I’ve never cared about a football team larger than my high school’s. Even when my cousin walked out with the Alabama Crimson Tide a decade ago, the Southeastern Conference meant nothing to me. I saw photos of his championship ring on Instagram, shiny as a bride. Then I married a University of Texas graduate. My husband anticipated the Longhorns’ long-awaited entry into the SEC at least as much as our wedding. My family became Longhorn-in-laws, dutifully asking after Quinn Ewers at the holidays as though he were our son. “He’s lost weight,” I would say, echoing the television announcers I overheard from the kitchen, “And he’s going to church!” Still, my husband’s college football fervor seemed like a personality quirk, like his collection of Beethoven records or his interest in Czech pilsners.
Soon after my marriage, my brother Leo was appointed Marine officer instructor for the University of Florida’s Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He directed the Gators’ pre-game military flyover and had season tickets to share. One by one, my parents and siblings were baptized in the Swamp, as Florida’s stadium is called, and my family’s conversion to the SEC was complete. My husband and I planned to attend the Florida-Texas game last October, but the doctor said I couldn’t fly at 38 weeks pregnant. My husband had nearly overcome his disappointment by the time our daughter was born.
We finally made it to Gainesville. This fall, Leo married a fellow Gator on an away-game weekend. We’d never have found lodgings if the game were in the Swamp. My immediate family is now 17 adults and ten children. Half the adults and all the kids stayed at a rental compound near the university, two bungalows lassoed together by a wraparound porch, with a pool under a giant black cage in the front yard. The pool cage is normal in Florida, says Leo; it keeps out the bugs (huge) and stray foliage (voluminous). It also dwarfs the bungalow complex, which squats behind it like a locker room. Imagine the tailgates. It must be booked out for years of home games. One problem: there are no lights. You hear all the time that kids these days are sheltered, risk-averse. Not my nieces and nephews. After the rehearsal dinner, they suit up and dive in, playing Marco Polo with their eyes open in the dark. I count their heads over and over from the pool’s edge, hectoring them about running and pushing. Then the groom shows up and starts hurling them into the deep end. They line up like bowling pins to be tossed, screaming with delight. The neighbors don’t seem to mind the noise. This would never happen in Pennsylvania. On the morning of the wedding, some of our party take the kids to an alligator preserve – real swamp, real gators. My niece Annie steps on a hornets’ nest and is badly stung: certainly not the worst possible wildlife encounter under the circumstances. Saying “at least you weren’t snatched by an alligator” doesn’t seem to console her, though.
Traffic down University Avenue to the campus’s Catholic church, St. Augustine, is horrific. “But it’s an away game,” I plead with the navigation system as it slowly adds minutes to our arrival time. Fans crowd street corners and spill out of bars, choking the lanes. The Gators’ match-up against the Auburn Tigers will play on every TV in Gainesville this evening. My husband drops me in front of the church, breathless, about two minutes before the bridal procession begins. “Game day,” the wedding coordinator clucks sympathetically. Half my family arrives late.
A spot of Florida lore for the weekend: in 1949, an insurance salesman and Gator fan named George Edmondson Jr. led his section in a cheer: “Two bits! Four bits! Six bits! A dollar! All for the Gator! Stand up and holler!” It’s no Viking Row, but it caught on. He did this at home games for the next 59 years. For the wedding, my eight-year-old nephew dons Mr. Two Bits’ signature outfit (insurance casual: yellow dress shirt, blue-and-orange striped tie) and leads this cheer after dessert, to wild applause. The Auburn game plays on TV screens above the dance floor. We send off the bride and groom under a flurry of blue-and-orange pom-poms. The Gators win.
What’s still special about college football, now players make millions? Announcers talk about “true freshmen” like they’ve sighted Bigfoot. Many players have been functionally professional athletes for years. But college football still has a regionality, a quirkiness, that comes from being part-owned by teenaged students and nostalgic old-timers. Gator football isn’t one entertainment among many in a big city, but the culture of Gainesville itself. I still don’t know much about pockets or audibles or coverage but, under the Spanish moss and live oaks of central Florida, I am, this weekend, a Gator.
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