More payback from the Gators By John Parnell THE TELEGRAPH My devotion to Florida football might as well be a strand of my DNA. My grandfather was captain of the 1931 team and my father was a manager for the team in the early '50s. At 42, I can scarcely recall a time when my thoughts on whether life is worth living have not been largely shaped by the fortunes of the Gators. So I can remember a time when Florida football was B.S. - as in Before Spurrier. It was a bittersweet time of promising seasons dashed and cries of "wait 'til next year!" It was a time when dread often eclipsed hope. And it was a time when no demon haunted the Gator psyche more than the Georgia Bulldogs. Year after painful year - or so it seemed - of my youth, Florida would storm through September and most of October looking like a team that could finally bring the elusive Southeastern Conference football championship to Gainesville and rescue the Gator Nation from the also-ran wilderness. And then would come the Georgia game. And Florida would lose. No, not just lose. That's too small a word for what would happen. Georgia would either grind Florida into dust, or the Gators would obligingly skin themselves and turn their hides into handbags and shoes in front of their long-suffering fans. Take 1974. Florida loses because of a blown two-point conversion. Take 1975. I think Georgia only got one first down the entire second half. Unfortunately, it was on an 80-yard touchdown pass thrown by the tight end. The Appleby-to-Washington throw. Florida loses 10-7. Take 1976. Florida leads at halftime 27-13, but loses 41-27. And please, please take 1980. I will say nothing of that game. Such games were not football. They were spiritual torture. I loved Florida football with all the outsized emotion that boys bring to sports. I knew all the players' numbers and hometowns. I pored over anything I could read about the Gators. I cheered them until I was hoarse in victory and mourned their losses for weeks. And I kept believing, like kids do, through all the disappointments that one day my faith would be redeemed by that SEC championship. Instead, I got a sort of Calvinism-by-the-St.-Johns - harsh lessons that some are favored and some are damned and that all human endeavor ends in futility. I was not able to absorb such knowledge without bitterness, and I began to hate - a primal, irrational hate - anything to do with Georgia football, even the smallest things. I hated the G on the helmet, and I hated the band playing "Glory, Glory to Old Georgia." (Honestly, why would any school in the South try to rally its fans with something based on a Yankee battle anthem? Had the Japanese bombed Savannah instead of Pearl Harbor, would the UGA drama department have performed Kabuki theater in the stands?) I wanted Vince Dooley - by any reasonable assessment, a fine and decent man - shipped off to some prison for felonious poor-mouthing. I wanted Sanford Stadium razed, its destruction accompanied by the wails of the Bulldog Nation lamenting its iniquities. Sounds a little over the top? Tough. My sense of reason on this vanished about the time Lindsay Scott crossed the Gator 20-yard line in the aforementioned 1980 torture. But mostly I wanted revenge on the field. I wanted Florida to beat Georgia like a rented mule until the Bulldogs decided to drop to Division I-AA. You might think that at some point in the past 15 years or so, that my thirst for vengeance might be slaked, that I might look upon the Bulldogs and say, "Ah, poor fellows. They've endured enough defeat and have been properly chastened." But you would be wrong. The feelings of the Gator Nation toward the Bulldogs - the hated Bulldogs - I think are best summed up by a poster on the Virtual Swamp, an Internet message board, whose alias is Pontifigator. A student of the Roman history, he borrows from Cato the Elder, a Roman senator so obsessed with the destruction of Carthage that he punctuated every one of his speeches, whether he was talking about a building project or the bunions on his toes, with "Carthago delenda est!" And so Pontifigator ends all of his posts with "UGA delenda est!" UGA must be destroyed. Rational? Perhaps not. Justified? Totally. After all, this is Florida-Georgia football we're talking about. John Parnell is a copy editor for The Telegraph. Reach him at jparnell@macontel.com.