Intentional Grounding
My overnight trip to see the national championship lasted three days.
But at least there was beer. And plenty of pig. By  James Greenfield

[read from the beginning] I was scheduled to exit Hartsfield in my rental shit box at 3, arriving in Chattanooga by 5:15, which would have allowed a couple of quick barbeque stops before the game. But two inches of rain pounded Atlanta that day, postponing most arrivals, including mine. Hartsfield spit me out at 4:10 into the maw of Friday afternoon rush hour. I spent a full hour creeping through a seven-mile stretch of I-75 just above its junction with I-285.

Beyond that point, the testosterone-jagged guys in pickups took over. Rain notwithstanding, if you were doing less than 80, they sat on your bumper, headlights glowering, until you jogged right. Get yo lolly-gaggin Yankee ass out of my lane, boy.

The game was nearly ten minutes old, a misty rain fell steadily in the 40-degree chill, and Villanova had just kicked a field goal for a 3-0 lead as I arrived at my seat in the eleventh row of Section 105 on the Villanova side of Finley Stadium, at about the 33-yard-line. Everything was soaked and this was a championship game, so having a seat was more of a formality.

Montana executed two flawless drives for successive touchdowns. Marc Mariani was consistently open for quarterback Andrew Selle’s precision passes, and junior running back Chase Reynolds chewed up generous chunks of yardage behind Montana’s gargantuan offensive line. Mariani hauled in a 24-yard strike for the first score, and Selle found Jabin Sambrano from four yards out for the second. With 6:48 to play in the half, the Griz led 14-3 and looked unstoppable.

But as it had all season in the tough Colonial Athletic Association, Villanova began to make adjustments. In a little more than three minutes, the Wildcats marched for their first TD on a five-yard run by the brilliant all-purpose junior Matt Szczur (pronounced “Caesar”). Nick Yako missed an extra point for the first time all year, but after stopping Montana’s ensuing drive, the Cats trailed by only 14-9 at the half. The flow of the game had changed.

It occurred to me that I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. The best I could do in the concourse was a couple of hot chocolates and a Polish sausage. The fat, uncircumcised sausage kept slipping out of its undersized generic hot dog roll, and I had to keep grabbing the slimy sausage to prevent its escape. I looked around nervously to make sure no rabbis were watching, and I felt egregiously underfed as well as unclean.

The rain had stopped as the second half began. Villanova’s offense grew more conservative and yet more powerful, running the ball at will as the offensive line fired out. Quarterback Chris Whitney (16 carries, 102 yards), a solid 225-pounder who lowers his shoulder to invite contact instead of sliding like the pussies in the NFL, either expertly pitched the ball or toted it himself on well-conceived options. On short yardage, Szczur took a direct snap, quickly read the blocks in front of him, and invariably hit the right hole with his 4.4 speed for a first down. Montana knew what was coming and still had no answer. Szczur finished with 14 carries for 159 yards, and caught four passes for another 68 yards.

Meanwhile, Villanova’s defense had figured out the Griz’ high-octane offense. The Cats stuffed Reynolds at the line and then turned up the blitz pressure in passing situations, giving Selle less time to find receivers. The Villanova secondary more efficiently shadowed Mariani, who caught nine balls for 178 yards in the first half, but made no contribution after intermission.

Whitney threw a three-yard scoring pass to Chris Farmer at the end of a long drive with 5:27 to go in the third quarter, and Szczur finished another extended march on a three-yard run with 11:04 remaining in the fourth. Villanova had scored three unanswered TDs and led 23-14. The Cats had a chance to ice the game with about three minutes left, but a bad snap aborted another drive inside the Montana 20.

The Griz got the ball back deep in their own territory with 2:17 left as the skies opened and the heaviest deluge of the game began. How could Montana throw in those conditions? God had spoken and it looked over.

But after a series of short passes and a stupid Villanova penalty, Selle found Sambrano from 53 yards out for a score. The Griz trailed by only a deuce with 1:07 to play and still held all three of their timeouts.

Everyone in the stadium knew Montana had to try an onside kick. Brody McKnight kept adjusting the ball on the tee to set it exactly as he wanted it. But he booted it with much greater force than he intended, and alert Villanova players stepped aside and let it go out of bounds.

The Wildcats needed only one first down to run out the clock, and they got it. Coach Andy Talley, who restored the football program 30 years ago after the university had suspended it for several years, hoisted his first trophy, and Szczur earned the Most Outstanding Player Award.

Szczur is Villanova’s best NFL prospect since the Eagles’ gifted Brian Westbrook, but you may not see him on Sundays next fall. Szczur is an equally talented baseball outfielder who led the Wildcats with a .346 average as a redshirt freshman last spring, and he could be in a major league organization by next summer. Right now he’s preparing to donate bone marrow to a 1-year-old girl who suffers from leukemia. Regardless of his future as a sports mercenary, he’s already a pro as a human being.

There was no real opportunity for gustatory delights during my 13 hours in Chattanooga. The only restaurants serving food after the game were chains, so in an act of pure desperation, I landed at an Applebee’s near my hotel, where I hoisted beers with friendly Griz fans. I scoured downtown for breakfast under tarnished pewter skies on Saturday morning, but the town was remarkably dead. I finally settled for a desultory bagel and granola–OK, the coffee was good–in a café within sight of the engorged Tennessee River.  

The South’s drenching Friday storm was becoming an East Coast blizzard as it powered up the coast, and would dump two feet of snow in southeastern Pennsylvania. Sure enough, as I cruised south on I-75, Jane called and said my 12:40 flight out of Atlanta was canceled. She deeply regrets agreeing to call US Air and switch me to a Sunday flight; they put her on hold for six hours before she finally went online and paid for a new reservation for 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

The drive toward Atlanta devolved into absurdity. NPR, obviously with hours of programming begging to be filled, ran a feature on lifelike flies painted into the porcelain of urinals, the brainchild of a deep-thinking European who hoped to give men something to shoot at. The flies were credited with reducing spillage by 80 percent. I admit I wondered about the mindset and methodology of the researcher who’d gathered that data.       

I called Alamo to extend my rental for an extra day. Because the first “specialist” hung up on me, I had this exact conversation not once, but twice:

“May I have your rental agreement number?”

“Sorry, I’m driving and I can’t reach it and read it to you.”

“Do you have your car key?”

What to do with an extra day? I pulled over, Blackberried for a few minutes, and learned that the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum in Greenville, SC, was open 10-2 on Saturday only. I’m a Jackson fan and devoutly believe his lifetime banishment by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis after the 1919 World Series was unjust. I’ve read his biography and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, and I’d loved Field of Dreams. I wanted to commune with Jackson’s spirit. Greenville was about two hours from Atlanta, and I had a shot to get there by 1:30.

The sun had come out and the track looked clear, so I went for it. But an hour up I-85, a semi had flipped onto its side, backing up traffic for about a mile. I called the museum, but couldn’t get a human being to answer. By the time I found the little brick house in which one of the greatest ballplayers in history had actually lived–it had been moved to a prominent spot closer to the center of town a few years ago–it was 2:20 and the place was shut tight. (Turns out it had never opened that day because its managers hadn’t wanted to drive in from the hills after Friday’s storm, but I had no way of knowing that.)

I rolled slowly through Greenville’s historic area, a pleasant surprise. The mills that had employed Jackson and thousands of others when Jackson was honing his game in the early 1900s had long since shut down, but many red-brick buildings from that era had been restored, and more recent construction had faithfully hewed to the same style. Traffic congestion strongly suggested that at least this section of town was commercially viable. I did not stop to shop. There were more important objectives to be satisfied.

I fell in love with southern barbeque in 1973, when I became a reporter for The Progress-Index in Petersburg, VA. Sometimes I ate it at the A&B, a little dive at the corner of Sycamore and Washington, where it was served by Elsie, a rheumy-eyed waitress who had eaten too many of the bourbon balls she lovingly passed out at Christmas. In mid-1974, I received an invitation I couldn’t refuse: Dinwiddie County Sheriff Charles Lee Mitchell and Detective Claude Mann hosted a pig roast, my first taste of barbequed pork pulled directly from a spit-mounted carcass.

A few weeks later, Charles Lee and Claude proudly invited me to take pictures of the moonshine they’d confiscated from a still they’d busted out in the woods. When I’d finished, Charles Lee took me aside. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” he said, and handed me two of the dozens of Gordon’s Vodka bottles that were filled with the stuff. I took it back to my apartment in Petersburg, tried it, and settled upon a preferred use for it–I passed it off as vodka at my next party.

Henry’s Smokehouse, 240 Wade Hampton Boulevard, Greenville, SC. If you crave a pure, elemental barbeque experience, this is your place. It’s a 25-seat shack that’s less than a mile from the historic district, set in an ugly, strip-zoned area, not far down a four-lane road from the incongruously manicured campus of Bob Jones University.

You order at the counter and sit, and it takes only a minute or two for your order to arrive. The Hog ($4.85) is a ton of very lean shredded pork, not overcooked, on a basic hamburger bun. You may be able to keep the surfeit of pork from spilling out of the bun if you have four hands to pick it up. It’s not served with sauce; you can season to your heart’s content from two options on your table, a traditional rust-hued southern sauce and what appears to be a mustard-based sauce. This has to be one of the best food deals in all of America.

Henry’s also serves hash, smoked chicken and ribs, and offered to barbeque turkey and ham for the holidays. If you’re in the area, don’t miss it.

Harry’s Pig Shop, 2425 Jefferson Road, Athens, GA. According to the foodie blogs, there’s long been a dearth of decent barbeque around Athens, the scenic home of the University of Georgia, about 45 miles east of Atlanta. The recently-opened Harry’s is a step in the right direction, although the ambience takes a hit because it’s stuck in the middle of a shopping center.

Inside it’s designed more like a ‘50s soda shop, brightly lit with a black-and-white-squared linoleum floor and white walls adorned with black-and-white photos and kid art. ESPN plays on a high-def screen. There’s a printed menu with more choices than your average barbeque dive: ribs, sliders, hen, salad, quesadilla, nachos, even (ulp) mac-and-cheese, wontons and a tofu sandwich. (Seriously, who’s going to walk into Harry’s Pig Shop and order wontons and tofu, even in a college town? There may be a focus issue here.)

I ordered the Pig Sandwich ($4.99) with green beans and a Terrapin Rye beer, hold the slaw. The barbequed pork is served on a straight bun without sauce and is very tasty, but it’s not lean. There are four sauces at the table–South Carolina mustard, North Carolina vinegar, onion, and my choice, Georgia Shack. The green beans are done southern-style, with small chunks of bacon, and are delicious.

Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, 1811 Piedmont Road, Atlanta, GA. (Thanks for this recommendation, Victor.) Situated opposite a cemetery, only a couple miles off the Buckhead section of Peachtree and northeast of I-85, Fat Matt’s has only 34 seats and a diner-ish feel, with a picture window covering the side that faces the street. The restrooms are marked by yellow doors–“Duke,” with a graphic of a horizontal key, and “Duchess,” with a lock. A tiny old RCA TV is mounted near the ceiling, tuned to the Falcons-Jets game. The floor is the popular black-and-white linoleum, but the wall opposite the window is painted deep red and holds photos and posters of blues musicians and concerts, some of them signed. The poster that catches my eye promotes the Atlanta Festival in July 1970. On the bill were Jimi Hendrix, John Sebastian, Mountain, Procol Harum, Poco, Jethro Tull and Johnny Winter. But the lead act, in bigger, bolder letters, was B.B. King. That’s serious respect for the blues.

Moments after I order at the counter, the sliced pork sandwich ($3.95) arrives with a bag of Lay’s chips and a Blue Moon ($3.95), chosen from Fat Matt’s generous selection of beer. Placed on a hamburger bun, the pork is lean and smothered in a dark, tangy Georgia-style sauce. So good I had to eat a second. The sauce is Fat Matt’s own. I bought a sealed bottle and fantasized about great culinary adventures, but I forgot about flight security rules and I didn’t check my bag on the way home. I hope the sauce was put to good use by the TSA agent who confiscated it at Hartsfield.

Fat Matt’s also offers Texas Pete’s hot sauce on its tables, and the cuisine sticks to the basic ribs, chicken, pork and sides. The staff and patrons are friendly. A beefy guy at the next table noticed my Villanova sweatshirt and congratulated me, then smiled and let me know the next national championship game would include his team–the Alabama Crimson Tide. After the way his boys whupped Florida in the SEC Championship game, I told him he should like his chances.

Philadelphia International was fully operational on Sunday and planes flew there from Atlanta, but not on US Air. Make no mistake, these were economic cancellations, but ticketing personnel were instructed to portray them as weather-related so they could deny customer requests for hotel vouchers. The cancellations, of course, only added to the number of stranded passengers for whom US Air had to find seats as the holidays approached.

After I’d waited in line for two hours, they told me they couldn’t put me on a flight to Philly until early Tuesday morning. I demanded a supervisor. A very nice guy named Ed finally came out and we hit upon the idea of using another airline to get me as close as possible to home. He took me over to AirTran, where the effusive, courteous staff found me a seat on a late night flight to Baltimore.

I reached a hotel near BWI at 2:30 a.m. Monday. Got a few hours sleep before the smell of raw sewage came through the HVAC system into my bathroom. I rented a car for the drive to Philadelphia International, where my car was parked. The highways were clear, but I had to endure one more traffic jam, caused by a wreck on I-95 in Pennsylvania, just above the Delaware line. Reached my house at 2:15 p.m., about 47 hours later than scheduled.

From the dual perspectives of sports and food, I’d make the trip again. But to borrow from an old country song about Dallas, if you ever get the chance to fly US Air, especially to Atlanta, take it from me, pass it by. •

James Greenfield is the author of Between The Lines, a biography of the late, great Dodgers relief pitcher, Steve Howe.