I though I’d already gone through all the rites of passage life has to offer to a Tennessee Volunteers fan.
I grew up hiking across campus through the summer heat and the fall chills because parking was cheapest in Fort Sanders. I’ve driven through the snow to get to a midweek January showdown with Vanderbilt in the Tommy Bowl. I smoked my victory cigar in Neyland to the sweet sound of Dixieland Delight after we toppled a dynasty.
Much to my surprise this scorching summer morning, I participated in yet another right of passage. I drove to 5 different convenience stores before I could find one that hadn’t sold out of the newspaper, headlined: ROCKY TOPS! Fiery, Fearless Tennessee Reaches the Pinnacle.
It’s hard to quantify and understand the exuberance of winning. Last night I saw grown men, strangers to one another, embracing like adolescents on the last night of a church youth retreat. Across our state no doubt millions of our brothers and sisters sat breathless as Aaron Combs threw that final pitch, vanquishing Texas A&M and confirming for the world what we’ve always believed about ourselves: we are champions.
This team and it’s personalities will live on as legends in Knoxville for generations. A scrappy, left handed pitcher who barely saw action in conference play til his senior year, a skinny sophomore from Hays, Kansas unknown to the world before bursting into the national consciousness in Omaha, and the greatest hitter Rocky Top has ever produced worked in concert to do something that I’ve never seen a Tennessee team do in my life, win the last game of the season.
Voice of the Baseball Vols John Wilkerson delivered the performance of a lifetime on his final call. It is difficult to live up to the moment, it’s even more difficult to pull off a salute to the great John Ward without coming off as kitschy or imitative. Wilkerson seamlessly threaded the needle with a call for the ages.
Tennessee baseball was a non factor to most, this author included, until the 2022 team and it’s bad boy antics captured people’s interest. You’d never know it walking around Knoxville today. The place is as alive with energy as I’ve ever seen it. Everyone is clad in orange, go Vols is on the lips of passersby, and as they ambled into work this morning the words, “can you believe it?!” echoed around coffee pots across the town. Can you imagine what it would be like if we did this in football? Pandemonium reigns ?
On Thursday night we will have the first presidential debate of the cycle, an event certain to highlight the divisions among us and bring us crashing back to reality. Life today is brimming with corrosive forces that highlight our divisions and make us afraid of one another. Mankind has a need for belonging. We desire and were created for clanship. In a world that isolates and divides, sports have such a power for good, an enigmatic ability to unite the masses, black and white, democrat and Republican. For a few days, we will pound our swords into plowshares, smile at the clerk at the grocery store, turn off the news and hopefully reflect a little bit on what makes life worth living in the first place. Don’t take this for granted, it’s been 26 years in the making. We are Champions again. Go Big Orange.
Not With a Bang 