Tennessee buries the past, raises the dead in dramatic defeat of Alabama
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Our relationship with sports is funny. Men running around in colorful shirts, wearing hard hats and fighting over a leather balloon sounds silly. It sounds meaningless. And the idea that people turn over billions of dollars to experience it is mind-boggling. But as Pusha T once said – and all of us have said since – if you know, you know.
My mom got remarried when I was 8 years old, and we suddenly found ourselves at Neyland Stadium every home game. First in the upper South endzone, then really low in the South endzone, close to the band I would later march in, and finally in the Northeast endzone, where the other season ticket holders around us would become like family. These angles of the field are burned into my mind. The sound of my mother’s supernaturally loud clapping, my dad yelling, “They’ve been doing it all day” after the first penalty of the game, drawing laughs from surrounding fans, and the reverent humor of swaying fans leaning as far as possible as the band holds out a long fermata near the end of the post-game “Tennessee Waltz” are sounds and feelings that I can recall with no effort. These things, and hundreds of other little Volunteer vignettes, are part of me. And on any given autumn Saturday, all of those little feelings amass into one overwhelming chorus of memory and identity, far beyond touchdowns and tackles.
Our relationship with sports is funny.
Saturday, after Tennessee’s dramatic and improbable win over the then-No. 3 Alabama Crimson Tide, which ended a 15-game stretch of pain for the Vols, another funny relationship caught my eye. Tennessee fans’ relationship with social media.
There is a long-running joke that #VolTwitter is still undefeated, often outshining Tennessee Athletics in their reaction time to success/failure, willingness to constantly put on more digital steam, their ability to track planes carrying coaches and recruits and their speed at cranking out world-class content meant to upset and annoy any and all other college football teams. They will hunt down the camera angles that confirm a bad call, they will hunt down the home address of a corrupt referee or photos to prove the officials are secretly fans of our opponents. #VolTwitter has kept the energy up throughout coaching disasters, administrative disasters, riots, scandals and investigations, mostly laughing through a mouthful of blood. #VolTwitter is both fierce and funny.
Saturday night, in an emotional blast that allegedly moved the seismograph at nearby Sequoyah Library, just after Chase McGrath’s partially blocked 40-yard field goal limped successfully through the goalposts, something different happened on the Vol web.
People started posting messages to folks that aren’t physically here anymore. I saw tweets and posts across platforms of folks speaking to lost parents and siblings and friends with messages of, “I know you saw what just happened. Can you believe it?” Or more solemnly, “I wish we could’ve watched this game together, but I know you’re so excited that we finally did it.”
In Neyland Stadium and in wild living rooms across a fanbase, there were orange-clad emptinesses brought back nearer to life in a wave of happiness, captured in these funny, heart-wrenching posts in public forums. They didn’t feel like memorials; they were conversations. This revival experience isn’t limited to sports, of course, but I think this kind of transcendent experience requires either extreme peace or, as we saw on Saturday, a wildly divine frenzy.
I know the precise sequence of calls we would’ve gotten from my great aunt, a reformed Bama fan who could tell you at length about the glories of the SEC that she’d witnessed after coming to East Tennessee in the early 1940s. She pivoted to Tennessee in the early ’90s and never looked back. The first call would be short, just after Bama defender Dallas Turner’s scoop and score that seemed to cut the heart out of the stadium: “What in the world are they doing?” Then after the missed Alabama field goal that gave us a chance: “I am a nervous wreck. I’ll talk to you after.” And after the walk-off, game-winning field goal: a few seconds of laughter followed by, “Oh, can you believe it?” I genuinely feel like I got those calls on Saturday, even though the last call from that number came in the spring of 2019.
Our relationship with sports is funny.
So on this particular autumn Saturday, in a room full of overjoyed relatives in West Knoxville, I watched 15 years of tension instantaneously resolved, rendering so many of those orange-clad emptinesses suddenly, momentarily, full again, reanimated in an earth-moving, ear-splitting chorus of memory and identity, far beyond tackles and touchdowns.
If you know, you know.
