or even my own days at UGA.  Except for the #34 years (when I wasn’t old enough to drive), somehow, as an Athens native, the whole “bulldog thing”, was regarded as severely un-cool, and quite possibly “too redneck” by my peers, and to be most honest, me too. 

My entire life in the South was spent trying to distance myself from all things remotely redneck (the cooking notwithstanding).  The duality of the whole “southern thing”, as the Drive-by Truckers so eloquently and poignantly portrayed it in Southern Rock Opera, was for me very hard to embrace as a youth, and even harder as a young adult. 

Anyway, I moved to Florida in 1995, and it has been since then, that my Bulldog blood entered its “adult” period.  I rooted loudly for Nebraska as they dismantled the Fun and Gun in the lopsided “Fiasco” Bowl, much to the annoyance of my white-trash Gator neighbors (they called the police on me in the middle of the 4th quarter). 

Let me tell you one thing, the Florida population is of two distinct types of people:  a minority of the extremely wealthy from everywhere else in this country and the world, and an uneducated, toothless majority, populated by swamp-hicks, trailer-dwellers, and assorted pedophiles.  I am being kind in my assessment of the Gator Majority. 

This experience made me much more proud of my “Classic City” Heritage.

Several years later, I met my beautiful and very sweet wife, who lived in southern California.  She wasn’t coming here (Savannah, Ga.), so I went to her.

Since then, well, my “Bulldog Light”, has really started to burn.

Being surrounded by these arrogant, obnoxious, and extremely fair-weather USC Trojan people, has really made me proud of my southern, PUBLIC education.

This insufferable Trojan crowd stands for everything that I have always hated.  They are nothing but a bunch of elitist scumsuckers.  Furthermore, the most rabid USC fans are not even high school graduates.  It gets really, really tiresome. 

As a friend of mine, who is a graduate of USC said, “they (USC fans) are terrible when they lose, and worse when they win!”. 

I wish the 2007 Dawgs were given their chance to lay a whupping on ‘em.

Thankfully, the NCAA finally got around to doing something.

So, I am a full-blooded, native Dawg, who is a million miles away from home, and missing it.

GOOOOOOOO!  DAWGS! SIC ‘EM! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!