ForumsOn Rocky Top: A Front-Row Seat to the End of an Era
Clay’s purpose was to write a book chronicling the 2008 season. Little did he know how significant the season would be.
I had the opportunity to ask Clay a few questions about himself, his soon-to-be-released book, and Tennessee football.
Clay, can you give our readers a bit of background on yourself, specifically your ties to the University of Tennessee?
I grew up a Tennessee fan, went to my first game at the age of 6 and continued thereafter. Nothing about my fandom was particularly unique otherwise, I’ve just always lived and died with Tennessee athletics. My grandfather played for General Neyland in the 1930’s. So you could make an argument that my blood literally runs orange. True story about him, he cared so much in his old age about the games that his doctor forbade him from watching games live. The doctor said his heart couldn’t take it.
The book opens in the Rose Bowl and then flashes back to the first game I watched on television by myself, the Sugar Bowl win over Miami. I probably would have been a fan otherwise, but that game sealed it for me. I was a Vol for life.
When you decided to spend the year following Tennessee and write a book on your experience, you surely expected a much different outcome to the season. Tennessee was ranked #18 in the country and Phillip Fulmer had just signed a contract extension. What was it like at the beginning of the season, dealing with the high expectations, as the season began to unfold?
I think it’s fair to say that everyone at the University of Tennessee from the athletic director to the equipment manager believed that we were extremely underrated relative to the other teams in the conference. We all truly believed that we would contend for the SEC Title. We returned 9 of 11 starters on offense, arguably had gotten better at tight end with Brandon Warren. And I think people believed that Jonathan Crompton was going to be really, really good at quarterback.
So there was a great deal of optimism. I think that’s palpable as the book begins. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d see a collapse of this magnitude. Never.
You talked on the radio about, due to the stress and pressures of the season, if you were ever asked to leave the locker room. Your answer was that you were only asked to leave one time, and that was during the Alabama game. Would you share the details of that specific incident?
Yep, that was the only time I was specifically excluded from something that I was witnessing. As Coach Fulmer prepared to give the team the final speech in the locker room, he turned to me and the videographer and asked us both to leave. So I had to make the orange walk of shame, past all the team sitting in front of General Neyland’s Maxims, and out the locker room door. As I was walking all I could think was, “Don’t trip.”
Just before I got outside the door Coach Fulmer looked at me and said, “I appreciate it.” Those three words summed up Coach Fulmer to me. There was no reason he needed to say that, nothing that he gained. But he thanked me. It was a moment of great tension, yet Fulmer was still thinking about things from my perspective. The perspective of someone that was going to have no outcome on the game.
It showed a great deal of empathy on his part.
In fact, honestly, I think being kicked out of the locker room and having Fulmer say what he did to me said more, paradoxically, about him as a man than anything he could have said to the team before the game.
At what point do you believe Phillip Fulmer realized that 2008 would be the end of the line for him?
After the South Carolina loss. That was the moment, I think, when he finally saw the writing on the wall. Now I still think he was surprised by the decision Mike Hamilton chose to go, but I don’t think he was shocked.
That loss in conjunction with the interview that Hamilton gave to the Knoxville News-Sentinel before the Mississippi State game, after the Georgia loss, where Hamilton said he wouldn’t be afraid to make the decision to fire Fulmer during the season. I think that blindsided him.
You made a comment, I believe it was on your blog, that after the final game, Fulmer looked at you and said something to the effect of “well son, you sure picked a hell of a time to write a book.” Is that true? What was his demeanor at that point?
Really good question. Yeah, it’s true and in the book, but it was just before the Alabama game. Tennesse’s sitting at 3-4, coming off the win over Miss. State. Fulmer was writing on the board in the locker room and the team was beginning to go out for warm-ups. He was standing alone in front of the board and he sort of walked towards me. And I was captivated by how alone he seemed in a stadium with over 100,000 people. I felt like he wanted to talk to someone, anyone, at that moment. And that’s when he said it.
I think, at that moment, he literally felt like he had the stadium on his back. Down in the bowels of the locker room that metaphor might even apply. Not just the team, but the coaching staff and their families, everyone who owed their jobs to his team being successful. Nothing else mattered but that moment. It had all come down to this, he needed to beat Alabama.
What was it like as a fan, being that close and personal to what ended up being a disappointing season. Were you as angry with the results on the field as most fans, or did having that inside perspective allow you to sympathize with the players and coaches? How do you think the experience will affect you as a fan from this point forward?
Well, that’s a series of good questions. I think the closer to the program you get the more absurd your own fandom seems. I think that would be true for anyone. I remember a moment, as the team bus rolled down to Georgia for a must-win game, when I looked around the bus and thought, “Man, these are just kids on their way to play a game.”
It was really jarring for me. I think it would be for anyone who ever played sports. At some point we’ve all been on a team and been riding to a game on a bus. Now scores more people care about the result of their game, but at its essence, they’re just kids riding to the game on a bus.
So that image sticks with me.
I think I definitely sympathized more. I mean, if you’re sitting at home or in the stands and your team is playing like crap, you really let them have it. At least I do. I curse them, throw things, I’m really not a quiet fan. But standing on the sideline, you realize how ineffective that ultimately is. How much more complicated the offenses and defenses that they’re running actually are. Basically how valueless your fandom actually is.
Clapping your hands really hard and saying, “Score some points, damn you!” isn’t really going to make the difference between success and failure. Fans like to think they hold the key to their team, that if they just sprinkle the right magic dust, or use the right inflection in their voice they can turn defeat into failure.
Wrong.
I’ve heard you mention on several occasions that you view the end of Fulmer’s career as the end of an era, not just at Tennessee but also in the SEC. With the influx of outsiders like Urban Meyer at Florida and the Lane Kiffin at Tennessee, you believe that SEC football has become a mercenary’s game now. Does that take away from what SEC Football once was and do the fans end up being cheated in favor of big business — or is this best for the game?
Another really good question. What came to me as the season progressed was that Phil Fulmer is the last of the regionalists in our game. The last guy to graduate from his school and be born in the state to be coaching in the SEC. When Fulmer started back in 1992 that wasn’t a big deal. There was Ray Goff at Georgia, Billy Brewer at Ole Miss, Steve Spurrier at Florida, all had been quarterbacks at their school and later become coaches.
Now, there are none. What’s more the majority of the coaches weren’t even born in the South. They’re outsiders to our culture, who have taken the helm at some of the most visible representations of our culture.
I think that does take away what has, to me, always been unique about SEC football. That it’s a game played for and coached by Southerners. That’s becoming less the case now. We pluck away guys who are very talented at what they do, but are they really of us? You can love or hate Phil Fulmer, but I say in the book that if you’re my age he’s an awful lot like what the men were like when I was growing up. Like our dads.
The business has taken over, and make no mistake, football is big business. I think, maybe, that’s kind of snuck up on us. I know it snuck up on me. I don’t think of myself as a romantic idealist or anything, but I do like to think of the game itself as being pure, something uniquely Southern.
Now the changes may be better for wins and losses, but it may be worse for us as fans. I don’t know, time will tell.
All I know is with the new television contract that we signed with ESPN our teams belong to fans in Minnesota and Maine as much as they belong to us. That’s different than it used to be. And I don’t think most SEC fans have realized that yet.
What is your most vivid memory from last season?
I’ll give you two:
1. Running through the T for the Alabama game. I describe it in much more detail in the book, but there’s something amazing about it. Like you’re literally born aloft by the cheers. It was a dream come true to get to do that.
2. The amount of fans who give the coaches advice during the Vol Walk. The players wanted to make sure I got that down. UT fans are saying things like, “Play man to man, now, Coach Slade,” “Let’s score some points with the passing game, Coach Clawson,” as if a coach hasn’t considered that in the sixty hours of prep work, at minimum, that he’s put into the game. It was shocking to me.
What do you most want your readers to take from your book?
Boy, that’s a tough one for any author to answer.
I’d hope they’d leave with the feeling, no matter who they root for, of knowing what it would be like to be a fan and get to spend a season up close with your favorite team. Very few fans will ever get to do this in their life, so I felt a responsibility to Tennessee fans in particular to get things right, make sure the details were authentic. I wanted them to feel the clock ticking down inside the locker room, hear the dull cheers from outside the stadium ringing down beneath in the locker room, drape themselves in the silence of a pre-game prayer. Embrace the barely restrained rage, anger, and passion boiling just beneath the surface, hear the sound of a player slapping the T on the wall as they exit the locker room to begin the run down the tunnel. Feel all of that from the perspective of a fellow fan.
As the season unfurled in a way that showed it was going to be very memorable, I felt a tremendous responsibility to do the story justice and treat everyone fairly. I think I’ve managed to do that.
All of that’s a big hope. So I should say, I just hope they enjoy the journey of the book and consider me to be a worthy guide.
I know you are an admitted Tennessee fan, but I ran across a disturbing picture of you on the internet wearing a Vanderbilt t-shirt. Please tell me it was photoshopped. 
Well, I believe it was a Vanderbilt Law t-shirt. I draw a distinction between grad school. No law students are playing college football. But, full disclosure, I have a law degree from Vandy. In Dixieland Delight, I wrote that my mom made my dad call and say he’d be proud if I went to Vanderbilt for law school after I’d been admitted. Because my mom was concerned that years of rooting against Vandy would cause me to turn down the school.
As luck would have it my sister went to the undergrad there before I got admitted to the law school. And he refused to sign her tuition checks. Literally would not do it because he was such a Tennessee fan.
That’s SEC football for you.
| To the left is a direct link to purchase On Rocky Top: A Front-Row Seat to the End of an Era from Amazon.com. The book will be available August 18th and I encourage you to pre-order your copy today.
By purchasing from this link, you are helping to support VolNation. We earn a small percentage on each sale. Clay told me to be sure and mention that he will be available to sign VolNation purchased copies of the book at any of his book signing events. Just let him know you purchased it here, and he will be happy to oblige. |
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