By: JJ Lanier

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

You learn at a pretty young age one of the things that makes sports so great are all the different rivalry games that take place year in and year out.

It almost starts as this kind of rite of passage that every young sports enthusiast must take. In elementary school you start pulling for a particular team, normally based upon who your parents root for, and learn fairly quickly there are certain teams that under no known circumstance, are you ever to pull for. Surely you remember going to school in the shirt with your favorite team’s logo plastered all over it, joking around the with kids pulling for the other team.

Some rivalry games are more localized than others, while some are on a much larger, nationwide scale. The Georgia/Florida games falls somewhere in between.

Growing up in North Carolina, about two and a half hours north of Athens, I obviously knew how big this particular game was, and that it oftentimes had SEC title implications. But, I never really considered it to be a rivalry game.

I knew a few people who had attended the University of Florida and to almost all of them Florida State was the bigger of the two games. Sure, they didn’t like Georgia and wanted to win, but it never seemed to go much beyond that. It wasn’t until I lived in Athens for two years that I realized how big a game it was for Georgia and their fans.

My second year in Athens, which was during the 2002 season, Georgia went into the game undefeated and ranked 4th, nationally. I probably don’t have to remind you the outcome of the game, but what I’ll always remember was something that took place before the game even happened.

At the time I was working in the warehouse at one of the carpet companies in Athens. One of the guys in my department had worn a specific UGA shirt to work every Friday, up to that point in the season, and for whatever reason had forgotten to wear the shirt that particular Friday before the Florida game. Being the typical superstitious sports fans that we all are, the owner of the store sent him home, on the clock, to get his shirt while the owner himself filled in for him while he was gone.

To see the owner in a shirt and tie, unloading rolls of carpet off a truck so one of his employees could change shirts was a mental picture I will never forget. I’m not sure how much more dedicated you can be to the cause than that.

Look, I’ll be the first person to admit that I am not well versed in the history of the Georgia/Florida game. And while I don’t necessarily see it as a big time rival time, or that I believe the enormity of the game is skewed to one side more than the other, I certainly don’t mean any disrespect to those who do view it that way. It’s quite the opposite, to be honest.

Before living in Georgia the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” was just another game with a cool moniker, made more interesting by being played at a neutral site. What I saw during those years in Athens- followed by three years in Brunswick- along with what I’m sure are similar stories I didn’t witness, makes me appreciate what this game truly means to so many.

Now, the only thing left is to make sure your children have their t-shirts ready.