I’ll readily admit to having been wary when I booked my tickets to Athens for Notre Dame’s visit to Georgia. I’d been told Georgia fans were a rare breed, and that on their home turf I’d be interacting with a different ilk than those who’d journeyed to the Rust Belt two falls back. I’d been warned I’d be barked at. My fiancée had been told, “they only drink brown liquor.”
I was unprepared.
Georgia fans do bark. But aside from one 27-year-old trying to force out the woofs through a speech-restricting haze of Fireball many of us have met on a college football Saturday, they only barked at the universe at large. None barked at us. None tried to intimidate us. Few were anything but aggressively welcoming.
In the morning, on the bus over from Atlanta, a stranger came up to our seats to tell us he hoped we were treated well. In the afternoon, on campus and around Broad Street, so many people stopped us to ask if we were having a good time that we had to start waving them off to have any hope of making it to my cousins’ tailgate. After the game, as we were walking out of Sanford Stadium, a man approached to tell us he’d hoped we’d enjoyed the visit, to ask how we were getting home, and to wish us safe travels.
It was a wildly good-spirited experience, as though some rose-eyed, idealistic old lady had dictated that the weekend become a caricature of humanity at its kindest, and the universe heeded her instructions. Even the game itself was a good one—a sloppy one at times, by pretty much everyone involved, but a gripping, down-to-the-wire affair. It was a dreamlike day. Almost uncomfortably so.
This isn’t to say Georgia fans weren’t loud. They were loud. Let that be abundantly clear. And unlike Virginia Tech fans in Blacksburg a year ago, who seemed to have been subjected to too much disappointment over the prior decade to find the strength necessary to sustain their opening-minute furor, Georgia fans were loud the whole time. They did their dumb things: Spelling Georgia didn’t do it for me, similarly to how back home, the “We are ND” chant doesn’t do it for me because who the hell else would we be. A group of them briefly chanted “S-E-C” as we descended from the 600 level, because rather than celebrate their own victory, they evidently wanted to subsidize the reputations of Arkansas and Vanderbilt and South Carolina. They did a lot more cool things: “Who’s that coming down the track” was awesome, the red lights were awesome, the flashlights before the fourth quarter were really awesome, and “It’s Saturday in Athens” before kickoff while the sky glowed orange all across a horizon full of trees was awesome. Athens is a beautiful town, and the people treated us far too well (I mean that—it’s college football, not an interfaith marriage).
There were, of course, some bratty Notre Dame fans. One, behind us, when Notre Dame defensive players kept going down hurt as Georgia moved the ball at will in hurry-up fashion, who responded to Georgia fans booing what they perceived as fake injuries by saying things like “Sherman didn’t go far enough” and “fuck your whole state” and “I’ll fight you all” as though the guys down on the field had broken their necks. One, who my fiancée overheard in the bathroom, telling a Georgia fan they “clearly didn’t go to Notre Dame” because of some quirk with the bleachers that was objectively neither good nor bad, likely oblivious to the fact that Georgia’s on par in rankings with schools like Wisconsin and Illinois, where plenty of Midwesterners choose to go to college over Notre Dame because they (possibly rightly) think they’ll get more for their money. Hopefully, the entitled Northerners who act as though anyone south of Cincinnati and east of Phoenix is a species somehow beneath them were only a tiny subset of those of us who made the trip. I don’t really care if fans are as nice as Georgia fans were to us (again, we aren’t resettling refugees here)—I just hope that when I chose to attend Notre Dame, I didn’t accidentally choose to associate myself with too many ignorant assholes.
All told, it was a great place to spend a Saturday, and Georgia fans, to an almost uncomfortable degree, made it more hospitable than I could have imagined. I’m still a little confused as to why they did this, but they accomplished their goal, and it made me want to treat people better myself.
