The Cocktail Party isn’t just a game. For Florida and Georgia fans, it marks the time

I haven’t been to the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party since my dad died 3 autumns ago.

I’d say I haven’t been ready to return, but the truth is I won’t know until I go again, cross the Mathews Bridge over the St. John’s River, and see the splendid regalia of orange, blue, red, and black flashing below.

That view is one of the greatest scenes in collegiate sports, one you store away in dreams.

That’s when I’ll know if returning in the flesh to a game that’s been as intimate a part of the fabric of my life, my mom’s life, and my family’s life as almost anything in sports or otherwise will feel joyful, bittersweet, sad, or most likely, all of the above.

I’ll find out this Saturday morning.

I know I’ll be thinking about my dad.

When my dad died — of cancer, just 36 days after he was diagnosed and less than 3 months after he retired after an immensely successful career in investment banking — I spent much of that first autumn and winter without him in a state of flux.

I was angry about the good years of his life cancer robbed from him and by extension, our family, his wife, and his grandchildren. In many ways, I did whatever I could to avoid his absence, losing myself in work, relationships, church, coaching basketball, and fatherhood.

A busy mind is a poor elixir for a broken heart, but grief is a ferocious, caged tiger, unpredictable if left unmoored.

I wrote about football that first autumn and as fall bled into winter, I spent weekends touring as many college basketball venues as possible, painfully marking the time by fulfilling a bucket list dream of several of the arenas we’d wanted to visit together after he retired.

On those cold, wintry weekend mornings, I would drive across North Carolina and other parts of ACC and SEC country in my car and, in those quiet moments where the frantic pace of life briefly allowed for honest reflection, I began to realize that outside of being a father myself and marrying my wife Becca, nothing I’d done in my life had meant more to me, at least in terms of bringing me pure, unadulterated joy, as the Saturdays down South in stadiums and arenas with my Dad.

There were so many more games he wanted to see.

There were no games he loved more than Florida-Georgia.

Like any self-respecting Florida or Georgia fan, Dad called the game the “Cocktail Party,” even after the 2 universities, in some pretense to piety that sounds good on paper but makes no intellectual sense in practice, decided the nickname too loudly celebrated the drunken debauchery and partying long associated with the famous 50/50 tailgating scene in Jacksonville each season.

CAPTION: The author and his Dad before Florida’s 41-17 win over Georgia in 2009.

The cocktail party aspect of the Cocktail Party is glorious.

The game is about so much more than that.

Growing up, the Cocktail Party marked the time.

Falling so often, as it does this season, on Halloween weekend, the Cocktail Party was the line of demarcation, the moment autumn started the march to Thanksgiving (Dad’s favorite holiday) and soon, Christmas, the holidays, and the New Year.

There was college basketball, too, and Dad was also a Tar Heel. This meant he took college basketball seriously. He cared even more about it because I played basketball and loved it, and dad was the type of father who was for what I was for. He wasn’t going to pressure me to love one sport or another sport or pursue one career instead of his preferred career.

But the Cocktail Party was different.

To Dad, whether the Gators beat the Dawgs loomed so large it reduced almost any other game of the season to a vanity exercise or pleasant indulgence. Let me count the ways.

Lose to Bobby Bowden’s FSU in a heartbreaker in Tallahassee?

“Doesn’t matter,” Dad would say. “At least we beat the pants off Georgia.”

Lose a thriller in The Swamp to Tennessee in 2001?

“It would have been electric to play in the Rose Bowl.  But at least Spurrier won his last Florida-Georgia game.”

Win only 8 games and get clobbered at home by Miami in 2002?

“Sure, the season could have been better, but Rex Grossman sent all those Dawgs home disappointed, didn’t he?”

Win 11 games and an Orange Bowl in 2019 under Dan Mullen?

“If Florida had decided to play anything but zone against Jake Fromm in the Cocktail Party, they’d have won at least 12.”

I doubt anyone reading this will find the notion of putting so much stock into one football game mystifying. This is a part of the country where governors intervene in coaching decisions and a whole brand has been built on “It just means more.”

For dad, the Cocktail Party was a masterpiece, an homage to his love of the University of Florida, his begrudging respect for the University of Georgia (“That dang Kirby, he’s so good,” he’d text Saturday after Saturday in his last few years), and fatherhood.

Whether it was taking my sister to the game, buying dinner for me and my fraternity brothers (I was an ATO at Florida, because that’s what dad was) after a long Friday chasing redfish in the no-name canals that litter Jacksonville’s intracoastal waterways, or simply making sure Sunday’s breakfast was paid for before the long drive home, my dad made the Cocktail Party about family.

He also made it a celebration.

For several years, he and one of his best friends, Chuck Patterson, a Jacksonville native and successful businessman we also lost too soon, threw a Friday night clambake together in Arlington.

Everyone was invited and there was a smorgasbord of food and plenty of libations for all, as long as you tossed your car keys in a hat on your way in the door. In a house that often became filled with college-aged kids, Dad and Chuck were often the last guys up and the first guys awake, grown men enjoying a football rivalry like kids at Christmas.

I lived for those weekends, and the accumulation of memories that slowly ballooned, year-by-year, into something grand and irreplaceable.

Relationships between fathers and sons are always complex, even when you are as close as my dad and me.

We moved a lot, from Atlanta, which will always feel like home, to suburban New Jersey, which I grew to love, to Jupiter, Florida, where I finished high school.

Nowadays, Jupiter is a lifestyle of the rich and famous type of place, a place where Jimmy Buffet recorded music videos and where Tiger Woods and what feels like half the PGA Tour have waterfront homes. I’m aging myself, but growing up, Jupiter was mostly a sleepy beach town, filled with commercial anglers and a handful of white-collar folks like my dad who decided an extra half acre was worth the work commute to West Palm Beach.

When my parents split, my little sister went to live with my mom and it was just me and my Dad, and partly because we moved a lot and partly because I was a quiet kid, more likely to enjoy books and hours of ESPN than trying repeatedly to make new friends in another new city, I grew up without many friends.

Dad and I did everything together, especially when I was in high school.

We shot baskets, putted golf balls on an artificial putting green on a pool patio and spent hours traveling to sporting events or on the golf course. When we were home on Saturdays, Dad would drink a beer and I would drink a Coke and during college football and basketball seasons, we’d break down the games and crack jokes and nurse drinks for hours — a Manningcast before the time of Manningcasts. For the most part, my closest friends were my dad and his college friends.

When I became a father, my goal was to be half as good to my daughters as my dad was to me. I’ve added a stepdaughter and stepson in my blended family since Dad died, but the goal remains. My Dad wasn’t perfect, but I don’t feel the need to cleanse myself from any fundamental weakness or deficiency in his approach to fatherhood. As a template, Dad’s approach works.

Like failure, imperfection is inevitable. Even Smart and Spurrier, the two greatest coaches to grace this storied rivalry, lost football games.

All we can do, as dad reminded me in a Father’s Day card he sent a few months before he died, is live with courage of conviction, kindness, integrity, and do our best until our best becomes a little better.

Weekends like the Cocktail Party honor the consistent pursuit of impossible perfection.

Win or lose, the Cocktail Party and rivalries like it are special because of their sense of occasion, and the occasion, whatever the records of Florida and Georgia (or Georgia and Florida, if you must), is time spent with family and friends. This is the fabric of a life worth living. This is why a Cocktail Party weekend matters and marks the time.

The game matters too, of course.

For Georgia, Kirby Smart can send a second-consecutive group of seniors to the NFL or other walks of life without a loss to the hated Gators.

For Florida, the Gators, led by an interim coach who lived and coached at Florida in the Meyer and Tebow glory days, can deliver at least one moment to savor in the latest in a string of lost seasons, one that now will end, win or lose on Saturday, with the program’s sixth head coach since Tim Tebow graduated in 2009.

Fans, families, and fathers and sons from reaches all across the country will arrive early Friday morning and come Saturday evening, one side’s loyalists will trudge back to their hotels or to trips in cars traveling dark highways feeling heavier and more defeated than usual, their sense of loss and longing cured only by only one promise or prayer.

There will be another season.

There will be another Cocktail Party.

Savor them together while you can.