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A Connecticut Yankee In King Football's Court




I was, and for all I know still am, the only kid from my high school to attend the University of Georgia. I am an anomaly. Georgia is a place where the hearts of most children pump arterially red and venous black from the moments of their birth, but my southern infusion started much later, with a hat.

Just before junior high, when I was about 12, I started to swim competitively, and in earnest. I'm from the shore of Long Island Sound: a 21 mile wide, 110 mile long body of salt water with the Atlantic Ocean at one end and New York City at the other. I continued, but few people spend their free time at swim meets, and depending on who you asked, they'd tell you I was a skater, a lifeguard, that kid with the slingshot in the woods, or that nerd from science class. Labels make for easy categorization. In Connecticut I was many different things to different people. The only feature they'd all recognize in common about me was the Georgia Bulldogs hat.

My uncle had moved from Connecticut to Alpharetta for work and returned to visit with the hat as a gift. It is early 90s vintage, and red with black pinstripes and a black bill, with the bulldog logo wearing a hat of his own. They say moths go after flames because their genetic programming tells them to seek out mates by flying toward moonlight. I'll refrain from repeating the trope, but I wore my Georgia hat so often in the ensuing years my mother said it looked like I was trying to cover a bald spot.

At 18, by the end of high school, I was now somehow uncomfortably marked with another label, Jock, from swimming. More people had found out, and I'd accept it publicly, but the label was like an invisible scab, a psychosomatic itch on my self identity. I applied to colleges on the four corners of the United States and sent one to Georgia almost in jest. The hat had kept Georgia on my mind. The literal nature of the idiom was not lost on me.

"You haven't seen Georgia yet, let's go." My father was talking to me in the kitchen. I had narrowed down my decision to USC (Los Angeles; sure as shoot not Columbia, though at the time I thought the hats were funny), James Madison in Virginia, or Colgate, in far upstate New York.

The process of reading is amazing, because with these symbols on a screen I can silently project my mind into yours from hundreds, thousands of miles away, possibly years after I've thought them. Maybe even after I'm gone. Our minds, yours and mine, are in communication now because I agreed to take that trip to Athens.

Athens: just think that name now and all of us nearly hallucinate with memories. To a lot of grads and students the recall stretches fully backward to infancy. Athens to me was Greek history - mythology and marble busts. Imagine arriving in town for the first time with that as your only previous point of reference. Athens, GA, one year after the Olympics.

The hat, and an international business major, were the points of application. Athens was uppercase black letters on a map until I saw north campus, until I took a tour of the Ramsey Center (which people were still calling the Space Center for futuristic tech like the biometric hand scanners), until we went to find the student center and drove past the BIGGEST FREAKING STADIUM I HAD EVER SEEN HOLY HELL THAT'S FOR COLLEGE?!

Back on north campus, as part of a tour, a student in a blazer informed us this was the first state chartered university, founded in 1785, and its first president was Abraham Baldwin. She pointed to Old College, (which I recognized from... where?) and said the building, and UGA's bulldog mascot, were both inspired by Baldwin's alma mater, Yale, in his native Connecticut. In New Haven, the city where I was born. My teenage brain was on boil, convincing me of cosmic connections while under a barrage of distractions from...

"Yes," said the guide. She was looking away, answering someone else's question. "We have a 5:3 girl-to-guy ratio."

Yep. Sold.

Football in New England is not football in the south. "Duh," say literally all of you, but I have seen both, and in person. There are arguably two games in the northeast which matter on a somewhat larger scale, one is Yale vs. Harvard, the other is the Army/Navy game which, apart from the mere experience of attending, means considerably more. College football typically means tailgating with some snacks, some booze, singing very, very old songs, and hiding a bit more booze, maybe in a thermos, under one of your layers because it's cold in November, man. I'd been to West Point when I was very young, and to the UConn/Yale game a few times. The Yale Bowl was built to seat 70,000 in 1914, and didn't have locker rooms. The players dressed in a field house and then walked through a cheering crowd and past the band on their way to play. The tradition has taken hold elsewhere.

What college football is not, in much of the northeast, is mandatory. You go or you don't, you wear what you feel like, and maybe you stay home and watch some late season baseball. This was my mindset the first time I dressed in khakis and a button down ("Why?"), picked up a date in a cocktail dress (W-what?), walked through a portal, and was hit square in the face by a wall of sound with the force of a breaking wave.

The ocean, AN ocean, of rolling red and black. Red pants, short black dresses, huge cups that said Coca-Cola but smelled like bourbon. Hell, I smelled like bourbon, which added to the effect I was swimming again, suspended in all this.

Inside my chest it felt like a bird was flapping, trying to fly out of my rib cage. It was the minute I became a Georgia fan. Not just a Georgia Bulldogs football fan, although that point is apparent to anyone within 150yds. of me on a Saturday in the fall, but a University of Georgia fan. I was besotted; deeply, gratefully stained all the way through, body and mind, with this foreign/familiar, academic/fanatic place that made my mind whirl, my chest heave, and left my vocal cords in jagged ribbons my lungs expelled from my body onto a field between the hedges.

I open my mouth in Georgia and I am a Yankee. I talk college football in New England and I am Maybe A Little Too Into It. I am a Connecticut Yankee who went fully native in a place which was not my own and is now. I am an anomaly.

Labels.

I still only seem to bleed red, as a few people have been happy to confirm for me, but I'm working on it. I am a Georgia Bulldog.

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Go Dawgs.

p.s. - Jasper was down.

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