Archive for June, 2008

Actually, I suppose this is more like screaming madly as you run around in circles…

Well, in case you haven’t noticed (and you probably haven’t) it’s been pretty quiet here at Gate 21 lately — brisk as the tomb. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am in the midst of a breakneck stretch here in which other obligations have forced me to step back briefly from this my temple of wasted time.

Anyway, given the fact that I will be moving tomorrow, I anticipate that there will be nothing new here on Gate 21 until next week (unless I get really lucky and find that I have inadvertently packed my clone in a box which the movers thoughtlessly carted off). Not that any of you actually care, but I am hoping to be back open for business full time at some point during the first week of June July.

Be that as it may — if you would be interested in contributing here at Gate 21, please feel free to email me at any time. Much as I am loathe to finally admit it, I suppose that I am now actively seeking more writers for the site, regardless of your stripes (yes, I might even let Florida fans contribute … sigh).

In the meantime, if you are looking for a little sports-blog action, you might try checking out a few of my personal favorites (a/k/a blogs that I regularly read):

(in no particular order)

• The World According to MoonDog
• 3rd Saturday in Blogtober
• Rocky Top Talk
• Fulmer’s Belly
• Your Mother Slept With Wilt Chamberlain
• Pigskin Pathos
• The BruceBall Blog

And just to show that I’m not completely fixated on Tennessee (which everyone knows is a damn lie) here are a few non-Tennessee affiliated blogs I read

• Get the Picture (Georgia)
• Hugging Harold Reynolds (Sports in General)

All of these blogs actually have some idea of what they are about, and occasionally get around to actually posting an article or two.

Anyway, hope to return to my typical level of low-quality and poor taste in the near future…

– Go Figure …

Well, as Joel pointed out, the News Sentinel’s Dave Hooker recently came out with his Top 10 games in Tennessee football history. It is an interesting list, but (like Joel) I’m not so certain I agree with all of the games on Hooker’s list.

Given the fact that I am still making my way through my “Great Games” series, it seems appropriate for me to chime in with my thoughts on this. At the risk of rendering some of my future posts in this series futile (not that they aren’t already), here is my top 10 games in Tennessee football history (with comparison to Dave Hooker’s ranking):

Gate 21’s Top 10 All-Time

Tennessee Football Games

No. 10: 1989 – Tennessee vs. UCLA

The Rose Bowl | Dave Hooker Rank: Unranked

I know that some will question this one, but this game still stands out to me as one of the best. I toyed with ranking the 1985 Auburn win at No. 10, but I have to go with the Vols 1989 trip to Pasadena to take on the Bruins. This game was early in the season, and at that point UCLA was highly touted. Tennessee had been beaten in both their prior trips to the Rose Bowl to play the Bruins (1975 and 1967), and many thought they would repeat that trend as the Vols came off of their worst season in recent memory, and a close call in their season-opener versus Colorado State. The Vols, however, stepped-up to the challenge and proved that their 5 and 6 record for 1988 was only a bump in the road as they came out gunning for the No. 6-ranked Bruins. The Vols completely shutdown the UCLA offense with their own brand of SEC defense, en route to a 24 – 6 victory. That game set the stage for the rest of the season — one which included 10 more wins and only a single loss. The Vols would go on to win an SEC Championship, beat Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl that year, and end with a No 5 ranking.

Still, by my mind, it all started in California…

No. 9: 1999 Fiesta Bowl – Florida State vs. Tennessee

Sun Devil Stadium | Dave Hooker Rank: No. 1

Dave Hooker had this game as No. 1, but I cannot in good conscience give it that distinction. While the 1999 Fiesta Bowl did give Tennessee its first Consensus National Championship since 1951, the game itself was not nearly as spectacular as others that season.

First of all, both Tennessee and Florida State played very sloppily throughout the game as a result of the more than 4-week layoff leading up to the contest. Second — in fairness to Florida State — they were playing with a back-up quarterback, Marcus Outzen, who (to my knowledge) never started another game after the championship, due to the injury to Chris Weinke.

Finally, the game was exciting, but probably only if you were a Tennessee or Florida State fan. The reason for this is that the two teams were extremely closely matched at most positions. All of that said, I have such amazing memories of this game and of finally seeing another championship for the Big Orange, that I have to include it in the Top 10, regardless of its flaws.

After all, a championship is a very special thing…

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Continuing with this “Summer of Love” (especially while I am out chasing my butt until, at least, the end of June), I want to give a big shout out to what I consider to be the best message board on the web for Tennessee fans: Smash South Sports.

Smash South Sports (or SSS) is a top-flight outfit which — in my opinion — succeeds in areas where others fail: maintaining balance.

There are numerous message boards out there, and typically they are either the sort where only the most true-blue “homers” who never question anything about the program are welcome, or they are a ranting-and-raving free-for-all inhabited primarily by those who simply want to flame away and complain about anything and everything they dislike about a given subject.

In other words, most message boards are either pure white bread or something akin to a leisurely stroll through hell…

That is what makes SSS different. It is unfiltered — so you can speak your mind freely without the unnecessary interference from overly aggressive moderators. I have never seen anyone get “moderated” due to the fact they take an unpopular or atypical position. By the same token, SSS is not a house of rants where all the posters do is complain and look for ways to call for the firing of coaches, the skewering of players, the burning of stadiums and so forth.

It is, however, a place which welcomes open discussion of a frank and often humorous nature. Furthermore, the community is one where the people get to know one another in the process of discussing all things related to Tennessee athletics, and beyond. I’ve tried a number of the message boards out there, and — in my book — SSS is the best when it comes to web forums following the Vols and the SEC.

On top of all of this, SSS has one board known as the Fark Factory, dedicated to the creation and sharing of farks (a/k/a photoshopped images) related to Tennessee and SEC sports. The Fark Factory was the recipient of the 2007 College Football Blogger Award for the Best Photoshop for the now legendary “Fark of the Covenant” which pitted the best photoshop artists for Tennessee against those from LSU in the run-up to the 2007 SEC Football Championship Game. The Fark of the Covenant is perpetually preserved at SSS, and many of the farks from that thread are also on display at Gate 21’s own Tennessee Home for the Visually Offensive for your viewing pleasure.

At any rate, if you’re looking for a great Tennessee Message board, give SSS a look. It bills itself as “the message board for the fans … by the fans.” I think it delivers.

– Go Figure …

**Disclosure: While Gate 21 and Smash South Sports both feature hyperlinks to one another, neither site, their parent companies, editors, nor webmasters receive any payment or other compensation of any type or kind in return those links. Furthermore, neither Gate 21 nor lawvol received any compensation for this review, which was not requested or solicited by Smash South Sports. This “Shout Out” represents the actual opinion of the author (for what that is worth) and was in no way influenced by any other person.

19 September 1998

vs.

(2) Florida 17 • (6) Tennessee 20

Neyland Stadium

Due to exceptionally bad planning on my part, I graduated from the University of Tennessee in four years — making my trip across the stage to collect my diploma in May of 1998…

Cartoon Courtesy of the Detroit News

I say it was bad planning because, as fate would have it — after traveling across the country with the Pride of the Southland for four years, following the Vols to every game — when Tennessee’s 1998 “season of destiny” rolled around, I was living more than six hours away in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was a student at Tarhead State (UNC) engaged in my “Trade School” studies (I call law school that mainly to annoy all the Tarhead grads who infest the area where I now live) and quite far removed from my passion for Tennessee Volunteers Football.

Thus was my lot…

For what it is worth, I blame all of this on Joel at Rocky Top Talk since, as he and I both realized a few months back, he was my “teacher” in a crib-course on how to do well on law school entrance exams, and thus Joel is totally responsible for my entry into this sordid profession and my departure from East Tennessee exactly one year too early (This all makes perfect, well-reasoned, and orderly sense in my mind, in much the same way that Alabama coach Mike DuBose ultimately concluded that “Jesus wanted us to lose to Tennessee”).

Anyway, Tennessee opened the season versus the Syracuse Orangemen, and managed to hang on to victory by the absolute narrowest of margins — namely, Jeff Hall’s foot. The Gators, on the other hand, had beaten the living hell out of some school whose name eludes me, but I am sure it has “North“, “South“, “Central” “Left“, “Up“, or “Sideways” in its name.

After the 34 to 33 victory in the Syracuse game, I was somewhat less than hopeful about the Vols chances of winning against “Lord Spurrier and his Reptile Renegades.”

Nevertheless, given my incurable and uncontrollable addiction to traveling great distances, at considerable expense, to have your dreams crushed and your soul scarred, I climbed in my Volkswagen and headed back toward Knoxville for the showdown between the Florida Gators and the Vols. This was the first time I drove from Eastern North Carolina to Tennessee for a football game — it was a new experience. Now, however, I have made this journey so many times that I have all but memorized every single exit along Interstate 40 between the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and Knoxville, and now I can (and on occasion do) drive it while sleeping.

As you might imagine, when I arrived in the Volunteer City, I didn’t have a ticket. After searching up and down Cumberland Avenue for an hour-or-two, I finally managed to find a single ticket, in return for all of the remaining money I had to eat on for the rest of my first semester of law school (making sure not to repeat my 1992 mistake of buying student tickets).

Left to Right: My Ticket to the 1998 game • My friend’s ticket to the same game • My infamous student ticket from the 1992 game when I wasn’t yet a student

Despite the fact that my ticket told me that my butt was supposed to be planted in Section ZZ15 in the North Endzone Upperdeck, I chose Row 18 of Section D — the heart of the student section — as my vantage point for the game, since all of my friends were on the “5-year plan” (or 6, or 7, or …) and that is where they were situated. Considering that there were somewhere between 250 and 5,000 people crammed into that row, and each of those around it, apparently I wasn’t the only one bending the rules — or the bleachers on which we all stood, until they finally gave way and broke off of the concrete risers in the 4th-quarter.

The contest opened with the “Challenger,” the bald eagle soaring his way down from the North endzone across the Pride of the Southland during the National Anthem. How exactly that beautiful bird could find where he was supposed to go amidst the screaming of nearly 108,000 fans with flashbulbs turning the stands into a bank of strobe lights, is beyond me. What a way to start a hot and steamy fistfight.

And boy was it hot and steamy that night…

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Despite my thoughts on Legion Field, Tom Mattingly has written govolsxtra.com/news/2008/may/31/legion-field-football-aura-was-special/” target=”_blank”>a fabulous article on the Aura of Legion Field. This article is a great read, and even though I personally think Legion Field is a dive as stadiums go, he makes a strong case for Legion Field being the one-time “Football Capital of the South.“

Mattingly writes so poetically about the venue:

When Tennessee and Alabama squared off, there was the sight of Tennessee orange on the press box sideline and Alabama crimson on the east sideline. It was football exactly the way the gods decreed it.

Great imagery.

Actually, about everything Tom Mattingly writes is great and you should really do yourself a favor and check out his “official” writing for GoVolsXtra as well as his blog, “The Vol Historian” which is also hosted on GVX. If you are a Tennessee fan, and love reminiscing, then you will love his stuff. In my book, he’s a first-rate writer and he has forgotten more about the Tennessee Volunteers than most of us will ever know.

Mattingly’s article just goes to show that, despite my claims to the contrary, I am an idiot…

– Go Figure …

**Notice: This “Shout Out” represents the actual opinion of the author (for what that is worth) and was in no way influenced by any other person.

Not that anyone out there is actually reading…

Lawvol’s Planner

As you can see from my schedule, my life has been a bit busy of late. Between work, life, buying and selling my house, coaching Little League, beating up old ladies on the side of the road, and thinking up new and interesting ways to contemplate my navel I’ve been a bit crunched for time. Thus, I want to formally make excuses in advance for my hit-or-miss posting which will occur over the next few weeks.

With any luck, I’ll be back up and running as usual in July. Until then, my posts may be a bit sporadic, and of more dubious (a/k/a “crappy”) quality than my usual level of mindless and meaningless drivel.

I promise that, once things are a bit more settled, I’ll return to my current schedule of daily posting with the same poor writing and lack of intelligent thought that you have come to expect from the temple of wasted time that is Gate 21.

In the meantime, feel free to send me nasty comments and emails about how lazy I am and how I lack character…

Should any brave soul feel compelled, I welcome guest writers who would like to submit posts for publication. If you are interested (and I seriously doubt any of you are) simply email me by clicking my signature at the bottom of the post and we’ll get you set up (I’ll even do you up a fancy-schmancy avatar if you like).

– Go Figure …

Images Courtesy of: Photo of the Day Blog

1995-96 CompUSA Citrus Bowl

(1 January 1996)

vs.

Tennessee 20 • Ohio State 14

Florida Citrus Bowl Stadium

Continuing on with 1995, after beating Bama soundly and ending the 10-year drought against the Crimson Tide, the Tennessee Volunteers finished out their regular season at 10-1. Their only loss coming at the hands of the Florida Gators in a 62-37 drubbing which tarnishes the 1995 team’s otherwise exemplary record. Tennessee finished the season ranked 4th, but in the days of the so-called Bowl Alliance, the “premier” bowls were reserved only for conference champions, thus, Tennessee received a bid to the “first outside the money” CompUSA Florida Citrus Bowl to take on the similarly situated Ohio State Buckeyes, who lost their last game of the season against arch-rival Michigan, and with it the Big 11 10 title, and ended the seasons ranked … uhh … 4th also.

Cover from the Official 1996 Citrus Bowl Program. Ohio State later sued the bowl committee for omitting “THE” (in all caps and 72 pt font) from their name — the matter was ultimately resolved in a settlement whereby Ohio State received a case of oranges and an autographed photo of Mickey Mouse.

The fact of the matter remains, no matter what either school would claim publicly, neither Tennessee nor Ohio State wanted to be in Orlando on New Year’s Day. Both had completed 1-loss seasons, and both came within a half of playing for the National Championship or, at a minimum, playing in one of the top-tier Alliance Bowls. Ohio State wanted to be in Pasadena and Tennessee in New Orleans or Tempe. Regardless of what they wanted, they were set to play one another in a game which — in my book — ranks as one of the best bowl games I’ve ever watched in person or on television.

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