"Hey, Grandbunn, your team, Clemson, beat Carolina in the football game yesterday." "It meant so much to her." I resisted at first what did I, a proud USC grad, want with a bunch of news clippings of Danny's firing and 1981 celebratory Coke bottles and cookbooks and porcelain tigers? But into my boxes they went, alongside Kris Kristofferson albums and Depression glass sugar bowls and a picture she had saved of me in a diaper, wearing an "I'm a Little Tiger" T-shirt, back when she still had hope the phrase would come true. "You have to save some of that stuff," my husband chided. Tiger paintings, Tiger earrings, Tiger toilet paper, a whole bookshelf of memorabilia from the 1981 championship and the Danny Ford years we called "the shrine." To pay for her new home, we needed to clean out and sell her old one. As Grandbunn healed physically, though, her cognition faded further in the distressing, unfamiliar circumstances of the hospital, and later, assisted living. She was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and we knew her days of living alone were numbered, even before the incident. She was found an hour or so later on the side of the road, broken but alive. One night last summer, Grandbunn wandered from her house and into a busy highway. When I broke up with my high school boyfriend, a die-hard Clemson fan despite his remarkable intelligence, Grandbunn took it harder than I did. We nodded and smiled, unable to return the sentiment yet unwilling to hurt Grandbunn's feelings by revealing just how much we hated the school she held so dear. Ever graceful, she claimed to pull for South Carolina, except when it played Clemson. Grandbunn couldn't compete with six or seven home games a year, and the family reached a détente. The family bonding over road trips down to Columbia, tailgating with barbecue, cheering the team as the Gamecocks entered the field in a pageant of smoke and cannons - we were hooked, even before we could tell a clip from a hold. That ended when my parents bought season tickets to Carolina games in 1988. When my husband sees these pictures now, he's incredulous I would ever put on orange. One Christmas, I received competing cheerleading outfits, while my brother got Clemson and Carolina football uniforms. For every Gamecocks onesie purchased by Mom and fellow USC grad Dad, came a Clemson tee or toboggan from Grandbunn and Billy. The battle for my biases began when I was born, just a few months before the Tigers clinched the 1981 national title. Clemson was the college experience she never had. A high school dropout, she married and birthed two children before she was out of her teens. Her father, a welder, had helped build the upstate school's Johnstone Hall, and Grandbunn loved to drive the 60 miles west to the (begrudgingly, I will admit) beautiful campus to drive around. Loyalty to the son she lost, my mother guesses. Mom stayed attached to Clemson until that fall's "Tiger Burn." As the giant, papier-mâché mascot became kindling for the bonfire, she says, she was reborn a Gamecock.īut Grandbunn never wavered. From that first 1971 season, when she began attending games with her children, she was, as current coach Dabo Swinney likes to say, "all in." Tony died from a brain tumor three years later, at age 20 my mother transferred to Carolina to continue her pharmacy degree. Grandbunn started pulling for Clemson 45 years ago, when her son, Tony, and later, her daughter, René, matriculated there on full academic scholarships. The rivalry is rabid, it is year-round, and it divides families. Each side thinks the other's fans are insufferable, and both are likely right. When you're a Carolina fan - the historical losers in that 120-year-plus bitter ball - "Tiger Rag" becomes the soundtrack of nightmares. "He ought to leave football out of it," my mother once fumed. At church, I've seen a preacher almost get booed for ribbing the defeated party from the pulpit. My elementary school offered two Jell-O flavors the Friday before the matchup, always the last one of the regular season: red for Gamecocks, orange for Tigers. The University of South Carolina, or Clemson University. But even at 8 years old, I knew better than to shed a tear for a Tiger. A candlelight vigil for an alive-and-well football coach was one thing. She couldn't believe Clemson would get rid of Danny, a good ol' country boy who had taken the Tigers to their first national championship. Grandbunn - a nickname from my grandmother's old '70s CB-radio handle, Cinnamon Bunn - may have cried. It was worse: Football head coach Danny Ford had resigned. You would think someone had died, but no. From up there, Patrick had a better view of the scene: in front of Clemson University's Tillman Hall, a sea of light - thousands of handheld candles lit in vigil. My grandmother held my hand while her boyfriend, Billy, carried my little brother on his shoulders. People pushing past us in orange sweaters and jackets and sweatshirts.
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