Clemson fans swarm Atlanta

Clemson, S.C. — The Tiger paw painters and orange shirt wearers have waited almost an entire generation for this day to arrive.

Look out, Atlanta. Tens of thousands of Clemson fans are headed your way, convinced Saturday’s game at the Georgia Dome will launch the glorious season that reinstates their football team to its proper place among the nation’s elite.

Clemson people have been born, grown up and had kids of their own since the 1981 national championship season. Today’s students were babies and toddlers the last time Clemson finished in the top 10 or won an ACC championship.

No wonder they’re fired up about this year’s Tigers, who carry a No. 9 preseason ranking into the sold-out Chick-fil-A College Kickoff against Alabama.

“This is the year,” said Hunter Allen, a sophomore from Latta, S.C. “It’s time for a change. It’s time for us to come through.”

Clemson has sold a school-record 58,134 season tickets. The school’s 32,000-ticket allotment for today’s game has been sold out since July, with the exception of student tickets, and you should have seen the line for those. It stretched halfway around Memorial Stadium when the ticket office opened Aug. 19, ticket manager Travis Furbee said, and the 3,700 student tickets were gone in five hours.

Tickets aren’t the only things fans are buying. If you can wear it, tote it, watch it, eat off it, drink from it, write with it, sleep on it, frame it, collect it or stick it on your wall, somebody’s selling a Clemson version of it. The well-dressed Clemsonian can sport a school tie for 21 consecutive days without wearing the same variety twice. And, just for today’s game, there are at least two varieties of officially licensed Beat Alabama shirts.

Business has never been better.

“We’ve been busy, busy, busy all spring and summer,” said David Spearman, whose Mr. Knickerbocker store a few feet from campus sells “anything that’s got a tiger paw on it.” “We’ve upped our buying 30 or 40 percent anticipating these first three or four games. This is the craziest I’ve seen it, and I’ve been in this business 35 years.

“We’ll probably top the national championship year even if we don’t have a national championship.”

A few doors down College Avenue, Jason Beaty is tapping into the excitement by selling replicas of the helmets Clemson teams wore from 1939 through the present day, for $300 to $325 apiece.

Students have been putting their money into athletics in record amounts. Katie Privett, president of the IPTAY student advisory board, said the IPTAY Collegiate Club is well on its way to topping last year’s 4,800 student members, despite a 33 percent increase in the cost of a one-year membership and a 30 percent increase in the cost of a four-year membership.

(So much for the 74-year-old booster club’s acronym for “I pay ten a year.” Even students now pay $40 a year, but nobody’s about to start calling it “IFTAY.”)

IPTAY member students get first dibs on tickets, and the hardest of the hard-core make sure they’re at the front of the line. Instead of showing up when tickets are distributed at 5 p.m. nine days before the game, they arrive 24 hours early, with tents. This year, some arrived even earlier than that.

“They’re hiding over there in the parking lot waiting, because it’s not legal to line up before 5,” Privett said at 3:45 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.

Alex Bushroe, a senior from New Smyrna Beach, Fla., is usually first in line. He came in second this week. Even for a game against Division I-AA opponent The Citadel, seven tents went up right at 5 p.m. That’s how much passion these students feel for this year’s team.

“It’s the highest I’ve ever seen it,” said Bushroe, who remembers three games his freshman year when he was the only one camping.

Things changed in 2006, when Clemson won seven of its first eight games and reached No. 10 in the nation.

Those Tigers lost four of their last five games, though, in yet another disappointment for a fan base that has suffered so many. The last seven Clemson teams ranked in the preseason Top 25 finished the year unranked.

Clemson has won 13 ACC championships, more than any other team, but the most recent one came in 1991. Six other schools have won or shared an ACC title since then. It’s the longest championship drought in Tigers history.

Ben Whitehead may not know all those numbers, but he knows the pain. He has lived it. And yet the senior from Blytheville, S.C., camped outside Memorial Stadium on Wednesday, wearing his Clemson shirt, confident that whatever happened in the past, his team won’t let him down now.

“They have so much talent, and they’ve been through so much,” Whitehead said. “This is finally their year to bust through.”