UNC beats Florida State for the
first time in 2001. Matt Purdy reports from Kenan stadium.
Keywords: UNC FSU North Carolina Florida State Julius Peppers Football
tearing down goalposts Julias Pppers
Learnin' to fly... and I Ain't Got No Wings
It started
out just like any other football Saturday in Chapel Hill. My roommate
and I biked up to the stadium to scrounge tickets about ten minutes before
game time. I was drawn to Kenan stadium more by the sunny, first-day-of-fall
weather than by a desire to see the Tarheels do their best impression of
a division one football team. It was my first UNC game of the season and
I was reminded all over again of how convenient it is to be a football
fan at a basketball school when I was able to quickly find and purchase
a student ticket for two dollars.
Seeing the
undergrads filing in, I was also reminded that, to UNC students, football
games are more like a society ball than a spectator sport. Outsiders have
often criticized this "wine and cheese" crowd, but I've always found it
fascinating. Overdressed in one sense and underdressed in another, the
undergraduate women are nice to look at, but it's the clothing and behavior
of the fraternity guys that really makes you think. Their oxford shirts
and silk ties can simply be chalked-up to genteel Southern tradition, but
their behavior defies any such simple explanation. It is impossible to
sit in the student section and not have impressed upon you the fact that
fraternity guys like to touch each other... far more than is commonly observed
among males in our culture.
A friend of
mine who was in a fraternity once explained this by telling me that all
pledges are issued a pamphlet entitled "How to Show Affection for Your
New Brothers". I was never sure if he was joking or not, but the
more UNC football games I attend, the more I think he wasn't. The
frat-guy's conversations are equally unique, ranging in tone from cheesy,
future-business-executive jocularity to Dude Where's My Car stupidity.
Cell phones only magnify the odd mixture of pedigree, wealth, and ignorance.
One frat brother sitting in front of me at Saturday's game shouted greetings
to his buddy three or four rows back, then did the "call me" sign, but
quickly added, "not now, later... after we leave."
This, along
with an 0-3 Tarheel record, was the backdrop for an amazing 41 to 9 victory
over the undefeated and traditionally undefeatable Seminoles of Florida
State. As the game wore on, fans began to turn their attention from
the basketball players sitting behind them to the football players on the
field in front of them. Gradually, they stopped talking about what
had happened last night and would happen tonight and began to notice what
was happening right now. By the third quarter, fans were actually
participating in the game by making noise to drown-out the quarterback's
play calls. By the fourth quarter, they had learned to only drown-out
the quarterback when the other team had the ball. I couldn't
help but feel a little proud to watch the young people in the row in front
of me, so confused and struggling so hard to be grown-up in their button-down
shirts and ties, coming of age as football fans right before my eyes.
Chancellor
Moeser must have felt a similar pride as the game's final seconds wound
down and he waved the students onto the field to tear down the goalposts
in jubilation. He also must have felt a little trick-candle mirth
as waves upon waves of students piled onto the unyielding goalposts and
failed to knock them more than a few degrees askew.
Watching those
students go to work on those goalposts was like a seeing a newlywed trying
to carry his wife over the threshold of the honeymoon suite, but being
unable to lift her and finally resorting to strenuously dragging her towards
the bedroom at a geological pace. Eventually, stadium security figured
that the goalposts were never going to come down and began to try to clear
the field of onlookers using the same lines that bouncers use at 2:30 am
in the bars (another situation when people are clinging to hope that if
they stay long enough, something memorable will happen... and/or they'll
find a sober ride home).
Finally, the
dirt at the base of the mighty steal structure began to give, security
backed off, and the crowd began to attack the post with renewed hope and
vigor. Like a proud and powerful giraffe with a pack of airplane-bottle
fueled dingos hanging from its legs and tail, the great yellow posts slowly
and resentfully collapsed. Thousands of frenzied hands swarmed over
the fallen prey and pushed the uprights in opposite directions like a wishbone
from some giant robotic turkey. With a sudden jolt, an enormously
satisfying "bong" reverberated down the length of one of the uprights as
the weld at its base gave way. A brief effort was made to carry the
massive trophy up the stadium steps and into the streets, but police and
stadium security were now satisfied that what needed to be done had been
done and began to make a concerted effort to clear the field. With
the goal post finally uprooted and broken in three, they met with little
resistance as the crowd could now disperse with heads held high.
Back on the
sidelines, I overheard a member of the UNC athletic department telling
one of the player's parents that in 1997, with memories of Hurricane Fran
still fresh and hopes running high for Mack Brown to lead UNC to its first
ever victory over FSU, UNC had gone ahead and purchased a set of goalposts
that was "guaranteed indestructible" by its manufacturer. This reminded
me of a slogan from a Garfield (cat) and Odie (dog) poster which, now that
I think about it, will continue to serve those less-than-brilliant frat
guys as they climb to the top of the business world using the hand shaking,
back slapping, and hearty embraces that they learned from their pamphlets
and perfected right here in bleachers of the student section: "It's
amazing what you can accomplish when you don't know what you can't do."
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