The first time I rushed a football field, I was but a babe still flexible enough to do a toe touch, on the cusp of nineteen and a sophomore at the University of South Carolina. It was the 2000 season opener, and the Gamecocks hadn’t eked out a W in two years. Luckily, I had earned my “long-suffering” badge well before that. Amid blink-short glories—mulleted QB Steve Taneyhill “autographing” Clemson’s midfield tiger paw after a 1992 upset leaps to mind—in the decade since my alum parents had begun buying season tickets, we’d absorbed enough mediocrity to form a beleaguered yet prideful immunity. Like martyrs, but enduring 100-degree, 100-percent humidity noon kickoffs instead of the rack.
Even so, over the 1999 season, we had succumbed to that most abusive of temptations: hope. The garnet and black didn’t just have a new coach in the headset, we had a legend. Notre Dame icon Lou Holtz had decided to twiddle away his twilight years turning around the Shamecocks. All six home games—six losses—practically every seat in Williams-Brice was filled, every fan frothing.
By that first game of the new century, USC boasted the country’s longest losing streak. For four quarters, the aluminum bleachers thrummed, a tinny bass line of anticipation. Then it happened. We had beaten New Mexico State, 31–zip. In a mindless euphoria, the student section surged as one, scrambling in our sundresses and Dockers over privet and into the end zone. Frat boys swung from the goalpost, kissing its frame to the Bermuda grass as we cheered. The second time I rushed a field was, believe it or not, just a week later. This time we had dominated Georgia. Ninth-ranked Georgia.
The third time I rushed a football field…well, I’m still waiting. Since graduating, I attend home games once again with my parents, and my mother would rather eat a rock than rush anywhere. As the clock ticked down on our fandom-defining upset of number-one Alabama in 2010, I turned to see tears in her eyes and decided I didn’t want to rush anywhere either. Instead I hugged her, waving my white rally towel and cock-a-doodle-doo!-ing like a yahoo.
Now it’s not a Saturday if fans somewhere aren’t “invading the pitch,” as they say across the pond, even as authorities fumble to plug the dam with boosted security, collapsible goalposts, fines swelling to half a mil (lookin’ at you, Vandy—worth it to topple the Tide, right?). This spike has sparked hand-wringing over each rush’s worthiness, mostly from the same fussbudgets who use the term “bush league” and scoff at grown men wearing jerseys. As my dad says when I extol healthy eating, “You really know how to suck the fun out of a room.” Still, now that I’m on the cusp of perimenopause and only flexible enough to sleep (mostly) without tweaking a neck muscle, I call my friend and fellow ’Cock Amanda (a separate person, not me talking to a mirror) to ask if she would ever do it again.
“Yes!” Then she hesitates. “Well…it would take me a lot longer to get down there. And I wouldn’t rush. I would casually walk onto the field. And I wouldn’t jump the hedges. I’d find an actual entrance.”
My parents and I decide only an SEC or a national championship would incite us to storm these days (we’re not picky). Dad pulls us back to earth as quickly as a Sigma Chi felling those goalposts back in 2000: “By the time we got down there, it’d probably all be over.”
So perhaps rushing the field is one of those things best left to the young, like thong bikinis and alpaca haircuts. But what won’t be over, ever, is the desire to storm in my heart.
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