Where I Come From: How I became a USC Fan

I’m one of those SC fans with a family “pedigree.” I hate that word, it sounds like dog breeding, but whatever. Really, though, this is a story about me and my dad, just like yours.

A bunch of family members have gone to SC over the course of the last 60 years. When I was a little kid living on the east coast, my grandpa would send me SC t-shirts he would pick up at the bookstore. The diehard fan in the entire extended family, though, has always been my dad.

At the end of the 80s my family moved out to the southwest. My dad and I would go out on weekend trips out to LA for just about every game. I grew up in ASU country and USC isn’t well liked here. I got a decent amount of junk, especially when the team stunk in the 90s and ASU was at its peak with Jake Plummer and Bruce Snyder. Still, we would go to just about every home game in the Coliseum, and a road game each year at ASU or Arizona. We would watch every game we could watch on TV, and half the time we’d have to slum it at sports bars when we couldn’t afford cable and games were relegated to backwater channels. The 90s weren’t always the most fun, whether it was being a little kid at the Coliseum watching your team lose to Memphis State, or seeing Reggie Perry run around like a chicken with his head cut off (I still liked him though), or seeing R. Jay Soward act like an idiot one play and then do something amazing the next. 12 men on the field penalties because Hackett couldn’t manage a game worth crap. But we were always there.

We didn’t have a lot of money, so we’d buy cheap plane tickets way in advance or make a long haul drive. We’d sit way up in the general admission seats (back when there actually were general admission seats… remember?). We’d walk to campus each game, and every year my dad would by a new prized possession: a new SC shirt which I would wear until it began falling apart.

When the time came for college there was no doubt in my mind, SC had amazing programs in my areas of academic interest, I busted my tail in high school to make sure I had the grades to get scholarships, and I ended up graduating from SC. It was completely and utterly worth it and the most exciting four years of my life.

I suppose I was always going to be an SC fan, but there’s something special about it that’s just not like any other school, whether it’s the history, the pageantry of a game at the Coliseum, the band, the beauty of the campus, the excitement of LA, it’s all there. And like Paragon, I guess I have my dad to thank for it.

I went to SC because I got a teaser about a scholarship that turned into a campus visit and an interview. I liked the campus, the IR program, and Thematic Option, so when I got the scholarship I decided to go. So far as I can remember I’d never seen a college football game of any kind.

Let’s just say that my first exposure to the band and all that was during orientation and I was stunned – not in a good way. But when I actually went to my first game, I was hooked. Growing up as an ex-patriot kid you get used to not being part of local stuff, and that first season of SC football coincided with a realization that I wasn’t going anywhere, I was really an immigrant now and not an ex-pat. As it was for general things, so it was for SC football: I was in.

I don’t take being a football fan as seriously as a lot of the people who have come to post on this blog over the last yea, but you can find me on fall Saturdays watching the games and sweating bullets – maybe less so if the game’s already over and I’m catching up on DVR, but still. And while I had what might have been the good fortune of missing most of the 1990s games thanks to being on the east coast, I still remember very clearly the euphoria of SC beating Notre Dame – finally! – for Lou Holtz’s last game – and the bar tab I rang up that night buying pitchers of beer for puzzled friends in grad school who had no idea why I was so excited but were happy to drink the beer anyway. It’s right up there with Scotland beating England, but it happens more regularly (!).