You ladies will love this from coot central- especially the

May 29, 2020, 12:42 PM

part about Dabo. Hilarious - they need some of our hemorrhoid creme concoctions from late last week.
Scott Davis: The Best of Enemies

As the temperatures rise, my thoughts turn evermore towards villains.

In my newsletter last week, I wrote about the sports grudges I’ve carried throughout the decades, focusing specifically on Michael Jordan and his uncanny talent for laying waste to my hopes and dreams (check it out here). Just days later, I was listening to sports radio here in Atlanta and the announcers landed on one of those always enjoyable “we don’t have any live sports to talk about, so let’s just reminisce for awhile” topics that ended up getting the phone lines humming with interested listeners.

The subject: Greatest Atlanta Sports Villains. Needless to say, my ears perked up.

If you’re an Atlanta sports fan of a certain age, you can almost immediately create a Sports World Rogues Gallery filled with bad apples and outlaws (which is kind of surprising considering the city’s teams have had little success across half a century). In my mind, I instantly populated an ATL Villains Hall of Fame with names like Kent Hrbek, Jim Leyritz, Brady/Belichick, the Atlanta Spirit ownership group, and even poor Eugene Robinson (the Atlanta Falcon who somehow managed to get himself arrested the NIGHT BEFORE HE WAS PLAYING IN THE FREAKING SUPER BOWL, then inevitably got torched the next day by John Elway).

Those thoughts led me back, as most all things do, to my beloved South Carolina Gamecocks. Who belonged on South Carolina’s Mount Rushmore of Villainy? I wrote about the Mount Rushmore concept back in the winter (check out my proposed Gamecock Mount Rushmore here, along with the responses from readers here).

And as we embark on yet another long, hot summer with college football still shimmering far away on a distant horizon, I think there is no better way to kick off the “Summer of Rushmore” than by putting together a quartet of the Greatest Gamecock Enemies. Every couple of weeks this summer, I’ll pass along my thoughts on some new Mount Rushmore topics and give you a forum for weighing in on them, too. I think we’d all agree that there can never be too many Mount Rushmores. They’re just too much fun.

We need Mount Rushmores (now more than ever, especially in these frightful times).

Strangely, we need villains, too.

Villains help us see ourselves more clearly. They give us the capacity to understand who we don’t want to be. They help us define ourselves by presenting us with our opposite, bringing into sharper focus who we actually are.

And they’re really fun to hate. Let’s don’t forget that.

In response to last week’s column, a few readers sent in a handful of names on their list of Gamecock-related sports grudges: Dean Smith. Dabo. Danny Ford.

As May turns into June, it’s time to flesh it out. Which four sports felons belong in the Hall of Hate?

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I have thoughts.

The Loathsome List

Across more than a century of athletic competition, the University of South Carolina has compiled a long, ugly list of enemies – many of whom appear again and again in our nightmares like sports-world facsimiles of the names on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted List.”

As I see it, Gamecock villains come in a variety of distinct forms. Certainly, coaches can and should most certainly be considered for the Villainy Mount Rushmore. Indeed, many of my most hated adversaries have been the men who walked the sidelines.

Carolina fans who revered the Frank McGuire basketball teams of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s despised – and I mean, flat-out despised – UNC’s Dean Smith. Surely I don’t have to tell you how fans my age or older felt about Danny Ford (in a strange twist, on two separate occasions, I randomly found myself amongst a group of people who had drinks with Ford in downtown Greenville…and liked him immensely, which nearly caused spontaneous combustion).

As for Dabo? He’s absolutely a despicable, almost mustache-twirling villain of the Saturday morning cartoon variety, and his case for Villainy Rushmore status is fairly straightforward: He’s delivered our archrivals two national titles, he unleashed that hilariously incoherent “the real Carolina is in Chapel Hill” tirade after losing to South Carolina, he is incapable of talking in any way other than as the insurance salesman he once was before becoming a football coach, and he has a long history of appalling fashion statements that include an odd fetish for sweatshirts.

Still, Swinney’s Rushmore status is surprisingly not set in granite, for this simple reason: For all his bluster and all of his accomplishments, he’s a mere 7-5 against South Carolina as a head coach – nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not like Steve Spurrier going a crisp 10-0 against the Gamecocks when he roamed Florida’s sidelines. Personally, I do think Dabo’s Rushmore-worthy, but it’s at least a consideration.

Other names to consider: South Carolina was never quite good enough to become a true rival while he coached in the SEC, but for what it’s worth, I loathed Rick Pitino to a staggering degree when he was at Kentucky (one of my favorite moments as a sports fan was when the Gamecocks beat the Wildcats on Senior Day in Lexington to win the SEC title in 1997, followed by a despondent Pitino admitting in his postgame press conference, “They’re just better than we are right now.”)

Jack Leggett was fun to hate. So was Urban Meyer. And for a long-shot candidate, let’s not forget about Chris Rumph, who played linebacker for South Carolina in the ‘90s, then made a name for himself as a coach by delighting in recruiting negatively against his alma mater while coaching at Clemson, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee. It always hurts more when one of your own turns on you.

There’s no shortage of players to mention, either. I’ll start the list by nominating Rod Gardner, the infamous author of “The Push-Off” back in 2000 (can you believe that it’s been 20 years ago now since that nauseating moment?) Let’s certainly don’t forget Georgia’s utterly vile David Pollack (NOTE: I’m not making this up – I just typed the name “David Pollack” into Google, and it auto-populated the screen with “David Pollack vs. South Carolina” as its first entry. FUN!) Rex Grossman at Florida was a guy I genuinely enjoyed despising back in the early ‘00s. I was also strangely obsessed with hating a series of grotesquely effective Arkansas running backs across an interminable period (Felix Jones, Darren McFadden, Peyton Hillis, Cedric Cobbs) simply because those guys seemed to post 1,000-yard games against South Carolina on an annual basis.

Can entire fan bases be included on the Villainy Mount Rushmore? What about the bizarre obsession that Mizzou’s women’s basketball fans (and the school’s administration) has with Dawn Staley and the Lady Gamecocks – a feud that actually ended in a lawsuit? How much do you hate Vandy baseball fans right about now (a classy group whose most famous member is known for whistling throughout games)? Anyone who has spent more than a nanosecond Between the Hedges in Athens has strong feelings about Georgia Bulldog fans. The fan list is seemingly endless, come to think of it.

It’s a start. But I need help from you to fill it out, so let’s dive right into a great Summer of Rushmore.

Drop me a line at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com, and let’s figure out who we hate the most, indisputably, for all time. Four names, four villains.

I know you can do it.