Two kids in the seventh grade, one sports bet, several grudges held for the better part of two decades.
Good morning and Go Dawgs.
First and foremost, I hope that, if you’re in the southeastern United States, you’re hunkering down to the best of your ability and riding out the storm. Thankfully my electricity here in wet and windy Athens, GA has only flickered on and off.
Second, good to be here again. I am a Georgia grad, but I do a lot of stuff over at Purdue’s site because I’m a masochist.
We have a football game this weekend that’s, uh, kind of important. Your second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs travel to Tuscaloosa for the first time since the shortened 2020 season. The Dawgs’ previous visit was thirteen years earlier.
We’re not gonna talk about anything that’s happened since 2007. Not even the time the good guys won a Natty against the Red Elephants.
This is about when I learned to truly hate in the sphere college football. As they say in our weird little college football social circle on the internet…HATE FEEDS THE DAWG. However, I promise there is a lesson learned at the end.
Enough preamble. Let’s flash back to 2007. Allow me to paint the picture.
It is September. Garrett Shearman is a seventh grade student at Lost Mountain Middle School. He has been watching Georgia Bulldogs football since 1999 or 2000. Two of his sisters currently attend UGA and his third sister is set to attend. Garrett recently attended his first ever game at Sanford Stadium, the season-opening win against Oklahoma State.
Dropping the third person, basically this was the first period of my life where I was thinking “I WANT TO BE A GOSH DARN JAWJAH BOOLDOG.” Such is to say, my fandom reached its first ever level of insanity. This level has lasted for 17 years.
In my homeroom class in middle school, I sat across from an especially obnoxious Alabama fan. He was not a terrible person, but he certainly was an obnoxious football fan.
We’ll call him Mason Gorham. Mostly because his name is Mason Gorham and I hope he sees this on Facebook or something.
So Mason is talking Kelee Ringo vertical jump levels of trash all week leading up to September 22. I finally break and decide to make my first and only ever sports bet in my 29 years on this planet:
I bet you $10 Georgia wins this weekend. Double to $20 if one team wins in overtime.
I painted mailboxes and mowed lawns in my neighborhood. I had some chore money to throw around and, most importantly, I really wanted to shut him up.
Mason accepted the bet. We had multiple witnesses, including our Tennessee fan homeroom teacher who laughed about it but obviously was not going to promote gambling between two actual children. She’ll come back into this later.
Now for the actual game.
It’s a primetime night game (like this weekend) and I’m watching on the edge of my seat.
I’m watching by myself because my dad wants to watch every game on mute like a psychopath and I can’t watch football without crowd noise and the music and the full fanfare.
One of my nervous habits is playing Redcoat songs on a guitar when it’s a close game. So as the game heads to overtime, I’m playing our terrifying death march third down song on an acoustic guitar. I have actually recorded a version of it here 17 years later if you’re interested. Can you tell I’m Athens music trash? That I work at the 40 Watt? That I’m in a mediocre metal band?
Anyway, after the infamous Britney Spears line featured in the broadcast, the Dawgs leave Bryant-Denny with a huge win in overtime. My first thought isn’t the $20 owed to me, it’s how proud I am to be a Dawgs fan.
Then it’s my $20.
I showed up to school on Monday morning in pure “WHERE’S MY MONEY?” form. I was thinking about the all the Pop Tarts I could buy with twenty dollars soaked in the tears of a Bama fan. There is an absolutely colossal grin on my face as he walks into the classroom.
I ask where my Andrew Jackson bill is.
This coward, this punk, this miscreant, this affront to Alabamians does not even pretend to say “I’ll pay you later.”
He drops the most playground spoiled brat line that has been burned into my brain since the morning of September 24th, 2007:
I know you wouldn’t have paid me $20 if I won. I’m not paying you anything.
I even showed him two ten dollar bills the Friday before. Oh yes, Mr. Gorham, to quote Earth, Wind & Fire: I remember the 21st night of September. Well, afternoon, but still.
Our classmates start coming to my corner of the argument. They’re all calling BS on him, but obviously nobody can force him to give me $20. My last name starts with an S, but it’s not Soprano.
Even our homeroom teacher, who of course could not do anything realistically, told him he was in the wrong.
What’s the late penalty or interest rate on $20 from 2007? Asking for a friend.
Mason, wherever you are, you owe me.
Was this insanely petty to write? Of course it was. That’s like 99% of the point. The remaining 1% relates to the previously teased lesson learned:
I was willing to risk a small fortune (relative to a twelve-year-old kid) to go to battle for my Dawgs just because I thought an Alabama fan was annoying. I would have paid up if Alabama won that evening. I walked away with no financial gains, but a lot of pride.
I love the Georgia Bulldogs. What I gained from this experience is that you can’t trust low-down-dirty opposing fans, and that letting that “friendly” (sure let’s say friendly) hate flow is worth more than twenty dollars because you love your team that much. You will never catch me doing an SEC chant. Why?
My outlook as a fan is simple: Go Dawgs, everybody else can kick rocks.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Garrett D. Shearman
University of Georgia c/o 2017