techblog

eparated by 70 miles of interstate between Atlanta and Athens Georgia, and founded 100 years apart, The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and the University of Georgia (UGA) have been rivals since 1893 in more than just football. Competing for everything in the state of Georgia, from potential students and fans to government grants and academic recognition (Georgia Tech is an engineering research university while UGA is a liberal arts research university). However, it is on the gridiron that this rivalry excels.

The dislike that these two schools have for each other probably started right after the Civil War when it was decided that a new technological school should be founded. Then UGA president Patrick Mell attempted to convince legislators that the new school should be located by Georgia’s main campus in Athens. despite his efforts, The Georgia Institute of Technology was established near the city limits of Atlanta in 1885.

It didn’t take long for the first hostilities to begin only a few years later in 1891 over, of all things, the school colors. UGA’s school magazine declared the school colors to be gold, black and crimson. Georgia’s football coach felt that gold was too close to yellow, which he felt symboled cowardice. That same year however, the Tech student body voted white and gold as the official school colors. In their first ever football game against Auburn, Tech would use gold on their football uniforms, some felt as a slap in the face of Georgia. Two years later, after Tech defeated Georgia in their first football game, gold was forever removed from Georgia’s school colors.

That first fateful game took place in Athens on November 4, 1893 with Georgia Tech, then known as the Blacksmiths, won by a score of 28 – 6. But it was who scored those 4 touchdowns that sparked the rivalry. Leonard Wood was a 33 year old US Army Physician who was officially registered as a Georgia Tech student a only a few days before the game. However, being a full time student, he was eligible to play. This fact upset Georgia fans since during and after the game they hurled rocks a debris at all the Tech players. The next day an article in the Atlanta Journal, by an Athens sports writer, mocked that Tech’s football team was nothing more than a collection of Atlanta residents with a few students thrown in.

A rivalry was born.

For the next several years, Georgia Tech’s football program would perform very poorly. As a result, they decided to hire a new coach from another rival school, Clemson. In 1904, John Heisman was paid $2,250 and 30% of attendance fees to be Georgia Tech’s football and baseball coach. (NOTE: after retiring from coaching football in 1927, he became of the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan in 1935. After his death in 1936, the club’s trophy for the best collegiate football player was renamed the Heisman Trophy). Heisman immediately turned Tech’s football program around going 8-1-1 in his first year. By 1908, Georgia alumni were having Tech’s recruiting tactics investigated, by the SIAA (Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association). The accusations were unproven and the SIAA later ruled in favor of Tech. In his 16 seasons at Georgia Tech, Heisman led the Golden Tornado (as Tech was known) to three undefeated seasons, including a 32 game winning streak and an all important 23 – 6 victory over Georgia. Heisman also led Tech to the highest scoring football game ever played with a 222 – 0 win over a totally outmanned Cumberland State in 1916 (too bad it wasn’t Georgia!).

By 1917, with the onset of WWI, UGA disbanded its football program since many of its able bodies students were recruited for the war. Since Atlanta was a military training ground at the time, Tech retained its male students and continued its football program throughout the war. When UGA revived its football program in 1919, they proudly proclaimed “UGA in Argonne” and “TECH in Atlanta” on parade floats. As a result, Tech severed all athletic ties with UGA, including cancelling several Georgia home games at Atlanta’s Grant Field (UGA commonly used Grant Field as their home field). It would not be until 1925, by mutual agreement, that regular season competition would resume.

In 1932, Georgia and Georgia Tech would become 2 of the original 13 members of the SEC, of which UGA is still a member. Tech however, would leave the SEC in 1964 after coach Bobby Dodd began a feud with Alabama’s Bear Bryant (the result of a cheap shot by an Alabama player that ended the career of a Tech player, and Bryant’s refusal to discipline the athlete). There were also concerns of scholarship allocations, questionable recruiting tactics and student athlete treatment that led to Tech’s departure from the SEC. However, Dodd understood the importance of a rivalry and would lead the Yellow Jackets to 8 consecutive victories (1946 – 1954) and outscore Georgia 176 – 39 in those games. This remains the longest streak of either team in the rivalry.

Several years later, Tech would attempt to re-enter the SEC but their application was denied, in large part due to the opposition of Georgia. With no league to compete in, Tech would found the Metro Conference, for all its intercollegiate sports except football. Similar to Notre Dame, Tech would compete as an independent for the next 15 years, until eventually joining the ACC in 1979, the conference in which it still completes today.

Not satisfied with simply disliking each other on the football field, both institutions have also tailored their fight songs to the rivalry. Tech’s Ramblin Wreck song contains the line “To Hell with Georgia”, and “Up With the White and Gold” is immediately followed by the lyrics “Down with the Red and Black” and later on “Drop the Battle Axe on Georgia’s Head”. The Georgia fight song, “Glory Glory”, which has technically remained unchanged since first being published in 1909, officially ends with G-E-O-R-G-I-A. The student body however, has modified the closing lyrics to “and to Hell with Georgia Tech!”

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No, I won’t send it anywhere.”

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

“Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.”

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

“You don’t understand me, Harry,” answered the artist. “Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

“Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”