We're Tiny White Specks on a Bright Blue Planet

Congratulations to Mr. John Middleton for correctly naming "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin as the Monday Song of the Day.

I'm back in Space City after a quick weekend trip to visit the lady friend in Nashville. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on Saturday night at a soggy Neyland Stadium along with 96,000 of our orange-clad friends.

My favorite part of the entire visit to Knoxville happened during the "Vol Walk."

What's the "Vol Walk" you might ask?

Head Coach Johnny Majors came up with the idea for the Vol Walk after a 1988 game at Auburn when he saw the historic Tiger Walk take place. Prior to each home game, the Vols will file out of Stokely Athletic Center, down past the Tennessee Volunteers Wall of Fame, and make their way down Peyton Manning Pass and onto Phillip Fulmer Way. Thousands of fans line the street to shake the players' hands as they walk into Neyland Stadium. Through rain, snow, sleet, or shine, the Vol faithful are always out in full force to root on the Vols as they prepare for battle. The fans are pumped up with Rocky Top played by The Pride of the Southland Band.

Thanks, Wikipedia!

Back to our story...as the Vol Walk was beginning, and the players and coaches were approaching the entrance to Neyland Stadium where our group was standing, the excitement grew as we clapped in time to "Rocky Top." Suddenly, I had the sense that a very large person was standing just behind me. For those of you who are thinking ahead, no, it was not Manute Bol. Instead, it was a very large man wearing bib overalls and a Tennessee orange jacket. As Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin walked by us, the aforementioned mountain of a man proceeded to yell "The LANE TRAIN" over and over again for a solid 2 minutes.

Was this guy the first person to recognize the rhyming properties of the words "Lane" and "train"? Almost certainly not.

Was this guy the only one who was fired up at the sight of his favorite team entering their coliseum to do battle against the foe from South Carolina? No again.

Did this guy contribute to my enjoyment of the "Vol Walk" and thus my enjoyment of the trip as a whole? UNDOUTEDLY.

Thanks, Overall-clad, Name-Rhyming Guy. You made our trip to Knoxville/Neyland Stadium a very memorable one.

Current Reading

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons

We've Gotta Move These Refrigerators, We've Gotta Move These Color TVs

One of the unwritten rules that exists for adults is as follows:

Rule 345: When meeting a new person, you should demonstrate interest in said person by asking where they are from (Whatever that means these days in a country as transient as America).

As such, when asked the aforementioned question "Where are you from?", I throw out "Tyler" as a response. This is obviously a bold-faced lie, but let's be honest, it's better than taking time to work my way through the dog-and-pony show of:

"Well, actually I'm from a town called Whitehouse, which is right outside Tyler."

"Whitehouse? You mean, where the President lives?"

"My goodness, such original humor from you. I've never heard that one before."

Quick Tangent: There are two instances where the fact that I'm from Whitehouse was a source of great amusement.

1. As I was sitting in English class during my junior year of high school, one of my classmates turned to me and said,"Justin, I get it. The drill team is called the "First Ladies", because we're Whitehouse." This guy may or may not have smoked a lot of pot, but I was simply thankful to be present when someone made a landmark intellectual breakthrough. It was probably equivalent to being near Robert Oppenheimer while he worked on the Manhattan Project. At least that's what I tell myself.

2. In keeping with the hallowed tradition of wit that is sign-making by Texas high school cheerleaders, one of the schools that we played in high school proudly displayed a sign that read "Murder at 1600" along their sideline. Given that the game wasn't played in the direct aftermath of the events of November 22, 1963, everyone had a good laugh and admired the humor available from Presidential address jokes.

Back to the story at hand...when I tell people I'm from Tyler, that usually leads to a discussion of "What was it like to grow up there?" I then put on my Tyler-area Chamber of Commerce hat and dish out platitudes like "It's a great place to raise a family" (again, whatever that means), but my favorite thing to mention about Tyler, and East Texas in general, that while it is certainly part of Texas (as if this fact were disputed by cartographers), it also feels like growing up in the Old South. For better or worse, you could pluck East Texas from the Lone Star State and place it in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia and probably not be able to tell the difference. There are old plantation homes in the city, downtown has brick-lined streets, and sadly, the city is still fairly segregated along racial lines.

I say all of that to say this...even though I've grown up my entire life in Big XII country, in a state with a national powerhouse like Texas, regional powers like T.C.U., Texas Tech, and the artist formerly known as Texas A&M, I'm fascinated with the SEC. Maybe it's just that I've a few good books on the SEC experience (Warren St. John's "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer" and Clay Travis's "Dixieland Delight" in particular), and none on the Big XII experience, but in my book, you can't beat the SEC.

I can probably chalk it up to a few too many afternoons listening to the dulcet tones of Verne Lundquist wafting across the airwaves as CBS broadcasts from exotic locales such as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Athens, Georgia, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Oxford, Mississippi, but I have drank the SEC kool-aid and I have drank it deeply. When teams such as Alabama and Auburn in the Iron Bowl each year, it doesn't seem as much a football game as an extension of some old Southern feud like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Which is why I'm very excited to say that next Saturday, Oct. 31st (exact time to be determined), with the company of Cole and Audra Griffith, the lady friend and I will be attending our inaugural SEC game in Knoxville, Tennessee as the Gamecocks of South Carolina (led by the head ball coach himself, Steve Spurrier) pay a visit to Rocky Top.

Despite pressure from the lady friend to wear some variant of the color orange to support the home team (she's a current resident of the great state of Tennessee and is thus likely simply fulfilling her duty as taxpayer), I have made my decision to not wear any Vols' gear well known. Even though only a small group of people would know that I was a Vols' fan poser, I would know, and as Alex Rodriguez taught us, if you can't be honest with yourself, who can you be honest with? As such, I'll be wearing neutral colors into Neyland Stadium, and I will certainly not be wearing any South Carolina-related paraphernalia I want to come back alive from Knoxville and not in a pine box, after all.

Just a Casual, Casual Easy Thing

Current Reading

Dixieland Delight: A Football Season on the Road in the Southeastern Conference by Clay Travis

With Dixieland Delight closely following on the heels of my reading of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer it appears that I'm not doing a very effective job concealing my covert attempt to learn about the pigskin culture of the Deep South. Also, since Clay Travis is a 2004 graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, I can always spin my time spent reading Dixieland Delight as "job shadowing".