It’s Saturday In Athens

Zach Freshley
Sep 1, 2018 · 4 min read

There’s a particular smell that permeates Athens on Saturdays in the Fall. It’s a mixture of warm beer and cheap liquor and cigarette smoke and sweaty frat boys and God knows what else. And as pungent as it is, it’s the smell of home.

Every year in early September, 92,000 people descend upon The Classic City. Fifty-something year old bankers from Atlanta rub shoulders with mechanics from Dawsonville. C-suite executives in their $50,000 RV’s share parking lots with frat boys grilling out of the back of their buddy’s 2008 Ford F150. Good ol’ boys, their cheeks bulging with Skoal Wintergreen, dap up local black kids selling bootleg UGA gear. This eclectic assortment of people, this mishmash of humanity; they’re all brought together by one thing: The Dawgs.

I’ll never forget my first UGA football game. September 1st, 2012. My freshman year of college. I remember waking up at 9 AM in my 8th floor dorm room and wondering who the hell was making all that noise outside my building. I threw on some clothes and walked out onto a campus I barely recognized.

I saw about million pretty sorority girls in their Saturday best. I saw somebody’s dad, already sevens beers in, absolutely crushing it at cornhole. I saw toddlers tossing Nerf footballs around, proximity to smoking grills be damned. This was a whole new world to me. I’d walked these grounds for weeks before on my way to and from class but somehow, everything was different that day.

There are these shirts with a picture of Sanford Stadium on them that say something like, “Nothing better than spending my Saturday with 92,000 of my best friends.” And I know those words are just something some Terry College of Business marketing graduate made up to sell t-shirts. But there’s a kernel of truth somewhere in it. On September 1, 2012, when a kid named Todd Gurley ran back a kickoff 100 yards for a touchdown, I felt closer to those 92,000 people in that stadium than I did to anyone else on the planet. It was exhilarating; a rush unlike anything else I’d felt in my life.

We won that game handily. It was just a tuneup game; one of those affairs where some minnow gets paid six figures to play the role of a glorified practice squad for one of the big boys. But as I walked out of that stadium, my red, sweat-stained Faded Glory polo clinging to my skin like plastic wrap, I was counting the days until I could walk through those gates again.

I didn’t miss a single home game for the next four years. I remember standing in line for two and a half hours before the gates opened for the Auburn game that was Todd Gurley’s return from his 4-game suspension. Exactly two things stand out about that game: It was cold as hell and we beat the brakes off them Tigers/Eagles/Plainsmen. I remember watching us lose to Georgia Tech in overtime. I’d obviously never cared for That Trade School on North Ave but as I watched the Tech players tear up the hedges in celebration, a deep hatred took root in my soul. Those four years were the start of a love affair between me and the University of Georgia that will last the rest of my life.

It’s not just the wins and losses that seared themselves into my brain. Hell, it’s not even mostly the wins and losses. There’s just something about being a Dawg fan that changes you. Georgia fandom imparts a kind of shibboleth to its adherents; an indelible something that can’t be quantified. This sense of belonging, while not unique to UGA, is what that keeps me coming back year after year. No matter where I am, UGA will always be my home.

After I graduated, I moved to Nashville. Nashville is one of those cities that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be yet. It’s a city of country music and NASCAR and hipsters and hip hop and barbeque and hockey and a million other things. All I knew was, I didn’t fit there. I was a stranger in a strange land. Nashville’s only about 250 miles away from Athens but it may as well have been a thousand.

When football season started, I googled, “UGA bar” and found out where the alumni association was hosting the watch party. (The bar was called “South” and it had murals of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee but that’s neither here nor there.) I remember walking into that bar and the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was mixture of warm beer and cheap liquor and cigarette smoke and sweaty former frat boys and God knows what else. And as a slightly inebriated dude cupped his hands to his mouth and roared, “WHO’S THAT COMIN’ DOWN THE TRACK?”, I knew that I was home. Even though I was hundreds of miles away, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew it was Saturday in Athens.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade