SCSU - USC Football proves its power

By BOB SPEAR, The State

Never again doubt the power of football.

Not after Saturday night.

Not after South Carolina and South Carolina State squared off at Williams-Brice Stadium.

A 60-minute game contested on a plot of grass that measures 100 yards by 53 yards scraped away years of unwanted history and helped the state take another positive step into the future.

Combine the expectations in the week leading to the game with the blocking and tackling on a late-summer Saturday night, and the sum of good feeling accomplished more than all the rhetoric through the years.

"Historic" and "symbolic" often found their way into media reports centering on the first football game between the "big" state university, South Carolina, and the historical black college-university, South Carolina State. The words fit.

Stories focused on the monetary gain of S.C. State, and certainly the Bulldogs' athletic treasury benefits from the transfusion of cash. Fans who believed the racial divide would never permit the game basked in the attention and reveled in anticipation.

All those factors matter, of course. Bundle them into one package and discover the real reason to celebrate a football game that figured to be one-sided on the scoreboard: the visibility and credibility showered on S.C. State.

Those two elements could not be bought at any price, and that is the power and passion of football.

Priceless exposure. For those who still do not believe, consider this: The schools have faced each other in their second-most popular sport, men's basketball, periodically through the years. The series dates to Frank McGuire's days with the Gamecocks.

Some of those basketball games turned into nail-biters. Indeed, some of the S.C. State faithful believe the Bulldogs fell victim to a classic "homer" job one year at Carolina Coliseum, and last season's game at the Colonial Center went to the wire.

The Gamecocks won 55-52 before an announced crowd of 6,307 in the most recent game. The season before, USC won in a walk before a gathering listed at 5,014.

No one noticed, or if they did, the attendance figures suggest no one cared.

Compare that to Saturday night's scramble for tickets and a reported sellout crowd.

That is football.

"Without question, Saturday will be a great night for South Carolina State University," Donnie Shell, a former Bulldogs star who had a glittering career in the National Football League, said in previewing the game. "You can't buy this type of exposure through any kind of advertising. The money for the budget is great, but the visibility will mean more."

Like most S.C. State fans, Shell — a season-ticket holder who works for the Carolina Panthers — believes this game should have happen long before now, but he did not dwell on that point.

"It's good that schools within the state play each other," he said. "It's good for everybody, both our school and South Carolina."

The pregame anticipation drives that fact home.

Shell grew up in Whitmire in the early days of public-school integration. He had one scholarship offer — to Belmont Abbey to play basketball. Instead, he went to S.C. State and played on a defense that included future pros Harry Carson, Mickey Sims and Barney Chavous.

"I wish we could have played (USC) then, but when I played, I never saw this happening," he said. "I couldn't have imagined it then. Now, I'm pleased the teams are playing, that (administrators) made it possible."

How his Bulldogs would have fared against the Gamecocks "is something we will never know," said Shell, inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1998 and an All-Pro safety on the Pittsburgh Steelers' Steel Curtain defense in the pros. "We had confidence we could play football. Football is blocking and tackling and running, and if you could do those things, you can play on any level."

The "big" schools with far larger resources generally dominate in games like this one, but the Gamecocks had to work harder than expected Saturday night.

The crowd had to be wondering at halftime if the Gamecocks are "average stiffs" — coach Steve Spurrier's characterization after their 28-14 win over Louisiana-Lafayette — or the team that knocked off nationally ranked Georgia a week ago. Five first-half turnovers created plenty of reason for indigestion with a date with LSU on the horizon.

But more than the numbers on the scoreboard mattered Saturday night. At long last, these neighboring teams squared off in a game that illustrates the power of football.