Justin Champion needed a flag. Joe Purcell had one. And within a couple of hours, a beautiful Bulldogs memory had been made.
Champion is a firefighter. He’s the engineer who drives the Rescue 2 truck for the Nashville Fire Department. He also happens to be “as big a Bulldogs fan as you’ll ever find.”
Champion put out a social media APB on Friday. He was looking for a Georgia flag that he might be able to fly from the back of his rescue vehicle as he made his rounds up and down Broadway and West End Avenue during a long shift that started at 6 a.m. Friday and wouldn’t end until sometime Saturday before the Georgia-Vanderbilt game.
Purcell, an Athens realtor and huge Georgia fan by his own right, follows the Bulldogs pretty much everywhere they go. He got wind that a Nashville firefighter with UGA allegiances needed a “Georgia G” flag. It just so happened that he had one that he intended to fly over his tailgate Saturday just south of Vanderbilt Stadium.
The two parties were connected via an intermediary on Twitter and they met Friday afternoon near the SEC Nation broadcast set on the Vanderbilt campus for what became an almost ceremonious “exchanging of the G flag.”
Champion promised to return the flag when he gets off his shift sometime before Saturday’s 7:30 p.m. kickoff between the No. 3-ranked Bulldogs and Vandy. Purcell invited Champion to his join his tailgate at that time.
And just like that, another Bulldogs friendship was born.
“I saw all these Georgia fans pouring into town, and I wanted to represent,” explained Champion, a Brunswick native and 19-year veteran of the Nashville Fire Department. “I’m a diehard Georgia fan, have been all my life. I’ll be running up and down Broadway all day and all night, so I thought if I could find me a Georgia flag somewhere, it’d get all those Bulldogs barking.”
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There already was a lot of barking going on in Nashville. Ticket-broker estimates of the secondary market report that 70 percent of the tickets bought for Saturday’s game were snapped up by Georgia fans.
Vanderbilt has the smallest stadium in the SEC, with the capacity listed as 40,500. Based on those estimates, somewhere between 28,000 and 29,000 Georgia fans are expected to be in attendance.
There was evidence Thursday and Friday that more than that might actually be in the Music City. Hotels from the downtown honky-tonk district all the way to the West End area where Vanderbilt is located were teeming with red-and-black clad fans. The honky-tonks on Broadway were packed with Georgia fans, where occasional “go Dawgs!” chants would break out. Restaurants requiring reservations reported no availability until late into night.
Credit: Chip Towers
Credit: Chip Towers
Georgia fans – and those of other SEC football powers such as Alabama and LSU – have long considered Nashville a favorite destination because of the music scene and relative close proximity. This year’s game has the added element of being the first of the season, and the first in 25 years when the Bulldogs opened the season on the road against an SEC opponent.
Between that and unabashed optimism – over Saturday night’s outcome and the dogged pursuit of a national championship – Georgia fans seem to be motivated like few other fan bases anywhere.
“This is our year, I know it is,” said the 40-year-old Champion, who moved to Nashville from Brunswick as a middle schooler. “This is the year we win it all. I can feel it.”
With his newly acquired Georgia flagged safely attached to Rescue 2 with black, plastic zip ties, Champion and his crew pulled off in Rescue 2 and headed back down Broadway.
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