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Editor's Note: Geoffrey Norman is working on a book about college football in the state of Florida. Each week during the 2001 season, he will send a letter to Page 2, in which he will try to make sense of the personalities, events and peculiar culture that make up Sunshine State football.
Dear Page 2:
 Tennessee is coming to the Swamp this weekend and, as usual, this has raised a lot of emotional temperatures. There is something about Tennessee that sets Gators off. For a long time, Florida got its coaches and athletics directors from Tennessee, one of the dominate programs in the South. The implicit message was: With enough help from men from Tennessee, you may someday attain glory. For a lot of years, Gator football suffered from an inferiority complex. Which is understandable since, for a lot of years, Gator football suffered from a lot of inferiority.
The talent was all around, waiting for the right coach to come along and mobilize it, but it never seemed to happen. As of 1980, Florida had never won an SEC championship. When, at last, Florida hired a coach with the requisite fire and determination, he led the program not to glory but almost to ruin. Florida won enough games under Charley Pell to take its first SEC but also broke enough rules that the NCAA took the championships -- along with some scholarships -- away and banned a couple of coaches from the game for life. It was a public humiliation and, among the many forces they blamed for their plight, Gator fans included Tennessee and its athletic director, who had also been a coach at Florida before he was fired.
The acids of resentment corroded the Gator soul. Another coach was fired, this one for stealing chicken, while other schools -- in the Gator view -- were knocking off banks. The school dodged the NCAA "death penalty" and hired a native of Tennessee who had become a Gator with the ferocity of most late converts. Since the second coming of Steve Spurrier, Florida has owned the SEC and Tennessee. And Gator fans have soothed all those old hurts by gleefully rubbing it in, every chance they get.
|  | | Since the second coming of Steve Spurrier, Florida has owned the SEC and Tennessee. |
Of all SEC teams, the Gators have been especially cruel to Tennessee. They have dominated the Vols on the field (Peyton Manning never beat Florida), and ridiculed them everywhere else. There must be millions of Gators -- who would otherwise have never been wired -- who went out and bought themselves computers just so they could get on line and say ugly things about Tennessee. The jokes accumulate almost geometrically as the game approaches and they are all variations on the same theme: The Vols are a bunch of dumb mountain folks of dubious ancestry.
Why is orange the Tennessee color?
Because they can wear the same jersey to play football on Saturday, go deer hunting on Sunday, and work the chain gain during the week.
How do you get a Vol off your front porch?
Pay him for the pizza.
What do you call a truck driver hauling a load of sheep to Tennessee?
A pimp.
And so on, endlessly. Har, har, har.
The head coach of Florida is, of course, above this kind of thing. Sort of. Instead of third-hand jokes, he takes digs of a different order. When the Tennessee coach complimented the Gator team effusively after a loss, going on about their great coaches and talented players, Spurrier remarked, with his trademark lack of graciousness, that it sounded like "the excuse of a coach who got beat." And after keeping Tennessee from yet another BCS bowl bid and sending the Vols on one more trip to Orlando, Spurrier said that you couldn't spell Citrus Bowl without the U T.
Spurrier has been saying, all week, that this Saturday's game is the biggest of the year for the Gators, and this is self-evident. Both teams are looking at a chance to go to the Rose Bowl and play for the national championship. But while the lame Internet jokes have been moving through cyberspace at warp speed, they seem to lack the usual malice. The real ugliness is being played out in other realms, as every college football fan knows. For the last two weeks, emotions down here have seethed around Spurrier's charge that an FSU player tried to injure two of his players, successfully in one case, and that the Seminoles are coached to play dirty.
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In a perfect football universe, as seen by fans, Florida, FSU and Miami would all play each other in the regular season. But they could kill each other off, as far as national title hopes go, like scorpions in a bottle, under this format. Maybe, then, Spurrier is manipulating things according to some larger, strategic plan. FSU and Florida are under contract for three more games. After that, who knows? And by then, perhaps there will be a playoff system that will bring a new kind of rationality to the way college football determines who is No. 1. |
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"Sometimes you wonder if their coaches instruct this type of action ...," Spurrier said in full righteousness. "And we've had enough ... I've had enough of it. Sometimes, somebody has got to speak out, so I am speaking out for Earnest Graham [the injured running back] and for, really, everybody in college football. This kind of crap should not happen ... yet it happens over and over, it seems like, when we play these guys. It's the only team we play that this stuff ever happens."
This, of course, was not the first time Spurrier has taken this kind of shot at FSU, so barely buried memories quickly resurfaced. There was the time when Spurrier accused FSU players of hitting his quarterback late when the Seminoles upset a No. 1-ranked Gator team in Tallahassee. He did not merely make the charge; he rode it like a temperance crusader at war with demon rum. Made a tape of the alleged late hits and sent it around, repeated the charge to anyone in the press who would listen and report it -- which was everyone -- and even used public podiums, which he and Bobby Bowden shared, to voice the complaint.
He would not let it go -- even though he was sanctioned by the American Football Coaches Association for unprofessional conduct -- until after the Gators had won a rematch in the Sugar Bowl and their first national championship. Then Spurrier seemed to dismiss the whole thing as successful gamesmanship, though he later backed off that, and insisted he had been sincere, and right, all along.
FSU fans brought all this out, last week, along with several other old insults they believe they have suffered in the age of Spurrier. These included the time, during a a brawl before another game in Tallahassee, when a Florida quarterback seemed to take aim at Bowden with a football. This episode, they point out, was handled between the two schools' athletics departments, and the quarterback wound up calling Bowden to apologize. In the FSU fans' view, which is shared by many who don't have a dog in this fight, this is the way these things should be handled. Right or wrong on the issues, Spurrier should never have gone to the press. But then, that is Spurrier.
As the war of words escalated, the tale surfaced of a Mississippi State player who claims a Florida player stuck his hand inside the man's face mask and tried to gouge his eye out. The player repeated the charge to a Florida columnist, but would not name names because he couldn't be sure who the guilty Florida player was.
"Kind of ironic," Wayne Madkin, the Mississippi State player said of Spurrier's campaign against the kind of things that routinely happen in a pileup.
Bobby Bowden, according to people who know him, was as angry as he ever gets and indulged in what is, for him, an outburst:
"I've coached against Joe Paterno, a lot of great coaches ... I've never, in 47 years, had a coach accuse any of my players of dirty play. This is twice he has. It's sad, really." (Actually, two other coaches have made the charge. Neither of these coaches, however, had the persistence or the media skills of Spurrier, who can, if he doesn't make his charges stick, at least make them stick around.)
And the FSU athletics director, Dave Hart, normally a mild man with the temperament of a CEO, said of the "head coach in Gainesville" (Spurrier makes a point of referring to FSU as "that school from Tallahassee," so pissiness gets repaid with more pissiness) that it "would be good if somebody'd just spank him and put him to bed and hope he wakes up all grown up."
As the Tennessee game approached, Spurrier said that there would be another time to settle all this, and that there would be a "winner and a loser," conjuring up the image of a legal action. His injured player had already hinted he might sue.
This being Florida, where the last presidential election was famously decided -- or not -- by a lot of guys who wear expensive suits and travel in executive jets and settle things with writs and briefs, the threat may not be idle. Florida is fertile ground for litigators. The state made billionaires out of lawyers who sued the tobacco companies, and surely some would love to become famous for settling the Gators-Seminoles dispute in court. The prospect is enough to drive the ordinary fan to despair. For them, college football is a refuge from that universe. College football, in all its murkiness, is clean when compared to the usual high profile lawsuit. If the game goes to court over this, Spurrier could be remembered as the man who ruined the sport.
Beneath all the surface turmoil and histrionics, people around college football in the state who are talking about the episode (and they don't talk about much else) wonder, "Why?"
What, they ask, is Spurrier's point? The game is over, and his team won. Even if he is right (opinions, even among the disinterested, differ), what does he gain? The whole thing is one of those famous "distractions" coaches are always lamenting, at a time when his team is getting ready to play the most important game of its season, or any season, since it played FSU in that rematch for the national title, five years ago. If he had a beef, why not handle it the normal way, with a phone call to the people at FSU? If he thought he needed it for motivation -- and what Florida team could possibly not get up for FSU -- then keep the film and show it to his players before next year's game.
|  | | Spurrier's competitiveness never rests. Nothing is "just a game," and winning, while it may be everything, settles nothing. |
One theory, quickly advanced, is that Spurrier doesn't like playing FSU at all, and especially not as Florida's last regularly scheduled game of the season. (This year's Tennessee game is a makeup for the one that was called off after Sept. 11.) FSU is not in the SEC, but inevitably highly ranked. Beating FSU doesn't get Florida any closer to a conference championship, while losing can kill the chance for a national title. Spurrier has never made any secret of his wish that they play the game earlier in the season, when the stakes are not so high and when, ideally, Florida will still be in the hunt for the SEC championship. The reasoning was the same when Florida stopped scheduling Miami in the 1980s after it added another SEC game. (Miami and Florida have games scheduled for 2002 and 2003.)
In a perfect football universe, as seen by fans, Florida, FSU and Miami would all play each other in the regular season. But they could kill each other off, as far as national title hopes go, like scorpions in a bottle, under this format. Maybe, then, Spurrier is manipulating things according to some larger, strategic plan. FSU and Florida are under contract for three more games. After that, who knows? And by then, perhaps there will be a playoff system that will bring a new kind of rationality to the way college football determines who is No. 1.
An alternate -- though not entirely opposing -- theory is that "Spurrier is just being Spurrier."
Steve Spurrier lives in a Manichaean universe of Gators and Gator Haters. In a way, he has helped this vision become reality by making Gator Haters out of a lot of people who were indifferent before he came along. No Tennessee fans, these days, feel tepidly about the Gators and Spurrier. In an "us" against "them" world, you not only never back down from a fight, you never pass up a chance to start one. Spurrier never misses an opportunity to get inside the heads of his enemies. While Bowden has been plainly distressed by the controversy, and even some Gator boosters have been disturbed, Spurrier seems positively to relish it.
Steve Spurrier is that fascinating figure in American life -- a lightning rod for furious, inchoate passions, a man of enormous talent with an unquenchable and sometimes self-destructive appetite for controversy and crisis. The handiest analogies are to a couple of political figures -- Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton -- who fired the same passions among their followers and enemies, and who could not seem to help themselves. In these essentially lonely and isolate souls, all life comes down to conflict (Spurrier is famously competitive, even for a coach), and there are no time outs. For them, nothing is "just a game," and while winning may be everything, it settles nothing. The fight goes on and on.
I suspect that Spurrier will stir this pot vigorously until he finds another that is hotter and more savory. And if Florida wins out, beating Miami in the Rose Bowl for the state and national title, then next year, with the Hurricanes and the Seminoles on the schedule, he'll just turn up the heat and make things even hotter.
Sincerely,
Geoffrey Norman
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