KNOXVILLE, Tennessee – The cigars were all over Knoxville on Saturday morning.
The problem is that the University of Tennessee is a tobacco-free campus. It’s been decades. For example, of the hundreds of thousands of college football fans who flocked to East Tennessee that afternoon for the matchup between No. 3 Alabama and No. 6 Tennessee, quite a percentage had their stogies stuffed in secret places. Stuffed in their back pockets, behind secret zippers sewn into the lining of purses, even in Mission Impossible-esque baseball cap compartments.
It was a lot of trouble. But at the end of the most glorious night of football this city has seen in a generation, guess what? It wasn’t a problem at all.
Perhaps the biggest indicator that the third Saturday in October had finally regained some real relevance in the college football universe was when the cigars were smuggled into Neyland Stadium by the pallet.
This streak of football-obsessed frontier rivals has been around since 1901. And since 1961, it’s been easy to spot the winner in this win-streak-dominated streak by the white plumes of smoke billowing from one team’s locker room or the other, like a college football Vatican, the announces who will rule this series for the next 364 days. A trail sky-high after what may very well have been the biggest and almost undeniably most entertaining of the 104 games played between them.
1 relatives
On Saturday night in Knoxville, the smell of burning tobacco wafted from corners and tunnels and from beneath the steel beams of the century-old stadium. It came from men riding demolished goalposts like mechanical bulls, and from countless sections of the parking decks around the stadium and the Vol Navy party decks down by the Tennessee River. They smoked as if lit by the eternal flame of the famous Torchbearer statue in the center of campus. The smokers were easy to spot. And good luck finding someone with authority to tell them not to do it. There were no rules. Simply delicious orange anarchy.
Here’s how it goes when you survive a 52-49 track meeting and a wounded Duck field goal that casts out a generation of Crimson Demons.
“I’ve been holding on to this damn thing for 16 years,” Nashville resident Tom Bryan explained as he took a hit and then coughed like he’d just dumped a bucket of sand. “I bought it in Tuscaloosa in 2007 because I wanted to smoke it down there and I wanted to smoke one of their own store bought down there just to piss them off. But they whipped our ass and I’ve been waiting ever since. I don’t think that humidor thing worked. It’s drier than a bone. But I don’t care either.”
Throughout the week, stories about the tradition of cigar smoking were being written across Tennessee and Alabama. How Tobacco Sales Soared In Both States This Week. How Tennessee’s longtime gear manager had secured several cases of specially rolled “Bosphorus Straits” from a Nashville cigar maker and UT fan (no one would corroborate this due to the aforementioned campus tobacco ban, let alone similar NCAA rules). How former players from both schools still clung to the fags they smoked after winning the game, no matter how long ago that win was.
At Smoky’s Tobacco, the go-to place for cigarettes in Knoxville since 1983, when Reggie White ruled football in Tennessee, they haven’t been able to stock the shelves with their hand-picked selection of orange-ribboned 2006 specials.
So why the sudden flare-up of interest in a cigar tradition that has been associated with this competition since 1961? The same reason Smoky’s chose these ’06 models. Because that was the last time the Vols had defeated the Flood.
Many believed that the losing streak would – ok, might – end on Saturday night.
It did.
After Tennessee established an impressive 21-7 lead in the first quarter, the Orange Ones started messing around with their contraband and drooled at the thought of firing them. As Alabama scored 18 unanswered points for a 28-28 tie early in the second half, they pulled their hands out of those pockets to cover their faces. Take lead, lose lead, retie, repeat.
Hands in, hands out, cigar grabbed, cigar loosened. It went like this for hours. Tennessee fans, struggling with recurring nightmares, have suffered from a murky feeling of, “Oh damn, here we go again” on and off for the past decade and a half. “Did you really just fumble away a touchdown?”
Bama fans kept waiting for the familiar feel that awaited them during the Nick Saban era, like the sun rising. “Okay, let’s go, we’ll start walking comfortably now.”
Instead, it was called Heumacher after Heumacher. A stadium that started out deafening in daylight, turned into a nervous nocturnal murmur, and then woke up again. You know how a really great college football rivalry is supposed to make people feel. It had hurt the hearts of fans on both sides, and arguably the heart of the sport itself, when people dared to say the third Saturday in October couldn’t possibly be a ‘real’ rivalry because it was so biased in favor of the Tide. But those who really know this game always knew better. You know it’s always been a constant series of stripes. This has been the case since the end of World War II. Prior to this current Bama series, Tennessee won 10 of 12, including seven in a row. Previously, the Crimson Tide went 8-0-1. Tennessee four in a row, Bama eleven in a row, and so on. In fact, the cigar tradition began because Alabama experienced a six-year winless drought in 1961.
Those who have been in the game long enough would always grab these doubters by the arm at the end of every last Bama Vols competition, even as the Tide wins were piling up, and tell them to take an aerial puff at the stadium must. “Does that smell like people don’t care who wins this game?”
On Saturday night they took care of it. A lot of. You could tell by the cigars hanging from the winners’ smiles. A team that finally feels like it’s about to emerge from the Big Orange desert where it’s wandered for almost two decades, perhaps finally ready to return to the national championship talk for the first time since pre-smartphones existed. Every Tennessee freshman among the thousands who stormed Shields-Watkins Field was two years old when their new school last defeated that old foe.
So yeah, smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.
“It tastes terrible, but it also tastes great,” admitted a Tennessee fan in a raccoon-skin cap, who identified himself only as “The Mayor of the Mountains.” “Don’t tell my doctor I’m doing this, either. Even though he’s a Vols fan, he probably won’t care.”
But the real sign was the number of Coronas, Havanas and Belvederes piling up in the bins around Neyland Stadium. No moral victories were won here. Just a W and an L, the joy and pain that goes with each one, and lots of wasted tobacco leaf.
“The hell with these things!” exclaimed Janine Bates of Dothan, Alabama, throwing a box of King Edwards, still wrapped in plastic, into a concrete bin next to the Thompson-Boling Arena. “You are bewitched. And they are bad for me anyway.”