Fading Stripes: A South Carolina Grad Keeps Grandmother's Clemson In Mind
— -- The memory is fuzzy now, 26 years on. A mild winter night. A dark lawn. People pushing past us in orange sweaters and jackets and sweatshirts. My grandmother held my hand while her boyfriend, Billy, carried my little brother on his shoulders. From up there, Patrick had a better view of the scene: in front of Clemson University's Tillman Hall, a sea of light -- thousands of handheld candles lit in vigil. You would think someone had died, but no. It was worse: Football head coach Danny Ford had resigned.
Grandbunn -- a nickname from my grandmother's old '70s CB-radio handle, Cinnamon Bunn -- may have cried. She couldn't believe Clemson would get rid of Danny, a good ol' country boy who had taken the Tigers to their first national championship. Side-eyeing this scene, I was disgusted. A candlelight vigil for an alive-and-well football coach was one thing. This was the South, after all. But even at 8 years old, I knew better than to shed a tear for a Tiger.
In South Carolina, you pick a side. The University of South Carolina, or Clemson University. And your loyalties are tested early. My elementary school offered two Jell-O flavors the Friday before the matchup, always the last one of the regular season: red for Gamecocks, orange for Tigers. At church, I've seen a preacher almost get booed for ribbing the defeated party from the pulpit. "He ought to leave football out of it," my mother once fumed. When you're a Carolina fan -- the historical losers in that 120-year-plus bitter ball -- "Tiger Rag" becomes the soundtrack of nightmares. Each side thinks the other's fans are insufferable, and both are likely right. The rivalry is rabid, it is year-round, and it divides families. Like mine.
Grandbunn started pulling for Clemson 45 years ago, when her son, Tony, and later, her daughter, René, matriculated there on full academic scholarships. From that first 1971 season, when she began attending games with her children, she was, as current coach Dabo Swinney likes to say, "all in." Tony died from a brain tumor three years later, at age 20; my mother transferred to Carolina to continue her pharmacy degree. Mom stayed attached to Clemson until that fall's "Tiger Burn." As the giant, papier-mâché mascot became kindling for the bonfire, she says, she was reborn a Gamecock.
But Grandbunn never wavered. Loyalty to the son she lost, my mother guesses. Or perhaps something more. Her father, a welder, had helped build the upstate school's Johnstone Hall, and Grandbunn loved to drive the 60 miles west to the (begrudgingly, I will admit) beautiful campus to drive around. A high school dropout, she married and birthed two children before she was out of her teens. Clemson was the college experience she never had.
The battle for my biases began when I was born, just a few months before the Tigers clinched the 1981 national title. For every Gamecocks onesie purchased by Mom and fellow USC grad Dad, came a Clemson tee or toboggan from Grandbunn and Billy. One Christmas, I received competing cheerleading outfits, while my brother got Clemson and Carolina football uniforms. When my husband sees these pictures now, he's incredulous I would ever put on orange. But back then, we were still malleable. That ended when my parents bought season tickets to Carolina games in 1988. The family bonding over road trips down to Columbia, tailgating with barbecue, cheering the team as the Gamecocks entered the field in a pageant of smoke and cannons -- we were hooked, even before we could tell a clip from a hold.
Grandbunn couldn't compete with six or seven home games a year, and the family reached a détente. Ever graceful, she claimed to pull for South Carolina, except when it played Clemson. We nodded and smiled, unable to return the sentiment yet unwilling to hurt Grandbunn's feelings by revealing just how much we hated the school she held so dear. When I broke up with my high school boyfriend, a die-hard Clemson fan despite his remarkable intelligence, Grandbunn took it harder than I did. Another Tiger son, gone.
One night last summer, Grandbunn wandered from her house and into a busy highway. A car hit her and kept going. She was found an hour or so later on the side of the road, broken but alive.
She was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and we knew her days of living alone were numbered, even before the incident. As Grandbunn healed physically, though, her cognition faded further in the distressing, unfamiliar circumstances of the hospital, and later, assisted living.
To pay for her new home, we needed to clean out and sell her old one. There were odes to Clemson everywhere. Tiger paintings, Tiger earrings, Tiger toilet paper, a whole bookshelf of memorabilia from the 1981 championship and the Danny Ford years we called "the shrine."
"You have to save some of that stuff," my husband chided. "It meant so much to her." I resisted at first; what did I, a proud USC grad, want with a bunch of news clippings of Danny's firing and 1981 celebratory Coke bottles and cookbooks and porcelain tigers? But into my boxes they went, alongside Kris Kristofferson albums and Depression glass sugar bowls and a picture she had saved of me in a diaper, wearing an "I'm a Little Tiger" T-shirt, back when she still had hope the phrase would come true.
"Hey, Grandbunn, your team, Clemson, beat Carolina in the football game yesterday."
Mom and I visited Grandbunn the Sunday after Thanksgiving. These days, she barely recognizes anyone, and often cries when Mom leaves her. I wanted to make her happy, so I showed her videos of my nephews, her great-grandsons, and forced myself to sound cheerful when I told her the score of the rivalry game that had been played the day before. She met the news with a blank stare. The nurses still dress her in her favorite navy-blue jacket, an orange tiger paw on the breast, but does the emblem mean anything to her now? I don't know.
I still hope they lead her out to the TV room tonight, when her Clemson Tigers play for their second national championship. Maybe she will hear "Tiger Rag" and remember.