Scott Davis: Long live the King

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (see below) and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

Let’s start with a few things that I believe are indisputable.

In over 130 years of athletic competition at the University of South Carolina, Ray Tanner is the most consequential figure in school history.

He is, along with Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s most popular athletic coach ever.

He delivered the university’s first national title in a major sport, one that its fans had yearned for and craved for decades as they watched their peers and rivals collect championships by the handful.

The playing field at Founders Park will be renamed after Tanner, but a statue of him should also be erected there, so important is his legacy not just to the baseball program, but to the university.

And all of that merely scratches the surface.

For more than a quarter of a century, Gamecock fans knew they could always count on Tanner. He was as reliable as the morning sunrise, right as rain, as sturdy as granite. If everything else was collapsing around us, we could take solace that Tanner would still be standing. Tanner in many ways has been the personification of South Carolina sports for so long it’s hard to imagine it existing without him.

Now, quietly, Tanner is receding from the forefront of our vision.

Amidst the avalanche of good news that has overwhelmed South Carolina fans over the last few months, Tanner’s exit as athletics director after 12 years and his well-received replacement by former TCU AD Jeremiah Donati has almost been buried.

Though Tanner will remain as a senior adviser to President Michael Amiridis, his stepping away from the role as athletic director undeniably kickstarts a new era for the school and its fans. Tanner – never one to seek the limelight despite his many accomplishments – has probably enjoyed the opportunity to slide out the door with little fanfare.

But that doesn’t mean fanfare shouldn’t be given. By all means, let’s blast the trumpets and pound the drums for this man.

We always knew Ray Tanner was a great coach. But in the last year, everything we thought we knew about his time as athletics director has changed, too.

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From the Dugout to the Desk

As a baseball coach, Tanner did one thing about as well as anyone could do it: Win.

Tanner’s South Carolina teams won relentlessly across 15 years.

They won ridiculously, insistently, ceaselessly. His Gamecocks compiled two national championships, six College World Series appearances and three SEC titles. At one point, Tanner’s teams won an absurd 11 consecutive College World Series games. Other than LSU’s Skip Bertman, no Southeastern Conference coach had a higher winning percentage.

And when Tanner ascended into his role as athletics director following the 2012 season, we expected the winning to continue relentlessly there, too. He’d hire the best coaches, oversee the most comprehensive facilities and fundraising efforts, keep spirits high and the coffers full.

Life, as always, was more complicated than we’d imagined.

Tanner’s initial hires of significance wound up leaving many Gamecock fans underwhelmed. His pick for overseeing the baseball program, Chad Holbrook, had a near-100% approval rating when it was made. But Holbrook lasted just five seasons and couldn’t return the program to the World Series before he gave way to Mark Kingston.

Kingston’s hire, on the other hand, failed to electrify Gamecock Nation, and the coach struggled both to return the program to its past glory and to connect with South Carolina fans. By this spring, he too was gone.

Meanwhile, Tanner’s handling of Steve Spurrier’s retirement and his subsequent hiring of Will Muschamp to coach the football team raised eyebrows across the Palmetto State, generating concerns that the AD had failed to lock up better candidates in his first crack at shoring up the department’s most important program and revenue stream.

By the time the pandemic arrived in 2020 and the university itself seemed to be cratering beneath the disastrous regime of overmatched former President Bob Caslen, a cold, unfortunate perception seemed to have permanently settled around Tanner’s tenure as AD: The dugout was the better place for Tanner than the desk.

And then, just as his career in administration was winding down, everything began to change. A happy ending began to take shape just in time for Christmas.

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Foundation for the Future

There’s no other way to say it: It’s been a banner year for the University of South Carolina and its fans.

It’s been a year, in fact, much like the kind that Ray Tanner’s baseball teams used to deliver with regularity.

Last spring, Dawn Staley and her women’s basketball team completed an unimaginable and captivating perfect season to win the program’s third national championship – all of which occurred under Tanner’s watch in the athletic department. Tanner didn’t hire Staley, but he did keep her here for more than a decade while she became the most important figure not just in college basketball but in the women’s game itself. Staley could coach any team anywhere at any level right now if she wanted to. She’s still in Columbia.

That matters.

It matters, too, that Tanner’s pick to lead men’s basketball upon Frank Martin’s departure – Lamont Paris – was named SEC Coach of the Year and took his team to the NCAA Tournament last March in just his second season. After taking down Clemson this week, Paris’ team looks poised to work its way back into the Tournament mix again this season.

It matters that Tanner convinced a genuine winner in Paul Mainieri to come to South Carolina and resurrect his beloved baseball program.

And yes, it most certainly matters that Tanner’s signature hire – Shane Beamer – has revitalized the football program in ways that almost none of us could have foreseen in our wildest imaginings. Beamer’s team has delivered some of the most memorable wins in program history over the last four years, reset a rivalry with Clemson that was sliding into the abyss, very nearly crashed the College Football Playoff this season and has an opportunity to win its 10^th game in a few days.

Beamer, also freshly named SEC Coach of the Year, is young enough and energetic enough to lead the program for years to come. If he continues his transformation of South Carolina football from a yearly disappointment into source of annual excitement and pride, it will perhaps be the achievement that Tanner will be remembered for the most.

In his final year at South Carolina, Ray Tanner rewrote the story. In the years to come, his already outsized legacy may only grow.

Maybe we came to take him for granted, this rock we could always rely upon.

But now that he is gone, we will surely know it.

“Rey” means “king” in Spanish.

It is pronounced “Ray.”

Long live the king.

Tell me your memories of Ray Tanner by writing me at [email protected].

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