ESPN Gameday

[coxfan]

If any of you are watching ESPN Gameday today (10-6) I'm listening to it outside our condo window. We live only a block from its site, and I'll walk through there later en route to a fall baseball scrimmage.

I'm not going to try the sold-out game tonight, but my wife and I can see the Stadium from our high-rise window, about two miles away. One thing I've learned is that "live" broadcasts are a few seconds behind the action. When I see a gamecock pass, exciting run, or field-goal try in a home game on TV, I check to see if I see stadium fireworks. If I see them, it means the Gamecocks have just scored, though it won't show on TV for as much as 3-4 seconds later!

The game has sentimental value, as my wife and I had our first date on the day of the UGA-South Carolina game decades ago. We were UGA students then, who couldn't have known that one day we'd be living right by the South Carolina campus.

[coxfan]

Gameday was such a big deal this year that I stayed there and skipped the baseball scrimmage. Two huge screens, a movable camera, a blimp, etc. The South Carolina horseshoe is almost the only piece of Columbia that survived Sherman's burning of the city in early 1865; it's almost entirely pre-1840's buildings, back to 1809.

When I started UGA in 1966, the Bulldogs finished #4 in the US with a 10-1 record, but had only one televised game! (The Cotton Bowl). There was no ESPN or even TBS (which was still a Georgia-only cable station in the mid-70's). So TV sports have really come a long way. But as one of my relatives joked: "You're at the age you don't need to read history; you can just remember it!"

[coxfan]

Or as I heard Lou Holtz say in a University of South Carolina commencement address: " I have an advantage over all of you. I've been 21, but you haven't been 65!"