Scott Davis: Yes, it's OK to believe

GamecockCentral.com columnist Scott Davis, who has followed USC sports for more than 30 years, provides commentary from the perspective of a Gamecocks fan. You can follow Scott on Twitter at @scdonfire.

A few minutes after the South Carolina baseball team wrapped up its NCAA Regional win in surprising, come-from-waaaay-behind fashion, I got a text message from my brother-in-law.

“Is it OK to believe in this team?” he asked, adding that it had been awhile since we’d been able to believe in any men’s sports team at Carolina, and he wasn’t quite sure if he was ready to pour his whole heart into this thing.

If you’ve been watching Gamecock baseball in 2016, you know this question made sense.

Still, I was ready with a reply.

“Yep,” I said. “It’s OK.”

And it is.

Just a couple of years removed from back-to-back national championships in baseball, Gamecock Nation is celebrating this regional victory with a vigor and passion I haven’t seen from our fans in quite some time. Sure, that statement may seem ridiculous at first blush. After all, it’s just a regional, and one that we hosted in our own park and were favored to win, and hey, when you’ve won two titles in recent years, who cares about getting by the likes of UNC-Wilmington, Duke and Rhode Island just to get an opportunity to play for a College World Series berth?

I’ll tell you who cares: Me.

And from the ecstatic reaction I saw by the 7,000-plus fans at Founders Park on a random Tuesday afternoon, a whole heck of a lot of USC supporters care, too.

If you didn’t closely follow the roller coaster ride that was South Carolina’s baseball season the last few months, perhaps it doesn’t make that much sense. By regular season’s end, the Gamecocks had compiled a powerfully impressive 20 SEC wins in a rugged conference. They had a top-10 RPI by just about every standard. They were in the mix for a top-8 national seed that would have ensured them home-field advantage throughout the quest for Omaha. No question about it, the end results suggested it was a very, very good year.

Somehow, though, to spoiled USC baseball fans like myself and thousands of others, it just didn’t feel like a particularly extraordinary campaign.

This edition of the Gamecock baseball team was capable of going on the road to Oxford and sweeping an excellent Ole Miss team…and also of losing two-of-three to an inferior Georgia squad and an utterly mediocre Kentucky team. They simply weren’t the kind of team that dominated anyone or caused opposing fans to have heart palpitations and bouts of insomnia.

If you were a fan of another SEC team, you respected this group, but you weren’t afraid of them.

And though the lineup from top to bottom was filled with talented players, as a fan, you just didn’t watch this team and think to yourself, “No matter what happens, I know that guy’s going to come through for us when it matters.”

In many ways, they reminded me most of South Carolina’s 2015-16 men’s basketball team. They were solid, and on any given night, they had a chance to win, and the wins and the results were there at season’s end…but for whatever reason, you never completely believed.

Regardless, none of that would have been a particularly interesting story had the last two weeks not happened.

With a top-8 national seed all but locked up, the Gamecocks arrived in Hoover, Ala., for the SEC Tournament and did what they’ve been doing since they joined the league a quarter of a century ago: They lost two games in a row, looked extremely bad doing it, and immediately boarded a bus to return home to Columbia. (If South Carolina athletics were a horror movie, Hoover would unquestionably represent Camp Crystal Lake – there’s just simply nothing good that happens there and it’s a place that needs to be avoided).

Unthinkably, archrival Clemson (which had barely finished above .500 in the ACC this season) went on a white-hot run to win the ACC Tournament. All of the sudden, the Tigers were now a top-8 seed, bumping the Gamecocks from the pecking order and making it all but a certainty that USC would have to play Clemson on the road to get back to Omaha. Then the Gamecocks lost the first game of their regional to Rhode Island (the Rhode Island Rams?????? Seriously????), and all Hades broke lose.

You’re not going to believe this, but the result didn’t exactly sit well with the South Carolina faithful.

After all, baseball is the one thing that we had.

Through all the endless jibes we’ve had to endure from Clemson fans over the years about football, soccer, golf, whatever – through all the condescending lectures we’ve had to sit through from Tiger fans at the office water cooler, or Sunday school, or family Thanksgiving meals – we could always fall back on, “Yeah…but still. Baseball.”

Not just once in recent memory, but twice, we defeated the Tigers two times in a row to send them home from Omaha. We won consecutive national championships while their fans helplessly watched in horror. And if we didn’t win it all, we threatened to do so, and we beat them up along the way.

Yet here we were, just a few years removed from being the most elite program in America, delivering our most successful season in years, and somehow, miraculously, it still felt like they had the upper hand.

And that’s why a deep, profound unrest emanated throughout the rank and file of Gamecock Nation as early as 96 hours ago.

Now…

I get that it ultimately shouldn’t matter what Clemson’s doing when we’re trying to decide how successful or unsuccessful our athletics programs are. But folks, I’ll just be honest: For fans, it absolutely does (especially just months after they played for a title in football).

Let’s look at the reality: Clemson had just hired a new coach (one who, in a sickening twist, had been a stalwart of Ray Tanner’s Gamecock staff for many years). That coach, despite an up-and-down season, appeared to have his club in prime position to make a nice run towards Omaha. Meanwhile, South Carolina was in Year 4 of the Chad Holbrook Experience, and quite honestly, the bloom was off the rose.

Holbrook followed Tanner’s towering legacy by making a Super Regional in his first season, then losing a regional in year two, then failing to even make the playoffs in year three. Those numbers weren’t horrific by any stretch of the imagination, but after Tanner won two titles and played for a third before stepping in as athletics director, even Holbrook’s immediate family would have to admit it wasn’t an ideal start.

And despite 20 SEC wins in 2016, that’s exactly where this program sat just a few days ago, in what was a particularly important year for Holbrook and his tenure at South Carolina. Had the Gamecocks flamed out against Duke and fled their own regional in ignominious, two-and-out fashion (and they came perilously close to doing so), and had Clemson advanced like just about everyone in America expected them to do, whatever restlessness we’d all been sensing from Gamecock fans everywhere would’ve have been multiplied by 10 trillion.

Which is why that almost painful level of passion erupted in Founders Park on Tuesday. Watching the game from my couch, I genuinely sensed a breakthrough in the Gamecock fan base. They wanted the win in an almost psychotic fashion, but more than that, they desperately wanted to believe in a South Carolina sports team again.

There was almost a special kind of insanity to the cheering, something that gave me chill bumps on top of chill bumps on top of chill bumps. I haven’t seen Gamecock fans care that much about something since we ran Georgia out of Williams-Brice in football in 2012.

If we’re keeping it real, we have to admit that other than the ongoing brilliance of Dawn Staley’s women’s basketball team, it’s been a bumpy couple of years for South Carolina sports. The basketball team won a school-record 24 wins this year and still somehow couldn’t find a way to make the NCAA Tournament (then looked utterly disinterested in being quickly dispatched from the NIT).

Football? That’s an even juicier soap opera. The Gamecocks followed a historic stretch of 42 wins in four years and an SEC East title with a swift return to mediocrity, and then for good measure posted one of the worst seasons in the program’s history, no matter how you slice it (sorry, but if your head coach leaves at mid-season and you lose to The Citadel, it’s one of the worst seasons in your history no matter how many awful seasons you’ve compiled over the years).

So we needed this. We didn’t just want it, we needed it.

And that’s why South Carolina fans were reacting like they’d won the lottery after improbably stringing together four straight wins to move on to the supers. As my brother-in-law said, it’s been awhile since we felt like we could believe.

And believing feels good. When you’re used to believing, and you haven’t had an opportunity to do it for some time, well, you want to do it again.

In many ways, Holbrook’s task has been impossible. Had he won consecutive titles and played for a third in his first three seasons, there still would have been a few fans saying, “Well, all he did is equal Tanner’s achievement. If he really wants to succeed he needs another title.”

Preposterous, ridiculous, but that’s just the way it is when you follow a legend. It’s not fair, it doesn’t make sense, it’s silly…but it’s the way it is.

Ray Perkins went 32-15 as head coach at Alabama, and won 10 games in 1986 before being tossed aside. His mistake was following Bear Bryant in Tuscaloosa. His successor, Bill Curry, won 10 games and a share of the SEC title in 1989 and got pushed out for also not being Bear Bryant. Even Gene Stallings wasn’t universally beloved by the Tide faithful, and he actually won a national championship.

Indeed, Tide fans took nearly three decades to accept a football coach as one of their own, and needed Nick Saban to actually surpass the Bear’s monumental achievements to do that. I’ll just go ahead and tell you this: Whoever follows Saban will be viewed as a failure.

A couple of years ago, I finally finished historian David McCullough’s mammoth biography of Harry S. Truman. The book is a ludicrous 1,120 pages, and it took me a long while to grind through it.

But I’m glad I did, because it’s a captivating story of a man who followed a legend and wasn’t at all popular for doing so.

Truman was not a beloved president in his lifetime. Amateur students of American history like me will likely remember the famous photograph of Truman hoisting a newspaper over his head with the headlines “Dewey Defeats Truman” in 1952, when Truman barely hung on to an extremely slender and unexpected reelection.

Truman’s main problem was that he wasn’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the most popular president in American history. He had virtually stumbled into becoming a U.S. senator despite having little political experience, then wound up becoming FDR’s vice president in an upset. Then FDR passed, and he found himself running the country. Nothing in his trajectory suggested he’d be a memorable or effective leader.

Despite the fact that he was a small-town farmer from rural Missouri, the plainspoken Truman just didn’t connect with average Americans in the way that FDR did, which was odd since Roosevelt was a from a privileged New York family. Roosevelt also wasn’t even mobile without the use of crutches or a wheelchair, yet he projected power: People believed in him. His folksy “Fireside Chats” on the radio inspired confidence in a languishing country.

Truman just didn’t inspire that confidence.

And yet at the end of the day, many American presidential scholars now rank Truman as the most important president of the 20th Century – yes, even ahead of FDR, ahead of Kennedy, ahead of Reagan, ahead of LBJ.

Maybe he wasn’t particularly beloved when he was in the Oval Office, but he actually did stuff. He’s the guy who told Japan we’d fight them until they surrendered unconditionally, and until they were ready to do that, we’d keep fighting. He’s the guy who decided to close the Japanese out officially by using an atomic bomb. He’s the guy who moved to integrate the U.S. Army, helping to legitimatize the budding Civil Rights movement.

Am I comparing Chad Holbrook to one of the greatest leaders in American history?

Of course not.

What I’m saying is that it’s more than simply difficult to follow a legend – it’s impossible. Your expectations are never, ever going to be met by anyone who follows a legend.

But those who follow legends still may have value, and we need to give them an opportunity to show us what that is.

Will Chad Holbrook meet that challenge? I don’t know.

What I do know is this: Gamecock Nation is ready to believe again. The environment this weekend will be raucous, wild and downright terrifying for our opponents.

I can’t wait to see it.

It’s been awhile.

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