Since May I've been saying that Georgia was the big game I felt most comfortable about UT winning. I thought we'd probably lose to Cal and I thought we'd lose to Florida. Now, I didn't think we'd give up more than a 100 points or that watching UT play in the Swamp would make me want to wrap myself in raw chicken and go swimming in Lake Alice, but I thought we would lose those games.
All through the long, hot summer months and on through the long, hot early fall, it has remained stiflingly hot and I've stuck with my prediction. For the entire weekend surrounding this game, I sweated everywhere I went. And not just because I was nervous about the outcome.
But as game day dawned around midnight on Saturday, I started to worry. The shots of Jager in Knoxville's old city didn't help assuage these concerns. Nor did having my friends Junaid and Tardio in town to help distract me from the upcoming game. Nope, as Saturday dawned I was filled with fear. That's what happens when your team has gone 15-12 in the past 27 games.
1. Tardio arrives in time to hear me break down the LSU-Florida game on Chris Verson's Memphis radio show. Vernon is the genius who wrote Colonel Reb is Crying (which, for the record, gets funnier the more times and more seasons you listen to it). Tardio confronts me, "How many LSU players can you name?" "Like 15 or 20," I say. "Name them," he says. I refuse. After all, my immense football knowledge is not some parlor trick to break out to amuse others. Also, I got to nine.
2. This is not the only thing Tardio has been ridiculing me about. For the past month, he's attacked my recent bar contention that, "This year, winter isn't coming." I based this erudite prediction on the fact that it has been so hot in the South that I refuse to believe winter will ever arrive. Tardio ridiculed this premise to such a degree that I was forced to tell him about the year summer didn't come in America. He refused to believe this ever occurred. And I have to admit I even started doubting myself. Worse, my contention that I didn't know the year, but that it happened sometime before the Civil War yet after the Constitution was ratified, made me sound even more suspicious. And lame.
3. We go out in Knoxville's Old City because multiple undergrads tell me this is where we should go if my single friends want to chase girls. And by chase girls, I mean talk about girls while they stand around drinking beside me. By about 2 p.m., each of the three bars we go to appears to consist of 462 men and four girls. One of the girls is the trashy one wearing only a bikini top (with the accompanying pseudo-boyfriend who wants to punch everyone for having the temerity to notice that the girl he is "with" is wearing a bikini top), one of the girls is a lesbian wearing a Lady Vols T-shirt, one girl is fat and dancing along to Soulja Boy with a guy who is wearing a beret on the dance floor, and the last girl looks pretty good until you find out she's with the lesbian. Then she looks even better. So the pickings were slim. We leave Old City in foul moods and drive through campus. Which is, predictably, swarmed with attractive girls in sun dresses. "It's almost like they didn't want us to end up where they were actually going," Junaid says.
4. The line at Krystal has better looking girls than any bar we went to. Hell, the Krystal employees might be better looking, too. For the record, if there were any debate, we reach a consensus that Chik-fil-A has the best looking female fast food employees. There's really not even a close second.
5. After 10 minutes, Tardio requests that we stop driving along Cumberland Avenue after 3 p.m. because, "I can't take it anymore. I just want to pull over on the side of the road and slap these guys because they aren't having a good enough time."
6. Things don't get better for Tardio. I have a game day book signing at Wal-Mart, which means we have to get up early. He tries to get fluids at the Holiday Inn Coke machine. He returns with three Mello Yellos and throws them angrily on the bed. "(Insert curse words here) Mello Yellos," he says. I play along to further provoke his ire: "You didn't want three of them?" "No, I didn't want three of them. Has any one person ever wanted three Mello Yellos ever?"
"So what'd you do wrong?"
"Nothing. First I hit the water button and a Mello Yello came down. Then I hit the other water button and another Mello Yello came down. Then I decided to outthink the stupid machine guy, so I hit the Mello Yello button thinking maybe then I'd get a water. But I got another Mello Yello."
7. While I'm drinking one of the Mello Yellos he has so graciously given me, Tardio demonstrates his lack of interest in my book signing. He buys a portable Dale Jr. cooler, a 12-pack of Coors Light, a bag of Bugles chips and goes out to the parking lot where he sits in the car drinking beer while reading the morning paper.
8. While Tardio is entertaining himself in the Wal-Mart parking lot, I ask one of the employees if he has any advice about book sales. He says, "Well, what do you call those books that come after the other one?"
