Scott Davis: Hope Never Dies

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 thousand years ago, I was born and began the process of growing up as a youngster in the 1970s.

You know how it goes: It seems like a trillion years ago, it seems like yesterday.

For as long as I can remember, I loved football. I wasn't particularly good at playing it, unless being an all-star wide receiver on an elementary school playground counts. I was slow, short, skinny and whatever the opposite of "quick" is. Oddly enough, being bad at football only made me love it more, kind of like those weird romantic relationships where one partner gets energized by the other's bad behavior.

I couldn't play it, but I loved watching it.

I was an All-American at watching it.

When I think about the '70s, I think about wearing ridiculous flared jeans and shirts that were too tight -- but I also think about Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell, the Super Bowl slowly becoming a national holiday, and scary-looking dudes roaming football fields with long, scraggly hair flowing out of their helmets. I think about that Mean Joe Green commercial for Coke ("Hey, Mean Joe!") playing over and over until I started wondering if Mean Joe was actually a member of my family. I think about those NFL pencils that I used to trade with my elementary school pals like prisoners use cigarettes for currency in jail.

I remember sitting impatiently through church, hoping the sermon would end in time for me to go watch my Atlanta Falcons lose.

That, as much as anything, is what I can remember of the time. Crazy hair, crazy clothes, football as a religion: These are good memories.

I found myself thinking about the 1970s and the South Carolina Gamecocks last week while reading an excellent book about football, America and life itself called "The Ones Who Hit the Hardest." The book's subtitle is "The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s and the Fight for America's Soul"...and look, if THAT doesn't get you fired up to read a book, I don't think reading is really in your future.

Check out this opening paragraph and ask yourself if it gets any better: "On Friday, January 17, 1969, the forty-two-year-old commissioner of the National Football League checked into a Jacksonville hotel. Forewarned that a charismatic, game-changing quarterback was in town for an all-star football game, hotel security was doing its best to hold fans at bay. But the commissioner couldn't help but notice the bevy of young women in the hotel's lobby and lounge, waiting expectantly for the star to make his entrance. This wasn't the kind of crowd Pete Rozelle was used to. Red-faced men in fedoras were more his speed. He settled into his suite, ordered a rusty nail and a bowl of nuts from room service and waited, just like the others, for the guy the kids were calling Broadway Joe."

I don't know about you, but when I read that, I was hooked. I was in. I wanted to keep going.

And that's what I did.

A couple of hundred pages later, I'd read enough to know that I still -- STILL -- have hope that the South Carolina Gamecocks can someday become the team we've been waiting for them to become.

Do you?

It's late July.

The heat outside is so thick that just opening a screen door on your patio feels like you've accidentally stumbled into the Devil's Playground.

You've been eating fresh peaches and tomatoes for the last six weeks.

And now you can feel it: Football's close.

It's here, whether you're ready for it or not.

Within days, large, strong human beings will begin roaming around the practice fields on the campus of the University of South Carolina. And a couple of weeks after that, you'll be in the stands somewhere or watching on a large, high-definition flat screen as the Gamecocks start the 2016 season.

You'll be there. You always are.

But you may not be exactly sure why you're doing it.

And honestly? I can't blame you if you feel that way.

Precisely zero people like the Gamecocks' chances in 2016 (which I discussed in a column last week). There's the whole "no playmakers on offense or defense" thing. There's the whole "I'm not sure your new head coach knows what he's doing since he couldn't even win at Florida" thing. There's the whole "South Carolina has never won and never will win, and Steve Spurrier's three-year blip of goodness was the exception that proved the rule, because instead of building on that foundation, even a coach as great as he is allowed the program to slide back into ruin" thing.

I mean, there are a lot of "things" going on with this South Carolina program, and not many of them seem particularly good.

Still, we care.

We always have.

Why?

Well, part of it is because we're good people with strong backbones and we don't quit on something just because it doesn't immediately reward us, and we're definitely going to heaven some day.

And part of it is because we apparently enjoy pain and suffering and want to be miserable.

But the other part of it is this: We know, deep down inside, what it would feel like if somehow, some way, this thing turned around and we became Alabama or Southern Cal or Ohio State. We know that all of the agony would suddenly be rendered into a merit badge: The Eagle Scout designation of college football fanhood.

Because the truth, as impossible as it may seem to believe right now, is that historically bad teams can become great ones.

Don't believe me?

Well, that's why I brought up this book I've been reading.

Do you remember a time when the Pittsburgh Steelers weren't an elite professional football franchise?

I do not.

And I was born in 4,000 B.C., so that means they've been not just good, but VERY good, since basically human beings started recording time.

But reading "The Ones Who Hit the Hardest," I was reminded of something that I'd forgotten: The Steelers used to be awful. I don't mean mediocre. I don't mean a decent team that occasionally makes the playoffs but isn't a real threat to win a title.

I mean straight-up, downright disgustingly awful. This team stunk like week-old salmon in the garbage disposal.

I quote from the book: "Early on, the Steelers were so bad -- the team had only eight winning seasons in its first thirty-six years of existence -- that fans sometimes challenged the players to fights in bars."

I mean, read that again.

Eight winning seasons in thirty-six years? EIGHT?????

Even the South Carolina Gamecocks haven't been THAT bad. Heck, we had more than eight winning seasons just during Steve Spurrier's brief 10 1/2-year tenure.

I mean, I've been frustrated watching this team. I've been despondent. I've been more depressed than Hank Williams and George Strait combined.

But I've never challenged Todd Ellis or George Rogers or Steve Taneyhill to a fight in a bar, for goodness' sake.

Pittsburgh Steelers fans, in the bad old days, did just that to their football heroes.

Today, they support a team that has won more Super Bowls than any other NFL franchise. More than Green Bay, more than Dallas, more than anybody. By every measure, they are the model of what a fan could hope for his sports franchise to be. They almost always make the playoffs, and when they do, there's a better than decent chance that they'll win a championship.

They've been doing it for so long that it's virtually impossible to remember when they didn't -- even for someone as ancient as I am.

But for decades, they were the laughingstock of the NFL.

Former ESPN columnist and current HBO talk show host Bill Simmons wrote his best column about this very subject. His hapless New England Patriots -- for so long not only the black sheep of the NFL, but of the Boston sports scene in general -- finally won a Super Bowl. If you're younger than 30, be honest: You don't remember the Patriots ever being anything other than awesome, do you?

Here's what Simmons wrote after a historically terrible team, his favorite, won the Super Bowl: "Now it all makes sense. You bleed for your team, you follow them through thick and thin, you monitor every free-agent signing, you immerse yourself in Draft Day, you purchase the jerseys and caps, you plan your Sundays around the games...and there's a little rainbow waiting at the end. You can't see it, but you know it's there. It's there. It has to be there. So you believe. Of course, there's one catch: You might never get there."

And that's just it. We might never get there.

We might spend all of those God-awful, sickeningly hot September Saturdays in Williams-Brice without a payoff. We might live to be 100 and still not see Gamecock players holding up an SEC Champions trophy on a field in Atlanta. We might not ever become the Cincinnati Bengals, much less the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But here's the thing: We might get there after all.

We might.

When we kick things off on September 1, I will be watching.

I will be watching. I always do. I always will.

And so will you.

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