When we first started kicking around the idea of doing this blog, I envisioned myself only writing about Class A athletics and BBQ. The topics will probably end up being more broad than that, but this first entry will shed a little light on why I'm passionate about Class A sports. Big cities have other forms of entertainment, whereas small town America often has its school and that school's sports teams. It provides an identity and means everything...also there kudzu plays a role, but more on that in a minute. I'll have something describing my obsession with barbecue later...it basically centers around the fact that I'm overweight and like pig meat. In the meantime, this tale of dark end zones and places with "crossroads" in their name sort of sums up my love of small schools...
I've heard people talk about "dark corner" South Carolina for a long time. I've always heard it's up in the foothills around Landrum somewhere. Apparently, I've always heard wrong. Earlier this season, I decided to take in Great Falls' football game at Wagener-Salley. I had been there, once, about 10 years ago, but had apparently forgotten how long a drive it is. The school is actually in Wagener (sorry Salley), which is in Aiken. I left from home, going past Whitmire to get on I-26, then to I-20, then to dimly-lit, Lexington County roads. I had tried to plan a full-on eating excursion as part of this trip. Aiken has a highly thought of barbecue eatery and I am quite fond of dead pig, smoked and slathered in a mustard-based sauce. I didn't get to leave as early as I'd hoped, and the barbecue place I wanted to visit was a good half-hour away from the school, so I had to nix that idea. I figured I could turn to the magical voice inside my phone for a recommendation on somewhere to eat that was a little closer. I don't know why I thought that, since Siri can't seem to understand my Carolina twang and doesn't particularly seem to like me very much. "Siri, where is a good place to eat in Wagener, South Carolina?" I asked. I asked in an extra-friendly voice, hoping that would win over the woman in my phone. "Getting locations for tire stores," she said. "I don't want to eat tires, ma'am," I said. "Somewhere...to...eat...in...Wagener...South...Carolina." "Getting locations for wagoners in South Carolina," she said. I decided it was hopeless. I gave up. I made it from one interstate to the other fine, but once I took my exit off I-20, I was a little confused about where to go. I decided to turn to Siri again, though I'm not sure why. She once instructed me to turn right in the middle of a long bridge and insisted that I could find Camden High School if only I would turn left into someone's driveway then take a right into their shed. I decided to eliminate the language barrier by just typing in where I wanted to go. To my amazement, it worked. She gave me accurate directions deep into the country portion of the midlands. She could have just said "exit near the dirty book store" then turn left, but she avoided that for some reason. Anyway, how far in the country I was became quickly apparent. At one point, I came to Fairview Crossroads. In my experience, anytime you come to a place called the "fill in the blank" Crossroads you are pretty deep in the sticks. I don't say that disparagingly at all...I'm from the sticks and like being there. Usually, though, little communities are named for a person, or a nearby landmark of some kind. "We gotta name this place," one state mapmaker says to another one. "What families live around here?" "Ain't none," the other would say. "Oh, well are their any bodies of water around here? Creeks, rivers...anything like that?" "Nuh-uh," the other says. "Not even a mud puddle." "Any old churches? We could name it after an old church." "I already told you nobody lives here. No people, no church." "Dang. What are we going to call this place? Hey, they've got two roads that intersect, right?" "Yep. That's about all they got. That and a hill." "Alright, I got it. You can get a fair view from that hill. How about Fairview Crossroads?" As I got a little further down the road, I finally started to see some things. I saw a sign advertising the services of B. Jay the DJ. A very long time ago, I actually went by the name "T.J. The DJ" when I was really young, worked in radio and thought that was the awesomest name ever. I may have a copyright issue with B. Jay. I'll have to look into that later. I also passed a monastery, which was a pretty interesting find...and quite a contrast to frontage road "book store" I'd passed earlier. I got to Wagener...well, Siri got me to Wagener anyway. It was a really nice little town and did appear to have some good local places to eat. With the game only 20 or so minutes from kicking off and the action probably to last well past business hours, I would have to come back and enjoy them some other time. From that point, finding Wagener-Salley High School was pretty easy. All I had to do was look for the stadium lights, which were beaming just in front and to the right of me. As I started to turn in I saw a number of girls posing for pictures in pretty dresses out front...a sure sign of homecoming. That usually means a big, happy crowd (Yay!) and a really long halftime (Sigh...) I enjoy the atmosphere at small school football games. I have been to most of the state's larger schools to watch games and have been subjected to crummy parking, actually being charged to park and unfriendly attendants who want everything short of a blood sample and my mother's Social Security number before letting me walk through the gate. At places like Wagener, you park wherever you can find a spot and stroll on through the gate. The folks are friendly and figure that a notebook and a large bag of camera equipment would be an awfully elaborate disguise for someone to don to get out of paying the $5 admission price. "You're good shug," a woman said as she waved me in. I was only a few paces into the place when I saw a big sign affixed to the trailer that serves as the stadium's restroom facilities. It was an advertisement for the Town of Salley. It voiced support for the Wagener-Salley War Eagles and touted Salley as the chitlin capital of the world. I already knew Salley held that title, but seeing the sign made me wonder how exactly Salley got it in the first place. Do they have more chitlins than everybody else? Do they have better chitlins? Frankly, how would you know good chitlins from bad? I've had them before, a long time ago, and don't remember them being bad or anything. It's just, you know, if you have to wash poo out of something before you cook it, I think I'll pass. Of course, I also eat hot dogs and who knows what's in those. Maybe it's best not to analyze what I eat too closely. Still, I decided then and there that maybe, perhaps, if they sold chitlins at the concession stand, I would buy an order and try a small bite. I'm pretty adventurous when it comes to food. The concessions stand had a big menu with a lot of good-looking items on it, but no fried hog intestines. Generally, I have found, small schools often have the best concession stand food, because some lady is in the cramped kitchen quarters actually making that food, or a fellow is stationed by a grill actually cooking the hot dogs and hamburgers. I like chain restaurant pizza and chicken sandwiches as much (or maybe more) than most and bigger schools often have some kind of sponsorship agreement with those chains and sell their stuff at games. I can get those at those restaurants, though...I can't get an appropriately burned hot dog Jimmy just took off the grill with a ladle-full of chili that Beulah just cooked in a crock pot. At a football game, I'd rather have that. Once I got down to the sidelines, I realized I didn't have a pen. I'm bad to just cram my pens into the spiral of my notebook, where they don't tend to stay. I asked Great Falls assistant coach Cody Mobley if he had a spare. He didn't, but he saw to it that I got one. "Hey, anybody got a pen Travis can borrow?" he hollered at the Great Falls fans. A young girl came down and gave me a hot pink pen. I would go to my car at halftime and get another one, since I would have to stay on the field after the game (when she would be ready to leave) to interview players and coaches. I returned her pen and thanked her profusely. Almost exactly one year before this game, I had ventured down to the Midlands to see another Great Falls game. That one was at River Bluff, a new, big school in Lexington County. The school was a palace and the stadium a cathedral. They had a two story building in one end zone. The bottom floor was a field house, with the second serving as luxury boxes for the team's biggest boosters. They had a field turf surface, a big video scoreboard and a brick wall that stretched from the corner of the home stands almost to the visitors side, providing a catwalk-like view of the game to anyone who wanted to stand up there. It was impressive, it is beautiful, it is the envy of most other schools and it was entirely too much for a simple fellow like myself. The Wagener-Salley band, which included 14 musicians by my count, one of whom was wearing her homecoming dress as she played a horn, treated the crowd to "Call me Al" and "Seven Nation Army" a dozen or more times. Call me crazy, but I far preferred that to the high-dollar sound system piping in music at River Bluff. What I also didn't miss was someone saying, over and over "That's another Jim Bob's deer cooler, tax service and haberdasher FIRST DOWN!" I know athletic departments need revenue anywhere they can get it, but constant commercials over the loudspeaker and wacky videos on the scoreboard during time outs sort of take away from what you're actually there to see...which is kids playing football, kids cheering for the football team and other kids playing music. I know many folks have shorter attention spans today and need something to tickle their senses almost constantly to stay engaged, but I'm not among them. Fourteen kids (one in a fancy dress) playing an old Paul Simon song and a country gentleman from somewhere in Aiken County occasionally saying "Let's go War Eagles" over the speaker (in vain as it turned out, since Great Falls won in a rout) is all I need on a nice night, out in the country under the big stadium lights. Bells and whistles are fine and all, but small towns supporting their small school and teams is far more authentic. Maybe they have figured out, as I have myself, that the more perfume you have to squirt on something, the more it probably stinks. Chitlin signs and bathrooms in a trailer and a crowd small enough to hear a coach ask for a pen for the goofy local reporter tell you a lot more about a place than a million dollar scoreboard, lights that virtually turn night into day and luxury boxes. Speaking of those lights, as Great Falls drove toward the far end zone, I made a discovery. As I walked down to that end to take some pictures I noticed something unusual. Just beside the visitor's stands, there are some woods and is often the case of wooded areas in South Carolina, there was an abundance of lovely kudzu growing on the trees and fence and some even spilled onto the field. Because of that, light actually can't get to one corner of the end zone. I've heard about "The Dark Corner" of South Carolina all my life and thought it was up in the hill country somewhere. I was wrong. It stretches from the goal line to the back pylon and over a few feet toward the goal post in one of Wagener-Salley's end zones. I bet York or Blythewood or any big school would fire the groundskeeper and fear for what people might think of unwanted vines blocking out the light. Man...they don't know what they're missing.
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November 2021
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