The Georgia-Auburn series began in 1892. Professor Herty from chemistry coached the game, and it featured a lot of men with wildly bushy hair and no helmets, shouting 1892 things to each other such as, “Dash-fire, boys! No more of this Gullyfluff!”
It was the second game ever for Georgia “foot ball,” the latest teenage fad. The students and players climbed onto a train and traveled to Piedmont Park in Atlanta to take on the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, later known as Auburn. Georgia Tech had no football—some things never change—and the North Avenue trade school students showed up wearing UGA colors. So there’s that.
Face value on the tickets was fifty cents, though they were going for upwards of seventy-five cents on StubHub. Some say the Wright Brothers flew over, toting a “Grover Cleveland will raise your taxes” banner. There was no Dawgvent, but a little group of fans gathered over by the gazebo to express real-time hysteria over every play.
The Auburn legend, or one of a fine selection of them, is that the cry of “War Eagle” began at this game. An Auburn fan will wipe away a tear while telling it to you. Supposedly a Confederate soldier was a-settin’ in the stands with his pet eagle. Perfectly ordinary thing. He had rescued the old, wounded bird from the battlefield some thirty years earlier, and toted it with him ever since. It had been injured in the Great Unpleasantness, but now it spread its wings and flew across Piedmont Park’s gridiron, inspiring the farmer boys to a pulse-pounding victory.
And if you believe that one, you’ll believe Cam Newton assumed his daddy just carried a lot of cash in his wallet. Also, there are at least three other “origin of the War Eagle” stories, all completely different, involving fightin’ Injuns and—I wouldn’t kid—Saxon warriors and their battlefield eagles. Some probably involve hobbits, though I didn’t read that far. Auburn fans shed a tear as they tell each “legend”; also when they explain why they really won the national championship in certain years.
The way I imagine it, once the game was over, with Auburn winning in a heavy rain, some farm boy walked over to a Georgia fan and said, “We own you. You’re jealous of our farm school, which is the Harvard of the South of farm schools.”
At this game, the Georgia people, having fully experienced the nature of Auburn people, went back to campus and said, “We’ll play ‘em somewhere else. But don’t make us go to their cow pasture in Opelika. There’s apparently something in the water over there. These folks are crazy.”
Even in 1892, Auburn was into white-outs. Though they played all their games in
Atlanta, where the fields impressively had no cow droppings.
The Georgia coaches said, “Sure. We’ll keep playing it in Atlanta for the next decade, then we’ll switch it to Macon for a few years, then maybe a couple of years in Montgomery—there are working outhouses in Montgomery, at least—then Savannah, back to Atlanta, then to Columbus for, like, a couple of generations. That will take us to about 1959.”
It was a good plan. You can look it up. Georgia kept shifting the locations, which was hard on Auburn fans who traveled in ox-buggies or the backs of wagon trains, plus it was harvest time whenever they played (no more February games). But the Auburn fans continued to be ornery and a little bit paranoid, and some of them brought farm implements—hoes, shovels, and the like—into pile-ups. They were annoying to play against.
Then arose the myth that Georgia-Auburn was some kind of “brother against brother” rivalry; that actually there was no genuine resentment between the two. TV loves that line, but come on.
It’s more like brothers, one of whom is very smart and gets to attend the prestigious in-state school, America’s oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education, in a fabulous town that invents great American music.
The other brother gets held back a year in third grade, takes trade courses in high school, and doesn’t get accepted to the prestigious in-state school. So he goes to the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. Which, within a couple of months—after he pledges a crappy frat, drunkenly rolls a tree with toilet tissue after defeating a directional Louisiana, and gets a date with a chunky small-town gal with a beehive hairdo from Ethelsville, in Pickens County, Alabama—he concludes is “just as good as” the school where his brother is in Pre-Law back home. No, better. That’s the ticket.
Then, the older, Pre-Law brother suddenly gets a growth spurt, about 2006, and starts whipping his brother in a fistfight nearly every year, a little before Thanksgiving, and wins nine out of eleven beatdowns going into 2017. Of course by 2017, the older brother is a partner in the firm, while little brother is still throwing wet toilet tissue at trees, and is settled down with the chunky small-town gal in Ethelsville, where her dad got him a job sorting mail at the post office. He yells “War Eagle,” drinks cheap beer, and believes the Trilateral Commission is bringing in the New World Order based out of Tuscaloosa with help from ESPN.
It’s something like that anyway. Just sayin’.
So yes, it’s a lengthy and glorious rivalry. Though it seems lengthier for one side, and more glorious for the other. We call it "The South's Oldest Continuous Rivalry." They call it "The Second Great Unpleasantness."
It was the second game ever for Georgia “foot ball,” the latest teenage fad. The students and players climbed onto a train and traveled to Piedmont Park in Atlanta to take on the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, later known as Auburn. Georgia Tech had no football—some things never change—and the North Avenue trade school students showed up wearing UGA colors. So there’s that.
Face value on the tickets was fifty cents, though they were going for upwards of seventy-five cents on StubHub. Some say the Wright Brothers flew over, toting a “Grover Cleveland will raise your taxes” banner. There was no Dawgvent, but a little group of fans gathered over by the gazebo to express real-time hysteria over every play.
The Auburn legend, or one of a fine selection of them, is that the cry of “War Eagle” began at this game. An Auburn fan will wipe away a tear while telling it to you. Supposedly a Confederate soldier was a-settin’ in the stands with his pet eagle. Perfectly ordinary thing. He had rescued the old, wounded bird from the battlefield some thirty years earlier, and toted it with him ever since. It had been injured in the Great Unpleasantness, but now it spread its wings and flew across Piedmont Park’s gridiron, inspiring the farmer boys to a pulse-pounding victory.
And if you believe that one, you’ll believe Cam Newton assumed his daddy just carried a lot of cash in his wallet. Also, there are at least three other “origin of the War Eagle” stories, all completely different, involving fightin’ Injuns and—I wouldn’t kid—Saxon warriors and their battlefield eagles. Some probably involve hobbits, though I didn’t read that far. Auburn fans shed a tear as they tell each “legend”; also when they explain why they really won the national championship in certain years.
The way I imagine it, once the game was over, with Auburn winning in a heavy rain, some farm boy walked over to a Georgia fan and said, “We own you. You’re jealous of our farm school, which is the Harvard of the South of farm schools.”
At this game, the Georgia people, having fully experienced the nature of Auburn people, went back to campus and said, “We’ll play ‘em somewhere else. But don’t make us go to their cow pasture in Opelika. There’s apparently something in the water over there. These folks are crazy.”
Even in 1892, Auburn was into white-outs. Though they played all their games in
Atlanta, where the fields impressively had no cow droppings.
The Georgia coaches said, “Sure. We’ll keep playing it in Atlanta for the next decade, then we’ll switch it to Macon for a few years, then maybe a couple of years in Montgomery—there are working outhouses in Montgomery, at least—then Savannah, back to Atlanta, then to Columbus for, like, a couple of generations. That will take us to about 1959.”
It was a good plan. You can look it up. Georgia kept shifting the locations, which was hard on Auburn fans who traveled in ox-buggies or the backs of wagon trains, plus it was harvest time whenever they played (no more February games). But the Auburn fans continued to be ornery and a little bit paranoid, and some of them brought farm implements—hoes, shovels, and the like—into pile-ups. They were annoying to play against.
Then arose the myth that Georgia-Auburn was some kind of “brother against brother” rivalry; that actually there was no genuine resentment between the two. TV loves that line, but come on.
It’s more like brothers, one of whom is very smart and gets to attend the prestigious in-state school, America’s oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education, in a fabulous town that invents great American music.
The other brother gets held back a year in third grade, takes trade courses in high school, and doesn’t get accepted to the prestigious in-state school. So he goes to the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. Which, within a couple of months—after he pledges a crappy frat, drunkenly rolls a tree with toilet tissue after defeating a directional Louisiana, and gets a date with a chunky small-town gal with a beehive hairdo from Ethelsville, in Pickens County, Alabama—he concludes is “just as good as” the school where his brother is in Pre-Law back home. No, better. That’s the ticket.
Then, the older, Pre-Law brother suddenly gets a growth spurt, about 2006, and starts whipping his brother in a fistfight nearly every year, a little before Thanksgiving, and wins nine out of eleven beatdowns going into 2017. Of course by 2017, the older brother is a partner in the firm, while little brother is still throwing wet toilet tissue at trees, and is settled down with the chunky small-town gal in Ethelsville, where her dad got him a job sorting mail at the post office. He yells “War Eagle,” drinks cheap beer, and believes the Trilateral Commission is bringing in the New World Order based out of Tuscaloosa with help from ESPN.
It’s something like that anyway. Just sayin’.
So yes, it’s a lengthy and glorious rivalry. Though it seems lengthier for one side, and more glorious for the other. We call it "The South's Oldest Continuous Rivalry." They call it "The Second Great Unpleasantness."
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