[tps_header][/tps_header]
* * *
Do you have any idea how many Washington State fans live in Seattle? There are obviously a ton of Husky fans, too, given that the University of Washington is located in Seattle, but there are just as many Cougar fans. Possibly more.
And you do remember the quarterback debate that was sweeping the nation at the end of the ’97 college football season, don’t you?
Which means I’d spent countless hours trying to convince a bunch of yahoos from Pullman that Peyton Manning was the clear-cut choice over their quarterback, Ryan Leaf. Suffice it to say I was aggressive in my defense of Peyton. So aggressive, a few friendships were strained.
Which I was totally okay with. Because these people were clearly idiots. Who, along with their tuck-and-rolled jeans, also wore preposterous amounts of gel in their shortly-cropped hair. The fumes of which presumably killed brain cells.
Because not only did they think Ryan Leaf was a better quarterback than Peyton Manning, they also thought Peyton was overrated. They contended he got undue media attention on account of his famous father and were “sick” of hearing about him.
They actually disliked Peyton. Every bit as much as I disliked Ryan Leaf, a me-first idiot if there ever was one.
In one of the more hotly contested of these debates, a particularly ornery Cougar fan accused me of being so consumed with the Tennessee Vols in general and Peyton Manning in specific that I lacked the ability to see things for what they were. That statement was obviously dripping with irony of the richest order, as years later, Peyton would land Super Bowl and league MVPs while the most noteworthy thing Leaf ever landed was time in the pokey.
But back then, no such irony had been revealed. And the court of public opinion in the GE Capital cafeteria pronounced Leaf the better of the two, a verdict that frustrated me to no end.
Adding insult to injury was that cruel December night in ’97 when Peyton got snubbed by the Heisman Committee. You would have thought Christmas had come early in Seattle that year, so filled with glee were the hearts of the anti-Peyton-ites.
Do you know how many times, during my ongoing Manning-Leaf debates, the naysayers uttered the phrase “trailer park frenzy”? The one ESPN’s Chris Fowler so (in)famously turned?
If the blowback from that remark surprised Fowler, it shouldn’t have. Knoxville’s not a town that takes kindly to being patronized. And Knoxville’s not a town that’s afraid of a fight, either. Never has been.
Precisely why it earned the nickname Scuffletown from the Europeans back in the 1700s, a moniker that in many ways is still an apt one. For not only will we fight you in a New York minute, we’ll also draw that fight out longer than we do our vowels.
It’s not our fault. It’s hard-coded in our DNA. We’re scrappy. Some might argue insecurely so. Regardless, we fight for what we believe in. Aggressively.
Sign up for the war? You’re damn right we will. Sending so many men to the battlefields is how Tennessee earned its nickname, the Volunteers.
But a battlefield isn’t the only place suitable for a fight. City Hall works, too, as evidenced in the 1950s when Knoxville received (unwanted) national attention after Cas Walker and City Councilman J.S. Cooper duked it out.
There’s a certain unrest in a place like Knoxville were elements of rural agrarian South encounter elements of urban industrial North, and no one captured that better than Cormac McCarthy in his book Suttree, which was set in Knoxville right around the time ol’ Cas and J.S. got it on.
McCarthy’s Knoxville exhibited a veneer of the genteel South that politely concealed the underbelly of its hardscrabble frontier roots as well as that of a gritty and struggling urban population. Such an underlying dichotomy creates a tension that continuously simmers just beneath the placid surface, which in turn creates a place that’s but an insult away from an all-out fistfight.
Which is why riling up Knoxvillians has never been a good idea. Just ask Susan Harrigan, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote an article that questioned Knoxville’s ability to host a successful World’s Fair. She dismissed our town as a “scruffy little city” that was in over its head.
Sure, the slick, wide-eyed bankers who managed to pull off that coup may have gone to jail the day after it ended, but when it comes to actually hosting a successful World’s Fair?
Let’s just say that Knoxville’s been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. Literally.
You wanna unite Knoxville? Then make fun of it. Suggest it can’t do something. Go on. I dare you. Because we’ll come together and fight our asses off to prove we can, if for no other reason than the sheer and utter hell of it.
Even our underground cult heroes bespeak the fiery nature of our region. Remember John Bean? You may know him as Leroy Mercer. Or Roy Mullins. Or Sid Arnwine. Or Bill Morgan, up here just this side of Maynardville.
Whichever, he and his legendary prank call tapes serve as definitive proof that one surefire way to earn a permanent place in the collective heart of East Tennesseans is to repeatedly threaten to whoop a man’s ass. Likely because we know a thing or two about such matters. We always have. And we always will.
Knoxville already believed that ESPN was the one to blame for the Heisman slight on Peyton in the first place. So when Fowler quipped that the decision had set off a “trailer park frenzy” in Tennessee, Knoxville knew damn well that he had done more than just twist the knife a little. He had also belittled the entire region by categorizing its inhabitants as rednecks who had nothing better to do than play the victim card whenever their favorite son failed to win an accolade.
And at that point, a war had been waged, one that we were all too willing — all too qualified, even — to fight. And through fate I had been deployed to one of the enemy territories where I was charged with bringing that fight to our opponents. Which I had already been doing. Instinctively.
So you’re damn skippy I was going to that game on August 8, 1998. No matter how important the following day was. No matter how early that important day had to begin. I had no choice.
Besides, in my heart I knew it would be Phase I, Stage I of Knoxville’s vindication. Because Peyton was going to prove he deserved that Heisman. Peyton was going to prove what everyone in Seattle doubted. What everyone in Knoxville didn’t. That he was a better quarterback than Ryan Leaf. And, what’s more, that he would be a great NFL quarterback.
It might take a few years, but he would eventually prove it. And he’d prove it by putting on one hell of a show. And there was no way I was going to miss the very first act.
A preseason game against Seattle.
* * *
[tps_footer][/tps_footer]
