The first time I heard Tennessee football announcer John Ward exult, as only he could, "Give Him Six!" to describe a Volunteers touchdown, I looked quizzically at my dad. He just smiled.
I was probably 11, maybe 12, and was listening on a transistor radio, which is more of a relic now than even a rotary phone.
As a young kid growing up in the Carolinas, I lived for those fall Saturdays in the late 1970s and early 1980s when men like Larry Munson, Jim Fyffe, Cawood Ledford, John Ferguson, John Forney, Jack Cristil and Ward were as much a part of SEC football for me as Herschel Walker, Willie Gault, Major Ogilvie and Bo Jackson.