Scott Davis: Finding the forgotten Gamecock classics

We’re just about there.

You know what I’m talking about.

That time of year when the days are long and hot and unmerciful, and the Gamecock sports calendar empties out like a downtown office building at 5 pm on Friday. I’ll admit it: It’s my least favorite time of the year.

Spring football’s over, and real football is months in the distance. Basketball’s but a memory. Baseball is lumbering through its final weeks, towards what appears will be an unsatisfying end (South Carolina drops midweek game to USC Upstate).

Soon we’ll have nothing but ice-cold beverages and memories to get us to September.

To that I say: Let’s go ahead and fire up the memories now. Why wait?

One of the best parts about following sports is that you don’t even need actual games to summon passion, emotion and powerful feelings. You just need your mind. I’d go so far as to say that my most intense, most fervent and maybe even most frightening sports-related arguments over the years have not involved the results of a particular game, or the officiating in a particular game, or the antics of opposing fans in a particular game.

No, they’ve involved memories, and those memories have often had the odd result of pitting me against my best friends and my fellow Gamecocks.

How we remember our teams and our players and our coaches is what ends up mattering most of all, even more than final scores and end-of-season statistics. And those memories fuel the most entertaining debates, the barstool disputes in the middle of July, the heated back-and-forth conversations at family reunions.

Which players were the best of the best? Which ones were actually clutch performers? Which coaches made the worst in-game decisions? Who, what, when, where?

And then there’s the debate I seem to love the most, the one I keep coming back to again and again in my life as a fan.

Which games – in any sport – were the most memorable?

Which ones lived forever in my mind after the clock hit zero? Which ones still linger, even now, even if the particular seasons in which they occurred have faded into oblivion?

Which games call out to us from the Great Beyond?

Let’s discuss.

Reviving Rushmore

It’s become a summertime tradition in this column. When the temperature starts pushing 90, we start talking Rushmores.

With your help, I’ve pieced together a Mount Cockmore of the Greatest Gamecock Players. We’ve exchanged ideas about a Mount Rushmore of Yacht Rock, of ‘80s Music Videos, of Romantic Comedies…and even one of movie versions of Business-Related Angry Inspirational Speeches (perhaps the strangest and most hyper-specific Mount Rushmore ever compiled). The concept never gets old.

A Final Four of the best of the very best.

The other day, a long-gone memory jolted me out of the blue. It seemed to have been dropped into my lap from a cloud, like an unexpected package left on your front doorstep.

I was casually scanning a Gamecock Central story about men’s basketball transfer news, when suddenly I was transported back 25 years to a moment when I was sitting in the old Carolina Coliseum, in February 1997, watching a sold-out, Top 20 matchup between the BJ McKie-led Gamecocks and No. 3 Kentucky, coached by the loathsome Rick Pitino.

Where did this memory come from? Why did it unfold in front of me now, in 2022? Who knows?

The game was one of those immortal seesaw affairs that whittle a decade off your life in an instant. Kentucky led at halftime. The game was tied at the end of regulation after the Gamecocks surged back in the final five minutes. Then South Carolina pulled away in OT, and I suddenly found myself storming the court along with thousands of other people. I still remember shoving a friend of mine in disbelief, almost like we were squaring up to fight each other, only we were ecstatic.

That game ended up helping the Gamecocks clinch their first SEC title in a major sport later that season. It was genuinely consequential – a rarity for South Carolina basketball in those days (and far too often, since then).

Because my mind works in strange and occasionally baffling ways, I immediately started taking the idea further. Which games during my Gamecock fanhood had been the most memorable, the most exciting, the most downright unforgettable even though they had absolutely no consequences beyond that particular moment?

Which games stood alone, by themselves, in our memories?

These wouldn’t be Clemson wins, or wins that clinched the SEC East in anything, or wins that delivered a bowl trophy, or wins that did anything at all other than just last, forever, in our minds because they were entertaining and extraordinary and etched upon our souls.

These were Lost Classics that I was contemplating.

And we need a Mount Rushmore of them.

Candidates for Your Consideration

I suspect there are dozens of possibilities for a Lost Classics Rushmore, perhaps even ones that I’ve forgotten or never even knew about in the first place. Now seems like the perfect time to catalogue them for the ages. With postseason baseball all but an impossibility, what else do we have to do until September?

The classics I’m circling are the ones that were utterly random, that seemed like lightning strikes from out of the void, that didn’t change the course of life as we know it or even help the Gamecocks achieve much of anything in particular…but for whatever reason we cannot get these games out of our minds, even decades later.

For my money, the quintessential example of this type of game is South Carolina’s inexplicable, “as time expires” win Between the Hedges against Georgia in 1993 (Larry Munson radio call). I was attending this football game as a South Carolina student, but even if you weren’t alive when it happened, you’re probably familiar with it, largely because Gamecock fans have been talking about it since (“He broke our hearts with two seconds to go!”)

In fact, this game is so well-remembered that I’m no longer even sure it can qualify as a Lost Classic, since it was never lost in the first place. What, then, might qualify?

Just to get the ball rolling, I’ll nominate the following: South Carolina football’s deeply surprising win in Athens in 2001 on a thrilling last-minute catch by Gamecock receiver Brian Scott, South Carolina basketball’s comeback from a 23-point deficit to defeat Cincinnati on a buzzer-beater in 1998, and the football win in 2009 against a top-five Ole Miss team in a game where the student section delivered a performance for the ages (The Birth of Sandstorm).

None of these games really ended up mattering anywhere but in our hearts and souls – and yet most of us haven’t stopped talking about them since (and as an added bonus, a much younger, much more innocent version of Scott Davis was in the stands for each and every one of them).

So that’s what we’re looking for: A Final Four of Forgotten Classics. Let your voice be heard. I know you will.

Tell me your Mount Rushmore of Lost Gamecock Classics by writing me at [email protected].

Discuss forgotten Gamecock classics on The Insiders Forum

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