I really hope my children, if I ever have them, don’t inherit whatever it is in me that wants to burst out in a smile, let out a scream and chest-bump strangers when the University of Florida football team wins a big game or, conversely, jump from the top of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium after a loss.

It can be a miserable existence, and luckily I wasn’t around in the 1970s. Then again, there were few expectations in those days — at least compared to now.

I guess being a fan — which, according to Ken Burn’s “Baseball” series I’m watching now, originated from references to baseball fanciers or fanatics — is about managing expectations. Really, life, I’m finding, is about that.

My expectations ran high this spring and summer for the various teams I follow, either through birth (UF and U.S. Soccer) or an unexplainable feeling of kinship (Manchester United). But none of the seven that had a shot at the ultimate prize was able to lift a trophy or hang a banner this year.

With three minutes left in Sunday’s World Cup final, I thought the U.S. women’s national team would come through. It was a goal up, and the players could almost feel the elusive (in the last 12 years) cup in their hands.

But Sawa, the Japanese star whose first name escapes me, was able to get a bouncing ball in front of net and tied the match. The rest — and the U.S. team — is history.

While there will be more games and more championships, that heartache does linger, as melodramatic as that might sound, for a time.

But, I suppose, you manage the pain, too, and move on to the next season. That sounds familiar.

A rare bright spot. Celebrating a thrashing in Nashville, Tenn.

Early on in the South Carolina game, before things got out of hand, I texted a Christian friend of mine, asking him to pray for the Gators — and me. “I refuse to believe the Lord manipulates sporting events,” he wrote back. “But I’ll pray that you don’t burst any vessels in your eyes.” At least that one was answered.

I’m in Tallahassee ahead of Saturday’s game to close out this bizarre season marked by three straight home losses, three quarterbacks and, hopefully, three wins over the core rivals — Tennessee, Georgia and Florida State. If the latter comes to fruition, I would be at peace, the pain from leaving Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on three specific autumn nights — the words “only Gators get out alive” replaying in my head to a background of cowbells, in the case of the Mississippi State game, and Southern hollers after the Louisiana State and South Carolina debacles — eased.

But this rivalry has always had its own bizarre moments, particularly in Tallahassee. Take the “Choke at Doak” in 1994, the first game I attended at Florida State. Or the 2006 game, after which a lame-duck Ron Zook was carried off a field that had been named earlier in the day for Bobby Bowden.

So who the hell knows what will happen tomorrow? Only God, and for some reason he apparently isn’t much interested in helping Florida’s offense.

For the second straight week, I looked over to the band playing the fight song to — no one in particular. The players and coaches had either run off to the locker room or, for the masochists, stayed on the field to watch their opponents celebrating on their field, mocking their gator chomp, ringing their stupid fucking cowbells. But they weren’t anywhere near the band.

For a while afterward, we sat there, stunned. Two weeks in a row, the scoreboards were wiped blank within minutes — as if it didn’t happen. The crying fans I saw in photographs later said it much more clearly anyway: God, we suck.

OK. Alabama is a very good football team. And Bryant-Denny is a tough place to play. A few questionable play calls and some shoddy execution in the first half, and it looked doomed from the get-go. That’s fine. But losing to Louisiana State at home was much more suspect. Some 90,000 fans knew Les Miles, the most badass coach I’ve ever seen, was going to fake that field goal. And guess what, Urban Meyer? He didn’t give a shit. And oh my god did it get worse. What happened the next week was just about the most inexcusable thing I’ve seen out of the football program — on the field anyway — in my two decades of fandom. An incredibly inept offense, a weak defense with no innovation and atrocious clock management. Jesus, we suck. Forget Tim Tebow or Cam Newton — can we get Dan Mullen back?

And, after all of this, the Gators still have a chance to get to Atlanta. This week, in the lead-up to the Georgia game, I am trying to talk myself into my team going on a three-game winning streak, beating its archrival at the cocktail party, winning on the road in Nashville and beating Spurrier’s ranked Gamecocks. Like the Chain of Strength song, I — I wanna believe. But I won’t until the players are gathered before the band on Saturday night in Jacksonville, singing that “we’ll fight our way for Flor-i-da” after they actually did.

Like dangling a shoelace in front of a flustered kitten, I reached over the tunnel wall and jangled my keys.

Clink clink clink. Here, kitty kitty.

The kitten, in this case a sizable Kentucky fan, was not the least bit amused. He gave me the finger and a snarl and jumped to grab the keys. I yanked them away and laughed with my brother. Mr. Kentucky disappeared under the stands. Good riddance.

Alone, this sounds childish, petty and, to stay the least, unsportsmanlike. But this dude had been annoying fans for much of the game, holding Gator head fans (the sort folks would wave in church before air conditioning) upside down like it was some sort of effigy. And in football, even in the stands, I believe in an eye for an eye. There was the asshole at the 2006 national championship game who, after Ohio State’s Ted Ginn Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a score, turned around and did the “O-H-I-O” chant in our faces. Naturally, the Gators ended up steamrolling the Buckeyes — and I steamrolled him the rest of the game. A Florida fan nearby tried to tell me not to mock the poor bastard. Nope. Get lost.

Continue reading

Note: Last season, I decided to blog about my experiences and hopes and fears following my alma mater’s football team. I had every intention of doing that again but have gotten off to a late start. Alas, here we go (Gators).

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — As a kid faithfully wearing a No. 7 jersey, as a student ushering in the Urban era and now as an alumnus, nothing makes me angrier than when someone mocks the Gator chomp. In 2007, I nearly had an aneurysm right there in Section 34 of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium as I watched Wes Byrum run around looking toward the east stands flapping his arms together. (I also nearly cried.)

So when some asshole a few rows below us at Neyland Stadium here on Saturday turned around to do it, I got pissed off. Things were said. Gestures were made. And all of a sudden, I understood the primal rage and the bloodlust for anarchy described in “Among the Thugs,” a book about English soccer hooligans I read earlier this year.

Eventually things calmed down, and by the beginning of the fourth quarter, when said asshole and his friends left, they didn’t so much as look in our general direction. Why? The scoreboard.

Continue reading

I got to do some cool shit this year. I visited two countries I’d long longed to, England and France; went to Texas; saw the Gators win their third football championship; saw them beat Louisiana State in Death Valley; went to a Premier League match; was interviewed on MSNBC; had a few stories featured on Bizarre Florida; had the pleasure of visiting Disneyland Paris; and so on.

But I don’t think I will remember 2009 fondly. After all, it was the year that left us with these enduring images: a seemingly occupied balloon floating over the Colorado desert; the mug shot of the governor of South Carolina, who was thought to be missing in the Appalachian Mountains but was really off bopping some South American broad unbeknownst to his staff (not to mention his family); Tiger Woods’ smashed-up SUV; a Texas military base in chaos; thousands mourning Michael Jackson’s hardly untimely death; protesters around my age dying on the streets of Tehran.

Continue reading

Bobby and Hank Hill digest their Longhorns’ heartbreaking loss to the Cornhuskers:

ATLANTA — During warmups, my dad and I settled into our upper-deck seats at the dome here, anxiously awaiting kickoff of one of the biggest games of the past few college football seasons. Our Gators had come out in all-white outfits, including an untraditional white helmet they had worn the previous week as part of a Nike promotion.

“The good guys,” a guy behind us commented. Maybe. But you know what they say about good guys and where they finish: maybe not last but certainly not first.

Continue reading

For about 10 months, since a beautiful January night in Miami Gardens, my dad and I have talked many times about what will come to pass Saturday: Tebow’s last stand.

We’ve talked about the decibel level when No. 15 runs out of the south end zone to greet Urban and his parents at midfield. We’ve talked about the bittersweetness. We’ve talked about the chills that will run through some 90,000 people (save for the few thousand in garnet and gold, and even they will likely be awestruck) as the greatest college football player EVER takes the field for his last home game.

Yeah, I said it. Greatest ever. Not the greatest of this decade or at Florida or in the SEC. Greatest. Ever.

As one of the only die-hard Gators in the Record newsroom, the sports writers like to give me a hard time. The other night they were making their case again for their Anti-Tebow for Heisman campaign. They have their points: Timmy hasn’t had the statistical season as a senior that he had during his sophomore and junior years. And after Thursday’s performance, Colt McCoy deserves it.

But take his career numbers into account:

8,335 passing yards
2,743 rushing yards
81 passing touchdowns
54 rushing touchdowns
46 wins to six losses
3 SEC East titles
2 national championships
2 SEC championships
2 first-team Academic All-American selections
1 first-team All-American selection
1 Heisman Trophy

All that with three games to spare.

You can compare those numbers to anyone’s and they will hold up. But to really determine how great he has been you have to watch him convert a fourth down or complete one of those crazy jump passes or get a whole stadium roaring with a jerk of the arms. You have to read about his mission work and his speeches at prisons and look at his GPA.

He’s been the entire package for four years, and we’ll be sad to see him go.

“Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Follow your heart, kid, and you’ll never go wrong.”

I don’t know why this gives me hope, but it does: ESPN’s preseason Bracketology predicts the Florida basketball team will earn a No. 9 seed in the tournament (the real one, not that invitational one) and play Wake Forest in Oklahoma City in the first round.

The fact that we’re merely predicted to make it has me more excited about Sunday’s opener against Stetson. But I’m not any less nervous about playing Kentucky and, well, any other team ranked in the Top 50 of the RPI.

I really really really just want a season that doesn’t end with me thinking, Since we’re in the NIT, we might as well win it.

To sum up the last three weeks: Oh my. A last-minute, game-winning field goal against Arkansas; a sloppy victory in Starkville; another rout of Georgia; and now Gougegate.

I don’t condone what Brandon Spikes did. But football is a violent, violent game, and when Georgia players were blatantly taking their own cheap shots, who knows what Spikes might have been responding to (that the cameras and the officials didn’t catch)?