Inside the Unwavering Devotion of an Aiken Man Who Lived Every High and Low of 60 Years with the Gamecocks

GRANITEVILLE — Glenn Sanders, as a retired educator, has covered much of western South Carolina, and as a dedicated Gamecock football fan, he’s reached considerably farther, getting acquainted with such football-friendly locales as Clemson, Athens, Nashville, Knoxville, Auburn, Tuscaloosa and Baton Rouge.

Starting as a student, he attended “most home games” from 1964 to 1983, and since then, starting with the Gamecocks’ game against Clemson in 1984, he’s attended 486 straight games open to fans — every contest, home and away, including bowl games. The sole exception was the 2020 game at Vanderbilt, when tickets were not for sale, due to COVID-19 fears.

The Graniteville native came up through local schools and got on board as a University of South Carolina student in the fall of 1964, en route to a career as a teacher and administrator. The trail into adulthood led to seating on a regular basis in Williams-Brice Stadium: Section 12, Row 32 and Seats 29 and 30.

Sanders has been there for several Saturdays in the fall since “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was in its initial theater run, “The Brady Bunch” made its debut, The Beatles were breaking up and Willie Mays hit his 600th home run.  

“By the end of this year, I will have traveled over 6,000 miles this year going to watch the Gamecocks by car, plus flying to LSU,” Sanders said. 

Making weekend travel plans might have become a little easier for Sanders in 1995, when he retired as principal of Byrd Elementary School, in Graniteville, although he stayed in touch through a variety of teaching roles for several years. 

His childhood loyalties, however, belonged to a football program associated with such names as John Heisman, Bobby Dodd and Bill Curry.

“I’d been a Georgia Tech fan. My daddy was a Georgia Tech fan. He was from Augusta, and on Saturday afternoon, back then, they had only like one game on TV every week, but Daddy had to work until 4 o’clock at the mill, and every Saturday, I cut the radio on and would listen to the game, so I could tell him what had happened when he’d come in, and I pulled for Tech.”

The shift occurred in 1962, when Sanders was a 10th grader and responded to a Sunday school teacher’s question about a possible outing. “I suggested we go to Columbia, to see the state capitol building, because most of us had never been to Columbia, so he took us … and while we were downtown, we happened to run into a guy. There were seven of us, and he had seven tickets to the game, and he offered to give them to us, so we went out to the game.”

The Gamecocks’ setting was relatively humble, Sanders said, recalling “just a little bowl that had about 30,000 seats in it.”

The result? “I became a Gamecock that night. We played Wake Forest. The Gamecocks won, and I come home and told my father I was going to go to Carolina, and the very next week, I sent an application to South Carolina to get admitted, and they sent me a letter back that they couldn’t receive it that early. I’d have to wait another year, and at the end of my junior year, I could re-submit, and then it would be based on graduating the next year, as a senior.”

He tried again, wrapping up his studies at Leavelle McCampbell — the now-vacant facility most recently known as Leavelle McCampbell Middle School. “Of course, we called it Graniteville High School. A lot of people didn’t even know the name was Leavelle McCampbell.” 

He wound up with three degrees from USC, to bolster his education credentials. “I’m qualified for everything from kindergarten through the superintendent’s office. Of course, my certificate’s expired now.” 

His tales of Saturdays in the fall vary widely. “I met the president of LSU one year, when I was down there. I was walking to the game and he stopped and thanked me for coming to the game, but unfortunately for him, he was fired the next week,” he recalled.

Another occasion had him meeting Lee Greenwood in a Tallahassee restaurant by coincidence, in connection with a game at Florida State. Sanders wound up having a long conversation with the “God Bless the U.S.A” writer and singer, getting access because Greenwood’s personal attorney was one of Sanders’ former students from their time together when both were at Lower Richland High in Columbia — Sanders as a football coach and the student as a player en route to law school. 

Highlights along the way, he said, included a 35-21 home win vs. Alabama in 2010 at a point when the Crimson Tide sat atop the national rankings. On the other end of the spectrum was a 1998-99 period when the Gamecocks lost 21 straight games (“and I was there for all of them”) and were in the process of moving from having Brad Scott to Lou Holtz as head coach.  

“I’ve driven my car into 18 states following the Gamecocks,” Sanders said. “The furthest north I’ve been was Pittsburgh — University of Pittsburgh. The furthest south would be Miami, where we played University of Miami one year — a regular-season game, but we played it in the Orange Bowl, so we got to see the Orange Bowl — and then out west, the furthest I’ve been would probably be Lincoln, Nebraska. We played University of Nebraska years ago.” 

Sanders now has seven season tickets, and his son has five nearby, so games tend to be a family affair for a dozen. “I’ve been sitting in the end zone since 1968, in that same seat, and I like that better … That new overhang they had put in a few years ago … blocks the sun on hot days, and it blocks the rain on wet days, but I can watch the line blocking in the end zone better than I can from the side, and I watch what the line is doing to tell me where the play’s going and what’s going on with the game.” 

He has parking spaces in Gamecock Park, and the Sanders tradition includes tailgating for a couple of hours, watching a game on TV and then heading into the stadium.