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Zeus

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Zeus

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13 minutes ago, Tomatillo said:

Why is there a Fla thread with Fla fans in it on a Texas board? WTF? 

I'm a Texas grad but half my family all went to UF and still lives in Gainesville. It's football. I root for them. Lots of people do. You should get out more.

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Tomatillo

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5 hours ago, SurlyGator said:

You do you, NTTAWWT.

 

There is a thread on the football forum about just about every team in the country, and you have a problem with the Florida one?  

Yes. Those threads are mostly Texas fans making fun of rivals. This is literally a Fla thread with Fla fans. On a UT board. It's incredibly odd. And kind of rude, to be honest. 

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Zeus

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17 minutes ago, Tomatillo said:

Yes. Those threads are mostly Texas fans making fun of rivals. This is literally a Fla thread with Fla fans. On a UT board. It's incredibly odd. And kind of rude, to be honest. 

Not to be more rude but feel free to fuck off

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jinx

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I meant to post this on the Florida section of this Texas board a while back. Pretty cool story no matter who you root for. 
 

from the athletic
 

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Bruce is a Gators fan, true blue as they ride. A die-hard. Says he tunes in for all the University of Florida teams, from baseball to basketball and he’s really gotten into women’s softball. Even went bonkers for those swimmers during the Olympics. But football in The Swamp, man, that’s where the memories swell, the tingles arise and golden sundowns fade into sweet nostalgia. “No better environment in college football,” he tells me.

Decades ago, as Bruce was growing up 3 miles from Florida Field, the stadium was about half its current size. Still, Florida football felt massive. He sold Cokes at games as a kid and was there on that seminal afternoon in 1966, imprinting the moment Steve Spurrier made the straight-on kick that whacked Auburn and won the Heisman. It launched a life span of “Two Bits” and Gator chomps that make Bruce proud to dwell among the old boys from “Old Florida.”

Now there’s the newer ritual, one that’s only four seasons old, officially, though it calls back much further. Hearing 87,000 folks belt out “I Won’t Back Down” has me jonesing for Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to refill this fall. That song, with its capacity to strum and steel, turns positively anthemic with a capacity crowd singing backup. Eager as I am to absorb the spectacle, Bruce appreciates it far more. When you’re Tom Petty’s younger brother, the moment hits deeper.

“It’s a unifying moment in that stadium,” Bruce Petty told me recently from his home in Tallahassee. “It reminds me of going to Tom’s live shows, where there’s a sea of people and you notice fans and their kids all singing along together. Good music does that. It just transcends.”

Bruce had been with his dying brother on the West Coast in October 2017 and wasn’t able to be at The Swamp five days later when Florida played “I Won’t Back Down” as a tribute during the LSU game.

“My wife and I were still in California, but our daughters went to the game and they were FaceTiming us,” he said. “Such a moving moment. God bless the University of Florida for doing that. It meant so much to our family to see everybody singing in unison and sharing in that.”

The vibe around Petty’s hit was so electric that it has remained a part of every home game since. When South Carolina visited in 2018, Bruce and his family were honorary captains and got to experience it from the field.

“To hear it in the stands was one thing,” he said, “but to be down on the sideline and hearing it coming from every direction, it was overwhelming.”

Bruce and Tom, born seven years apart, shared a bedroom in their childhood home in northeast Gainesville. There they spent hours on the floor, listening to an assortment of music — always scraping up money to buy the latest record from The Beatles.

Once Tom began practicing on his first guitar, “it became an obsession,” his brother said. “He was constantly tinkering, trying to get better.”

Their father had added a room onto the house, intended to be storage for his knickknacks and novelties business, known as Petty’s Wholesale Dry Goods. He turned to selling insurance, however, and Tom claimed the addition as a practice studio. Soon there was floor-to-ceiling carpet to soundproof the room, and 14-year-old Tom began fronting his first rock band, The Sundowners.

Around that time, the brothers watched The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and became transfixed. “That’s when it all clicked for Tommy. That’s when he really knew what he was supposed to do,” Bruce said.

The origin stories are the best, aren’t they? Watching documentaries on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers revealed how song lyrics flowed and albums were crafted, but that childhood scene — a future rock legend and his little brother staring at a black-and-white TV — was the root of it all.

My own Tom Petty stories are mere fan pop. I told Bruce about being 9 years old on a family road trip and singing “Don’t Do Me Like That” so obnoxiously loud that my dad switched off the radio. Along with missing the end of the song, I had yelped the “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” part so intensely as to give myself hiccups.

When a girlfriend did me wrong in my 20s, singing “You Got Lucky” a few hundred times became a coping mechanism. When I resorted to being emotionally shut off, “Walls” was the one. And upon really listening to “The Waiting” for the first time — not simply singing along to it, but actually listening — I was struck by the sweet purity in Tom’s crooning: “Baby you’re the only one that’s ever known how / To make me wanna live like I wanna live now.”

So, back to The Brothers Petty, and back to late 1988, when Tom rented a house on a stretch of Crescent Beach south of St. Augustine. He had wrapped up studio recording, and as was customary, Tom wanted Bruce to hear the new album before it was released. Across a week at the beach, “Full Moon Fever” played and Bruce was mesmerized.

“The first time he played ‘I Won’t Back Down’ for me, you knew it would be a hit. It was just one of those songs,” he said. “And of course he had George Harrison playing on it. So I remember telling Tom over and over, ‘You’re doing a song with one of The Beatles.’ We were so giddy about that.”

When a second Beatle became involved — Ringo Starr sat in on drums for the music video — “I was just over the top,” Bruce recalled.

It became the first single from an album that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Last year, “Rolling Stone” magazine listed “Full Moon Fever” among the best 300 albums of all time, though its 1989 review awarded only 3.5 stars out of five. As with college football, pay no mind to those early rankings.

“I Won’t Back Down” has staying power. Bruce says it’s among the songs his 4-year-old granddaughter likes. My 19-month-old daughter watched the video as I prepped this essay and didn’t sound entirely off-key with her version of “Heeeeeyyyyyyy, baby.”

Whether you originally heard the song on cassette or iTunes doesn’t matter. There’s a fourth quarter ahead, so fire up the cellphone flashlight and sway along in the bleachers. Whether you’re standing up against the gates of hell or Alabama’s defense, the lyrics work and the moment perseveres.

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Horn80

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On 9/12/2021 at 3:25 AM, Tomatillo said:

Yes. Those threads are mostly Texas fans making fun of rivals. This is literally a Fla thread with Fla fans. On a UT board. It's incredibly odd. And kind of rude, to be honest. 

This is nothing new.  In addition to Gators, there have been UCLA, Iowa St, Oklahoma State, Michigan, Ohio State, Pittsburgh threads many times so nothing odd about it. 

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