Growing up an hour away from Charlotte and three hours away from Tobacco Road, I was immersed in sports from birth. When you’re in rural North Carolina, you watch everything on television. I lived most of my childhood through my family’s behemoth Curtis Mathes tube TV. I wasn’t a couch potato sitting around growing pale and chubby; in fact I was quite the opposite. I played sports year-round, and stayed outside as much as possible. But life outside of the town I grew up in (population 600-ish) had to be digested through media. I was living in the lawn seats of life.
Seasons in my youth weren’t broken up in quarters to reflect the weather; they were broken up into baseball, football, and college basketball. MLB season was the under-card for the main event that was college football. The lack of conference networks and other ESPN sub-networks back then meant you had no football whatsoever until that glorious first weekend. I remember the rumblings of an ESPN 2 as a kid and when we got it in our cable package, life was changed.
College football season meant the countdown to one of my favorite times of year: college bowl season. I understand the gripe about the sheer number of bowls, or a .500 team getting a slot. For all the complaints about bowl season, I can never get enough. I’ve spent many a Saturday on my couch watching the St. Petersburg Bowl contested on a baseball field, so I can’t be a hypocrite and whine about teams’ records. Bowls have always felt special; they were something of a mythical event for me as a child. The Rose was cemented as phenomenal from the get-go. There was Orange, Peach, Cotton, and Sugar; if could be harvested, it could be a bowl.
When my dad and I found out we were getting the Continental Tire Bowl in Charlotte, there was energy in our house that I’d never felt before. My dad opened the Charlotte Observer as he did every day for decades, flipped to the sports section, and quietly sipped his Folgers Coffee. He found what I’m sure was an above the fold article, and made the closest thing to a family announcement I’ll ever get: “We gettin’ a bowl game.” So in 2002, the Continental Tire Bowl came to Ericsson Stadium.
I watched that first Continental Tire Bowl on the above-mentioned aircraft carrier-sized TV. Virginia whipped West Virginia 48-22 in front of a sellout crowd. It was a beautiful sight to behold, even though the game was no classic. It was a good omen for the bowl game itself. The following bowl season of 2003, my dad finally had enough. We were too close to Charlotte not to make the drive, weather the mob, and take in an actual college bowl game. I’ve had the disdain for crowds passed down to me from generation to generation, and it blossomed full-blown at an early age. I can tolerate more than a few thousand people for one thing, and one thing only: football. When it comes to football, the more the merrier.
I still have the ticket stub from the 2003 game when we saw Virginia back in Charlotte to take on the Pitt Panthers. We were up with the roosters to arrive hours before the 11 am kickoff. We sprung for $25 parking passes that got us in a lot a stone’s throw from the stadium. We could see the Carolina Panthers statue out front, all decked out in Christmas gear. Fight songs rang out, parades rolled down South Mint Street with full marching bands and mascots. It was the party I imagined it would be, and I was hooked.
Since then, I’ve been to two Continental Tire Bowls, three Meineke Car Care Bowls, and a Belk Bowl. No matter the atmosphere, the crowd, or the score I’ve valued each trip to the stadium. I saw a lot of Carolina Blue seat backs instead of fans for a couple of South Florida Bulls games, but whether full or not it’s been a great addition to my college football schedule. Even the sponsor change to Belk made me smile as I harkened back to shopping for an Easter Sunday outfit. A southern-based department store, Belk was as high-end as my family would go. It was a store on the opposite end of the mall from Sears, and shopping there meant you’d better be careful at the post-church cookout because a stain on your new polo would be disastrous.
Even the little details of this bowl game take me back to the couch and that giant floor TV set. I’m back to mid-December in my teens, and it was the foundation of my affair with football. Having bowl games at a distance for so long made the arrival of one all the more satisfying. For twelve years I’ve had this game in my life. Nothing in the grand scale of bowls celebrating 100th anniversaries, but for a kid that grew up viewing bowl season as the Mecca of all sports marathons, this was a godsend.
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