Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, November 13, 2017, 11:12 a.m.

And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
Goodnight

This Iris DeMent song, released in 1993, always floods into my mind when I get sentimental. This time it’s over our college in our town. Specifically, it’s about football, a favorite topic of my nostalgia glands, which are near and dear to my heart as well as being mythical.

Presbyterian College is not my alma mater. Furman University is, and seldom have I been prouder than on Saturday as I watched the Paladins conquer The Citadel, 56-20.

I have fondness for PC, too. It’s funny that the first college football game I remember was Presbyterian at Furman, won by the Paladins, 13-9, at Sirrine Stadium. Thanks to the web that goes worldwide, I know that game was in 1968, when I was 10, but I remembered the score. Maybe that was why I went to Furman. Maybe it was fated, even though I didn’t make the decision until seven years later. I never imagined going anywhere except Clemson until the fall of 1975, when I visited Furman with a high-school football teammate who was being recruited. Oddly enough, my friend, Roy Walker, went to PC. Furman wanted Roy but captured me, and I wasn’t any good at football.

Now, as my alma mater returns to prominence, Presbyterian football is endangered, and my roots run deep at both schools.

Some of the best times my father and I ever had were sitting in wooden stands behind the end zones – inside the track – at Johnson Field, the first Bailey Memorial Stadium and present home of Fighting Blue Hose lacrosse. Kids could frolic around, playing tackle football with miniature plastic footballs and, on occasion, wadded up paper cups, while their fathers passed sage judgment on the games. The names of PC players – Bill Kirtland, Lynn Dreger, Wally Bowen, Bobby Norris — still crackle from the public address archives of my mind.

Now, it is widely alleged, PC is about to “de-emphasize” football, which is to say it is going to stop awarding scholarships and abandon its thus far quixotic membership in the Football Championship Subdivision. The upgrade to NCAA Division I has not gone well, and it has apparently been a great financial drain on the little liberal-arts college, and the reason I suspect this is that all such triumphs and disasters are ultimately and unfortunately judged and justified on the basis of money.

That’s where the Iris DeMent song starts running through my mind.

The Blue Hose are, at the moment, 3-7, with a game at home against Gardner-Webb left. From 1957 through 1992, Presbyterian College played its athletic contests under the auspices of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). From 1993 through 2010, the Blue Hose moved to NCAA Division II. Beginning in 2011, PC moved into NCAA Division I and, in football, the FCS. Now the alleged plan is to remain there but relegate the football program to what would essentially be a conglomeration of walk-ons. The model, originally, was Wofford College, a longtime rival. Now the model appears to be Davidson College, a wonderful school without a successful football team. Its woeful team undoubtedly costs less than Presbyterian’s.

As I am not imbued by sheepskin with the Fighting Blue Hose Spirit, let me write as a Clintonian. If the people of this little town were asked to recall one annual event they miss the most, it would almost surely be the Bronze Derby football game between Presbyterian and nearby Newberry, which was played every year but two between 1913 and 2006 and on Thanksgiving from 1946 through 1992. The game wasn’t as popular for the students because many of them went home for turkey and fixings, but for the towns of Clinton and Newberry, it was the social and sporting event of the year. It was our version of the Carolina Cup steeplechase in Camden, or the Chitlin’ Strut in Salley, or, in its way, the Southern 500 in Darlington. I went to the game every year I was in college because, in no small part, I was home, and many of the other kids who’d gone to college elsewhere congregated there, too. The game captured the attention of the whole state. Clemson’s Danny Ford came at least one year, and I remember him chitchatting with people on the sidelines. It would be unimaginable today for Dabo Swinney to show up, and not just because there is no Bronze Derby to watch anymore.

It was a different time, fondly remembered.

Men and women who know much more than I apparently believe PC football, at its current level, is too expensive, but let me offer up the intangibles I know against the tangibles I don’t.

Football diversifies a college by providing opportunity to kids who could not otherwise afford a private-school education. One reason that I gravitated toward the football players of Furman was that they represented the students who were most like I, a naïve kid who grew up on a farm in Clinton. Together we all found wisdom, not to mention considerable mischief, in college. The Furman alma mater makes reference to drinking “from wisdom’s fountain pure, and rally sons and daughters dear, ’round our dear alma mater.” There were other fountains, too, often originating in aluminum kegs. We made passage through the various rites, and most of us emerged with what it took to take on a world that was allegedly real.

Let me bring this sentimental tome to a conclusion from another old song, Skeeter Davis’s:

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world

It ended when you said goodbye

From what I read, and what I hear, and what my instincts tell me, and the way the powers that be are acting, the de-emphasis of Presbyterian College football is coming, just a few years after its emphasis.

FCS hasn’t been a success. I thought it madness from the beginning. Now, I’m told, merely returning to Division II is “not an option.” Presbyterian has a lovely football stadium, so it needs a team to play in it. Any old team. Throw something together.

I love PC home games, even though the Blue Hose don’t win often. It’s almost impossible to park more than two hundred yards away. We eat, drink and be merry. Then we walk across the street, watch the first half, return to the merriment at halftime, and, then, at the end, hopes often extinguished, we commiserate as we consume the remaining refreshments and make future plans.

I wonder what it’s going to be like on Saturday.

 

Most of my books — non-fiction on NASCAR and music, collections that include my contributions, seven novels, and one short-story collection — are available here.