Sewanee and my first game in front of my family

Cindy and I drove up to Sewanee today. So much nostalgia. We were caravaning with George and Kim Berry. Kind of. They were about twenty minutes behind us by the time we made it to the Blue Chair Restaurant in Sewanee. We were excited about getting together but the service was abysmal. If we hadn't had a lot of catching up to do, and if there were other places to eat in Sewanee, I think we would have gone elsewhere.

We finally finished our meal and drove down to the playing field (I say playing field, because calling it a stadium is not exactly accurate). That place suffers from a bad case of resting on their laurels. I thought W&L was covered up in the past. Sewanee may be worse.

I did see young girls in sundresses and cowboy boots. I kind of thought the sundresses were the odd part of the ensemble. I kind of think the girls were more comfortable in the boots. Cindy says she thought that was odd to the point of innapropriate.

Fortunately, W&L won. I got a chance to see a few folks I knew. I got introduced to the head football coach, as a stranger, which was odd, since he was one of the coaches when I was a Senior in college. Put that together with seeing George Ballantyne and getting ignored the first time he came close, and I felt a little like the odd man out.

Forget that we were linebackers together for four years, live in neighboring communities and my wife and daughter have both been patients in his office. Well, he used to ignore me when we were fellow students on the collonade at W&L.

Perhaps the best example of George ignoring me occurred when we were seniors and were practicing blocking field goals. George lined up behind me and in his single-mindedness, ran me over, placing his knee in the back of my head and causing me to suffer a concussion and the odd experience of only being able to see through a box in front of my eyes for about an hour.

That was wierd.

I guess the best memory of football at Sewanee was my first trip there, when we were freshmen. We had been reduced to six remaining linebackers and I was finally dressing out for the home games. But I still hadn't broken in to the group that dressed out for away games. That honor fell to Ed Tutak, a player from New York who was being courted by the coaches. Hindsight is 20/20 but Ed quit football after being allowed to letter as a freshman. Meanwhile, little quick linebackers from Dunwoody High School hung out until their senior years and fell three quarters short of lettering as a freshman (and thus for all four years).

Anyway, I attended my Freshman Psychology class on the Friday afternoon before the Sewanee game in Sewanee. As class let out, I was heading back to my dorm room when I found a note on my door in the dorm from Don Crossley telling me to pack and get dressed for the trip to Sewanee. It turned out that Ed Tutak had been fooling around in the freshman dorms before getting dressed for the trip to Chattanooga. In his playing around, he cut his foot and suddenly wasn't available for the game. So the travel opportunity fell to me who was next in line on the depth chart.

So, I quickly dressed in a coat and tie, ran to the locker room and got my equipment bag on the bus to travel the short airplane ride from Roanoke to Chattanooga. I didn't even have time to contact my parents, who were at my brother's high school game with Henderson High.

That evening, we checked in to the Holiday Inn in Tiftonia, Tennessee and I finally got to call my parents and let them know I was dressing out for the Sewanee game. I asked them if they could come up for the game in Sewanee.

Well, of course they could. I remember sitting on the bus in the Holiday Inn parking lot in Tiftonia and seeing my family drive up to the bus as we pulled out for the short ride to Sewanee. I couldn't see them until after the game was over.

Sadly, we lost. But the linebackers led the defense in tackles, each of us getting our chances to tackle the Sewanee ballcarriers, and I finally got to see my family after a college football game.

There were four years of football to play and watch. But that was the first game in which I got to play in front of my family. I have always had a place in my heart for the Sewanee game. A lot more significance than the others we played.