Great Article on 1994 AU - FL

[Tiger Wench]

It is too long to post here, but it is an awesome perspective piece.  It's written by a Florida fan, the guy Spencer Hall, who is one of the main writers at EDSBS, who was in the Florida band at that time.  Worth a read if you get a moment.

http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2012/8/30/3278772/10-15-94#storyjump

I would like to say I remembered anything from the game but that moment, the moment when mild interest metastasized into something else entirely, the instant when Frank Sanders caught a perfectly thrown smash route for the touchdown, ending Florida's home winning streak against SEC teams. I do not. I only remember the sky glaring above, and the air pressure dropping as sixty thousand people gasped in unison, a small city's worth of humanity cooked sous vide at once.

The play was simple. I'm listening to Terry Bowden talk about it right now, rewinding and listening to him, now the coach at Akron, which is not Auburn, outline the game, but mostly the crystalline end.

We got down to that last play. With 17 seconds left we had a time out, so we flipped the formation. That safety they had--Galloway? He's a doctor now--he was a little shorter. We put a 6'2" receiver on a shorter safety. The corner slipped on the hitch, and the safety was trying to push Frank to the corner, and he was able to jump too high for Gilmore to get it.

I saw none of this. Across the field, there were only bodies, and the quick flutter of the ball flushed from Patrick Nix's hand into a waving maelstrom of arms blurred against the bodies of fans standing in the endzone. Then someone turned off the power to every Florida fan in the stadium, and left the lights on in the Auburn sections, tiny squares of people vibrating like bees in a freshly kicked hive.

The moment in a film when something horrible happens is bad, but it is far worse when the viewer has to go off only what is inferred. I have seen the winning play happen right in front of me, and it is always so much more bearable because of its irrefutability, its undeniable reality. The eyes saw the cold math of the situation, observed the ball go over the line, and recognized the clear outcomes and implications of the moment. Your skill is superior, and the day clearly yours, opponent.

I never saw Frank Sanders come down with that ball. I did hear the random scream of a woman somewhere in the stadium, and feel the clammy, lukewarm nausea of defeat roil through me. The unseen villain off-screen was again so much more terrifying than anything explicit you could ever show. Terry Bowden sprinted across the field to shake Steve Spurrier's hand well across midfield. The word Bowden used for the moment: "youthful."

Spurrier went to the corner to sing with the band, and then forgot that you do not sing after losses, and walked alone into the locker room. The lone safety lined up on Frank Sanders, the one who gave up the TD, was still in shock along with everyone else in the stadium--including a guy named Jonathan who wrote me just to say that he drove back all the way to Auburn just to see himself on VHS tape jumping up and down on television after Auburn's second TD.

[CCTAU]

Heck yeah!