Eight Hateful Miles (eBook)

Chapter 1

AN UNRIVALED RIVALRY

“Players, fans, mothers and daddies — they all know each other because they grew up together. They’re all our friends, and nobody can hate you like your friends.”

— John McKay, USC coach on rival UCLA

For many years the county where I grew up was known for two things: it was the epicenter for some of the best high school football in all of Tennessee and it routinely had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the state.

It’s true. Google that second one if you don’t believe me. Despite ranking 51st in total population of the Volunteer State’s 95 counties, the young people in Marion County, about 25 miles west of Chattanooga, understood the farmland that surrounded us wasn’t the only thing fertile.

And in the south, where boys are always looking for ways to prove their manhood, these two statistics were seen as indisputable evidence that from the time they could form-tackle or fornicate, nobody in our great state did either better.

Technically, there are three high schools in the county: Marion County in Jasper, South Pittsburg and Whitwell. But while I’m sure the boys in Whitwell were helping contribute to the number of teenage girls who found themselves in a delicate condition, more often than not the Tigers weren’t scoring nearly as much on the field.

The towns of Jasper and South Pittsburg combine to cover less than 15 square miles, both with populations of around 3,200 souls and the two high schools in those map-dot towns sit just eight miles apart.

But while the schools and towns are geographically close, their residents believe they’re a world apart in every way. For at least one week every fall the stretch of county Highway 72 separating them is paved by good old-fashioned unbridled hate. Think Hatfields and McCoys, or imagine a Mayberry setting where Sheriff Andy Taylor and Floyd the barber might, at any moment, begin feeding each other knuckle sandwiches.

South Pittsburg and Marion County players shake hands before the 2017 game.

In the heart of the Bible belt, only one thing could drive folks to set aside the good Lord’s commandment to love thy neighbor and it isn’t politics, religion or how to kick-start the local economy. Instead, in a county best known for being the Fireworks Capital of the South, it’s one of the state’s oldest high school football rivalries that keeps their fuse lit.

Despite having one of the smallest enrollments among all football-playing schools (fewer than 250 students in grades 9-12), South Pittsburg is the only program in the state to have played for a state championship in all six decades the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association has had a playoff format.

Meanwhile Marion County’s Warriors won four state titles in six years in the early to mid-1990s, compiling an envious 56-1 record during that time.

Heading into the 2018 season, the Warriors and Pirates have claimed more state championships (9 combined), more title game appearances (20 total), more playoff wins (137) and more all-state players (109 combined) than any other programs among the 75-school radius of Chattanooga’s tri-state area.

In a county with more pride than prosperity, that level of football achievement has fueled the rivalry’s intensity for nearly a century. The residents, packed in tighter than gunpowder, are tenacious about guarding their team’s tradition as if their identity depends on it. The proximity and pride of the communities is what energizes the atmosphere of the games. Familiarity truly does breed contempt.

“I’m not sure anybody from outside this county really gets just how much these two teams and towns don’t like each other,” said South Pittsburg Hall of Fame coach Vic Grider, who along with his dad, the late Don Grider, are the winningest father-son coaching tandem in state history. “People that are born in these two towns are taught to hate the other. It’s in your blood. I’m never going to like them and nothing will change that.

“The two towns have never gotten along and never will. The one word you keep coming back to, at the end of the day the reason both sides feel the way we do, is pride. They’ve got so much pride in their school and program and community and so do we. And we’re both hellbent on outdoing each other.”

The two teams have played since 1924, taking breaks only during World War II and again in 1954 because of the threat of violence between the towns. Harriman and Rockwood have played since 1921 and every year consecutively since 1924, making the Marion/South Pittsburg match-up the second-oldest rivalry in the state, but by every account it is without question the most heated.

Pirates coach Vic Grider doesn’t hide his feelings for his rival.

Or as former TSSAA executive director Ronnie Carter once said matter-of-factly, “It is the rivalry without rival. There’s nothing that even comes close.”

Spirit signs are displayed each week on storefront windows throughout both towns.

Carter began working for the TSSAA, the governing body for all of the state’s high school sports, in 1978 after more than a decade as a high school coach and administrator in the mid-state. Before his retirement in

2009, Carter had seen enough across the length and breadth of the state to know and understand the make-up of every small community and large city from Bristol to Memphis.

A tall man with salt and pepper hair and glasses, Carter is somewhat of a professor on the subject of prep sports throughout the nation, having also served as the president of the National Federation of High School Associations.

“People would ask me about rivalries all the time because everybody thinks theirs is the biggest or the best,” Carter said. “But I always told them that the biggest rivalry in our state, by far, is Marion County and South Pittsburg football. People should see for themselves or else you just don’t realize how much those two places don’t like each other.

“It’s not pretend either, they genuinely do not like each other. People from both towns hate hearing this, and they won’t agree with it, but they’re very much the same. The bulk of the people will end up living right there and working in that area. They don’t get out, and they’re so tightly packed in next to each other that it actually makes the rivalry more intense.”

Talent comes in cycles in small towns but there are far fewer down years here than at most other small schools across the state.

Not only does South Pittsburg and Marion have the tradition of glory days gone by, they’ve also maintained a level of success that separates them from nearly every other program in the state. Through the first 50 years the TSSAA has had a playoff format there have been only four seasons in which either the Pirates or Warriors failed to reach the postseason.

When the 2017 season ended, either one or the other had played for a state championship in 8 of the previous 10 years. In the other two seasons, considered throw-aways by those programs, one of them reached at least the quarterfinals.

“There isn’t an area in our state with more tradition,” added Carter, who coached football and wrestling at Overton High School before joining the TSSAA staff. “Oh, there are schools that will be dominant for five or six years or a decade even, but nobody can match the sustained excellence of those two programs.

“It’s amazing how you could have two small schools be so close together and for both to be so outstanding over such a long period of time.”

Warriors coach Ken Colquette once guided the program to four state titles in six seasons.

DIVIDING LINES DRAWN

“We’ll fight ‘em til hell freezes over. Then we’ll fight ‘em on ice!”

— Dutch Meyer,
Texas Christian University coach

Maybe football became the identity of the two towns because so many of the first settlers in the Appalachia area came from Irish and Scottish descent, with their bloody-knuckled refusal to back down and internal need to conquer.

“Anytime you competed against your brother or best friend, you wanted to beat them so bad you couldn’t stand it. And usually you’d wind up in a fight,” said Marion’s Hall of Fame former coach Ken Colquette.

Yard signs announce team allegiance in the county.

Marion County supporters play on South Pittsburg’s “little brother” complex by proudly reminding Pirates fans which team carries the county name on its helmets. Conversely, Pirates fans view that as an act of arrogance and refuse to use their rival’s official name, calling them “Jasper” instead, and saying it with the same contempt normally reserved for referring to atheists and yankees.

“Them calling themselves Marion County has never bothered me,” said Vic Grider, who admits a good bit of the reason he dislikes his rival so much is that he never beat them as a player. That pent-up frustration from the jabs he took during his playing days comes boiling over now as a coach. “I won’t call them that because I don’t have enough respect for them. When I was growing up ‘Jasper’ is all I knew them as. Even today, if I said Marion County my mom would slap me.

“I just take a lot more pride in...