Mississippi Today
New documentary ‘9/20’ details a most memorable night in college football history
An excellent new TV documentary “9/20” tells the compelling story of a football game played 23 years ago that was, as then-Mississippi State quarterback Wayne Madkin put it, “bigger than all of us.”
The game was played on Sept. 20, 2001, at Scott Field in Starkville. Final score: South Carolina 16, Mississippi State 14. Twenty-three years later, the score seems irrelevant.
For sure, the final score was nowhere near the reason why the SEC Network will air the 30-minute MSU Films documentary at 7 p.m. on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11/2001.
That South Carolina-Mississippi State game was the first big-time college or professional football game played after terrorists killed more than 3,000 Americans, injured more than 6,000 others and changed our lives forever. It was the worst attack on our homeland in our nation’s history.
Madkin, the Bulldogs’ quarterback, remembers walking out onto the field that warm evening, along with all the State and South Carolina players and suddenly knowing the experience was something he would never forget.
Scott Field was packed. American flags were everywhere — I mean everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. Bulldogs and Gamecocks players surrounded the biggest flag of all, each holding on to it during the playing of the national anthem.
“At that time I knew this was bigger than football,” Madkin says. “You have a couple days in your life that you know will define you, that you are never going to forget, that you can pass on or share to your legacy. This was one of those for me.
“Once you actually got on that field and you held that enormous American flag and you saw South Carolina and Mississippi State all together as one, nobody cared if you were a Republican or a Democrat or a South Carolina fan or a Mississippi State fan. At that particular time it was bigger than all of us and we were Americans.”
All of us who were alive 23 years ago remember where we were and who we were with when we heard — or actually saw on our TVs — the horrible news of Sept. 11, 2001. Larry Templeton, then the Mississippi State athletic director, was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for an NCAA meeting. Somebody walked into the meeting room told all in attendance they needed to get to a television.
And so they did. And since they were all high-ranking athletics officials, most with programs to run hundreds or thousands of miles away, all began trying to figure out how to get home. There were no flights. All air traffic was grounded. Templeton and then-Auburn athletic director David Housel were in a group of four who decided to rent a car and and drive south.
“We got the last rental car in Philadelphia,” Templeton said. “At least that’s what we were told.”
“It was an eerie drive. Every time we would go through a big city, you could see the military presence, the security. I’ll never forget going through Washington, D.C. You would have thought we were at war.”
Their first stop, other than for gas or fast food, was the Atlanta airport, where Housel had left his car. “We couldn’t even get close,” Templeton says. “Tanks were blocking the road. We pulled up and a soldier asked what we were doing. We told them who we were and that Housel needed to get his car to drive back to Auburn. They told Housel to get his stuff and get out, that they’d drive him to his car, and for us to turn around.”
When Templeton turned in the rental at Golden Triangle Regional Airport, he says, “at least a dozen people were waiting in line to get a car.”
The next few days were filled with meetings and phone call after phone call. State was supposed to play host to BYU that Saturday. The initial plan in the SEC was to play the scheduled games. That changed when the NFL canceled the games for that weekend. The BYU game was postponed and later scheduled for December.
State’s next scheduled game was the South Carolina game the following Thursday, and it was in doubt as well. But then, the call came from the SEC office on Saturday, Sept. 15. Roy Kramer, the SEC commissioner, had been in discussions with White House staff. He told Templeton, “The president (George W. Bush) wants your game to be the first.”
That gave Templeton and his staff five days to prepare for a game that would surely be the biggest security undertaking in college football history. Again, if you’re old enough, you remember. America was basically at a standstill. Airports were still closed. Planes were still grounded. There was still great fear of another attack. A stadium filled with tens of thousands of fans seemed a likely target.
Templeton asked Kramer: “How will we get South Carolina here?”
Kramer answered, “You worry about preparing for the game. I’ll get them there.”
Before it was over, the National Guard, the Air Force, the FBI, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, then-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove’s office and still others were involved in game preparation. Security measures that have become commonplace were instituted for the first time. Among the more than 40,000 in attendance for the game were bomb sniffing dogs.
David Garraway, one of the film’s three co-producers, believes “9/20” tells an important story.
“In the very first days after 9/11 — those days of uncertainty and fear — we find a society looking for normalcy. Sports are such an indelible part of the American experience, and they became a refuge,” Garraway said. “When America needed competitive sports to move forward from this tragedy, Mississippi State rose to the occasion.”
There were hiccups. For instance, the Delta jet chartered for South Carolina the day before the game was grounded due to mechanical issues. Coach Lou Holtz and his Gamecocks flew into Starkville on a different plane on game day, highly unusual in college football.
Because of security, the lines to get into the game were unusually long. But there were no incidents and a decidedly partisan crowd, many dressed in red, white and blue instead of maroon and white, seemed to endure the delays gladly. It was as if everyone in attendance, including this writer, was just glad to be doing something somewhat normal for the first time in nine days.
In many ways, the game was a patriotic celebration of America with some football played in between. The game itself was competitive and well-played. South Carolina, the more physical team that night, won a hard-earned victory.
Templeton’s lasting memory? “A sense of accomplishment,” he answers. “Just playing the game, amid all the circumstances, was an accomplishment.”
Madkin? “I feel very blessed to have been part of it. You know, 9/11 changed everything. It changed our lives forever, but that game was part of the healing process of America. We lost the game, but we were part of history. We were part of one of the first steps of America getting back to normal.”
“9/11” will be aired on the SEC Network at 7 p.m. Wednesday. It will be available for streaming here following the broadcast.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.”
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’”
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.
“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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