This column is sponsored by Uptown Cheesesteak Company, located at 114 Broad Street in Kingsport, TN. Mention I-81 Sports when placing an order at Uptown and receive 10% off your bill.
It was a fall Saturday in September, and my mother was screaming.
A nurse with a panicked expression came running into her hospital room.
Nothing was wrong. She was just excited watching her Vols score a touchdown. It was the 2024 game against Kent State, so Tennessee scored plenty of TDs. Mom had a pretty simple ranking system for the things she loved most.
- Her family.
- Her dog.
- Her Vols.
My mother passed about a year and a half ago, and, with yesterday being Mother’s Day, thoughts and memories of her stayed prominent in my mind.
Mom was a proud Tennessee alumnus. She’d watch the basketball teams, and when the Vols made their run to the national title in baseball, she and my dad — another Vol alum — watched most of their postseason run. But football was head and shoulders above the rest. She structured her weekends around Tennessee games. We learned not to make any family plans during the four hours or so that the game was happening.
Wanted to watch the game with mom? It wasn’t that easy. One did not just walk into my parents’ den, pull up a seat, and watch. You had to prepare yourself for mom’s own brand of commentary during the game, with hits that included:
“RUUUUUUUUN!”
“Gethimgethimgethim GET HIM!”
“These refs HATE US!”
If the Vols won, all was right with the world, regardless of how she might have felt physically that day. If they lost? Weekend ruined.
I married a woman who grew up spending several years in Alabama. She’s not a big sports fan — Red Zone and the four screen multicast on YouTube TV are the dual banes of her existence — but she amped up the Bama fandom when the Third Saturday in October approached, just so she and Mom could needle one another. One Christmas, my wife got my mom an Alabama toothbrush as a gag gift. Mom thanked her: “It’ll be great for cleaning my toilet.”
Mom had a close work family and I asked a few of them if they had any memories of her UT fandom. She sucked at least one coworker into watching the games faithfully there for a while. Another was, like her, a Tennessee alum.
“I could always count on a text message just before kickoff every Saturday during football season reading, Go Vols! Depending on the status of the game, I may receive several messages. She did this every season, until she couldn’t.”
Mom kept watching the games even when she was in the hospital, even when she later went into home hospice. The week after that Kent State blowout, she fell asleep midway through the Oklahoma game and the first thing she said was, “did Tennessee win?” When she was transferred to a nursing facility for physical therapy, one of the first questions she had was whether the TVs in the place picked up Tennessee games.
The Vols brought her a lot of fun and comfort, especially in those final years.
When I started covering Tennessee football for the Kingsport paper, no one was prouder. They read every article; I know this, because I’ve found binders with the clippings while going through their belongings. I think she’d like the fact I’m back writing weekly columns again.
Even if my Tennessee takes had a knack for pissing her off.
Miss you, Mom.