Saturday afternoon in Knoxville
Lucky we swallowed hard and bought ourselves 8 gallons of gasoline at $4.499 a gallon before we hit the sack… by morning it was five bucks.
Anyways…
We got downtown early on this warm, muggy and sun drenched day in Knoxville, eagerly anticipating the big day ahead of us. And while we were looking forward to all the pageantry and tradition that goes with Tennessee football, one thing we were not anticipating was a competitive football game. As it turned out we were spot on in that assessment.
When we arrived outside the stadium, we saw the “Vol Walk” was well underway. What is the Vol Walk? It is sort of a parade of the players from the athletic center down a windy path, where Tennessee fans assemble along the path and cheer on their players. The parade is led by head coach Phillip Fullmer and their coonhound mascot, “Smokey”. The marching band is perched on a hilltop, playing the state’s unofficial anthem, “Rocky Top”. Yeah, we’re in for one special day.
From there we walked around the outside of the stadium, and despite my gimpy leg (I fell off a ladder a week ago, fractured fibula) we got all the way down to the shores of the Tennessee River, and checked out all the boaters decked out with their tailgate gear as they were parked in their slips. Absolutely awesome!
Neyland Stadium is one of those venues built decades ago and added on to again and again, and its current capacity is a tad over 102,000. But this is one intimate venue despite its size, the second deck pitch is steep, and you sit right on top of the action. Being a completely enclosed stadium, the place gets noisy (yes even when UAB is the opponent). Rocky Top is the signature sing along song, and everyone sings. The entire building is decked out in Tennessee orange.
Which, by the way, is not just any orange. Wanting to fit in, I wore the only orange shirt I had, a polo shirt for the Clemson Tigers. Unfortunately, Clemson orange has almost a reddish/purple hue to it, and I ended up getting called out on this more than a few times. Oops!
The game itself was a clunker - UAB managed to do something stupid each time it had the ball, Tennessee moved the ball with precision and efficiency, and by the time it was over Tennessee had itself their first win of the season by a 35-3 score and it could have been much worse.
As we headed out of the building to make our way to the car and begin the second part of the day’s adventure, we were hitting “refresh” on the mobile phone web browser to keep an eye on another game back home… Temple had just scored to take a late 28-24 lead against UB… one last chance…
Then we saw it - “Buffalo 30, Temple 28, F.” Holy crap, what did we miss back in Buffalo?!
