For my friend, Ryland

When the call came in as it always has for nearly two decades on the Saturday before the Cocktail Party, I smiled. It was Ryland Grant, my close friend, calling to discuss plans for the big weekend. Ryland and I met at a Cocktail Party tailgate in 2002 and have been friends ever since.

I wrote about our friendship born of football 3 years ago at Saturday Down South, and how for nearly 20 years, whenever life has allowed, we’ve found time for each other the weekend of the Cocktail Party, whether to break bread at Whitey’s Fish Camp, share a tailgate bourbon or go look for redfish in the shallows of Black Creek and Doctors Inlet. Both of us are a father of two girls now, and life doesn’t allow much time for Friday game weekend fishing, but without fail, the week before the Florida-Georgia (err, Georgia-Florida?) game, Ryland texts me and tells me his plans for the weekend.

Ryland never misses a Cocktail Party, or at least he hasn’t since he was a senior in high school in the autumn of 1998. He even made the trek last year, when there was no World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party allowed and only a quarter of the seats at TIAA Bank Field were permitted to be filled. “I just needed a weekend away from politics and political commercials,” Ryland told me last fall. Who among us didn’t? I didn’t go, and I’ve missed a few Cocktail Party weekends during Ryland’s nearly quarter century long streak, but when Ryland called, I knew it was about the game.

I was right. Except this year, the call was Ryland telling me he wouldn’t be coming. Ryland lost his father, Robert — who we all knew as “Bob” — on October 9. Bob was 64, and the cause of his death was complications from COVID-19.

Bob was many things: a farmer, a Sunday school teacher, an avid outdoorsman and, for a time, a minor league baseball player in the Athletics organization. A fit 6-3 even in his early 60s, Bob enjoyed his 5 a.m. morning coffee (milk, no sugar) on the farm, especially as summer begrudgingly gave way to the first cool bursts of autumn and a moment of sweet relief from the clenches of middle Georgia heat.

Bob was 24 and a new dad when Herschel and his beloved Bulldogs won the national championship in 1980. He taught Ryland and Ryland’s little sister, Mary Elizabeth, to love the red and black, and football Saturdays, like in so many southern homes, were family time when Ryland was growing up. Ryland’s first memories of his Dad are of the late Vince Dooley years, watching games while climbing his Dad’s broad shoulders.

On Bob’s final day, Ryland told his bedside nurse to put the Georgia-Auburn game on his father’s television set. “Dad was asleep,” Ryland said. “But hearing is the last of the senses to go. I wanted him to meet God after one last Saturday with the Dawgs.” Doctors told Ryland his Dad passed on half an hour after the Dawgs whipped Auburn, 34-10.

Bob lost his wife to cancer in 2011 but had found ways to live life to the fullest in the time since. He traveled, collected National Park stamps, perfected his reach cast technique fly fishing in the north Georgia mountains, and, until he contracted COVID in mid-September, attended college football games and planned and made the annual pilgrimage to the Cocktail Party with Ryland for the better part of a decade.

One of the best things about the South is the assumption, infallibly true in my mind, that college football is important. In other parts of the United States, the idea of organizing one’s autumn life around college football season may seem absurd. In the South, it is eminently reasonable, and it is all the more understandable to plan an annual father-son trip around one football game in particular.

Such was the story of Ryland Grant and his Dad and the Cocktail Party. Come hell or high water, including last season, they would be in Jacksonville on either the last weekend of October or the first weekend of November. And, as Ryland was quick to remind me Saturday, since the arrival of Kirby Smart, Georgia has been so good that the duo could make the long haul to north Florida confident that a sunny afternoon alongside the St. John’s River wouldn’t be spoiled by the depression of unanticipated defeat.

It was understandable, then, that Ryland would sit this first Cocktail Party without his father out. “It didn’t feel right,” Ryland told me, and he wanted to just be home and hug his girls. Football would be a somber reminder, not a welcome respite from grief. “But I’ll be watching, and so will he, and I want you to remember that. And I’ll miss seeing you,” he told me.

I will remember Bob, whose kind heart and warm sense of humor had been a joy to get to know at my past few Cocktail Parties, for as long as I head to Jacksonville for the Georgia-Florida game. For Bob and for others, I will also try, this year and in the future, to remember all we’ve lost as we enjoy college football together once again. This season, as cases in SEC country skyrocketed and sickness continued to swirl around us, college football has been an even more welcome distraction than it was a year ago, when we were grateful to just have games even as they were played in half-empty stadiums amid lockdowns and social distancing mandates. This autumn, stadiums have once again swelled and brimmed at capacity, crowds have roared and impacted games, tailgates have returned and the little moments of joy that color a college football season, like the first handshake or hug of an old family friend, have returned.

And yet we are all still in some way, indirectly or directly, grappling with loss. Too many lives have been lost and too many families altered forever for that not to be the case. There’s a lesson to be learned in this and a collective experience of grieving and recovery we will, I hope, take with us.

The older and wiser we get, the more we appreciate that loss is the key in which most of life is played. Southerners are particularly well-equipped to grapple with grief and loss. Like the rest of America, the South is still wrestling with the pandemic. It is also grappling with its history, much of it dark, and with over a century of smarmy dismissal from other parts of the country, who will look down on the South as “backward,” no matter how much we progress, even if slowly.

Part of growing up in the South– and part of reckoning with a new, hospitable and welcoming south, is recognizing that others still take pleasure in southern defeat. But part of understanding that is also understanding that as southerners, we know that the best way to deal with grief and loss is to grieve and rebuild together.

This has always been true down south and will be true in the aftermath of COVID. There are many ways this process occurs. Southerners grieve and rebuild together in places of worship. They come together at supper as families and friends huddled in homes and around hearths. They do it beautifully with music, which is why most of the best music you’ve ever heard, from rock and roll to the blues to old country and western to jazz, was born in the South.

Above all, though, they’ve come together and recovered with college football, which is tethered to the very soul of southern identity. In the SEC, college football is a collective exercise, a place where southerners find joy and more often than not, field the winning team.

No matter how much the South changes, certain things will always remain true. First, the South is beautiful, dotted by small towns, historic cities, mountains and streams and forests and miles of lush, green fields. Second, great football, food and music are like sunshine – you just can’t escape it. This is especially true on rivalry weekends, in games like the Iron Bowl, the Egg Bowl, the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry and at the Cocktail Party. These games are celebrations of life, sporting sacraments to southern passion and the slow, enduring and unstoppable march of progress.

More than a game, college football, and the Cocktail Party, is woven into the very fabric of life and of family in the South. If you are wandering a tailgate lot on Saturday, offer a fan a beverage and ask for their story. Chances are, they’ll have one, and it will be a tale of life well worth the listen. As for those who made the Cocktail Party their masterpiece and are gone too soon, like my Uncle Chuck, who I wrote about 2 seasons ago, or Ryland’s Dad Bob, perhaps we can take a moment in this spectacular autumn season to remember lives well-lived.

For Bob, a life-well lived meant being the best dad he could be, a dutiful Sunday school teacher for 30 years, a conservationist and a huge advocate of youth sports leagues, which he coached even after his children were off to college. But Bob always took time away for the Cocktail Party and a weekend with his son. After all, most seasons don’t end in a championship, even at storied programs like Florida and Georgia. But every fall Saturday does leave room for memories, and autumn ends quicker than any of us hope.