Football, and The George
When Lucas Oil Stadium was built, I shed a few tears and thought of all the memories I lived through when the RCA Dome still housed the Indianapolis Colts. That was a pretty big part of my life, but Lucas Oil Stadium was bigger-figuratively and literally. It was a new set of downs, it was OUR stadium and not an event venue retrofitted for a football team that unexpectedly arrived in the middle of the night. Tony Dungy did the needful and brought Indianapolis a Lombardi trophy and I guess that sort of Christened things, it became “The Luke”.
The architecture made perfect sense, it looks more like a basketball arena than a football stadium, and that’s fine with me. Indianapolis is a basketball town after-all, countless NCAA Men’s Final Four championships have taken place at Conseco, and no Indy native can talk about college basketball without mentioning Butler, a couple minutes up the street, nor can any historian of college hoops stand on his own two feet without at least a passing reference to Bobby Knight and the Hoosiers. Then there were the days when Reggie Miller was the household name of professional sports in Indy.
Those days have come and gone and now, the first word out of someone’s mouth after the word Indianapolis is “Colts” and the first name following that is Peyton Manning. This is our town, tje Luke is our shrine, Indianapolis is a football city now.
When The George Dean Johnson School of Business and Economics opened in Spartanburg, the city I inwhich I now reside, I didn’t really think twice; I wasn’t in school. In fact, I think I was crashing on my friend’s couch, unemployed and running trivia gigs in bars for cash. Maybe it’s because of the personal circumstances that I’ve got no vetted interest in what the building has, or what it can do for Spartanburg.
I just don’t know about calling it “The George”. Let me explain:
As you’re coming into central Indianapolis, winding around I-70 you can’t help but miss this big son of a bitch, looming all by itself. One it’s stupidly huge, and two it’s the only building erected in the last 10 years facing towards Monument Circle, an arrangement historic Indianapolis once the standard. Now, buildings face North to South. The Luke is genuinely a sight worthy of a citizen’s awe and respect. Not to mention it came out of the pockets of Indiana denizens in one way or another. Affectionately, that’s our Stadium.
So Spartanburg is a college town, which is pretty neat (which also kind of sucks if you, like me enjoy going to the pub to sit down and have a conversation with the guy next to you, and actually enjoy using your normal tone of voice). This new school rolls up and all of a sudden it’s “The George”. Maybe I’m being pushy, but tossing such an intimate name that soon seems premature. I’ll be 100% honest with you, up until I had to drop a friend off for class just a week ago, I didn’t even know they had finished building the place. For full disclosure, they haven’t. There’s still landscaping and construction going on in the back yard.
But that’s not really my problem, is it? That’s the students’ problem. It’d be one thing if they want vernacular for something in the city, which I’m all for. It’s not. The University of South Carolina is already pushing out banners and branding with “The George” on it.
What fresh hell is this, anyway?
Remember what it was like whenever you had a sleepover, you were downstairs maybe dancing to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and your mom walked in and started dancing with you? All of a sudden nobody even wanted to be in the same room with you? That’s exactly how it feels with “The George”. You can’t just create rhetoric and expect it to catch on like this; top-down sucks. There’s no intimate relationship with this establishment in the city other than a new piece of architecture that was erected while the remainder of E. Main Street looks like a parody of Downtown Detroit, MI.
I’ve got to give props to the Hub City Writer’s Project for finding a location that could benefit from occupancy and actually make some use out of it. Wonder why a school that plans to teach business and economics couldn’t do the same, and get this city back on it’s feet. Think about it, we could damn well use it.
That’d be the Lombardi trophy Spartanburg needs, The George should have been located in an abandoned building, retrofitted for a school that showed up in the middle of the night. Hell, it worked for the Colts.
