The Loudest Football Fan In Florida
Written by an anonymous author
Not much to say here. The author wishes to remain anonymous and there’s no reason to defy his wishes. He’s lived through enough pain already.
Today we meet a college football superfan, a University of Florida student who desperately wants to leave his mark at a nationally televised game. And as you may guess, it ends up leaving a mark on him. A rather distinctive mark.
Hear this cautionary tale, a lesson in life not found in textbooks or in any lectures – Your parents may not know everything, but some of it may save your skin someday.
FAIR WARNING: This episode may make you squeamish 🙂
Published New Year’s Day, January 1, 2025
Transcript: The Loudest Football Fan In Florida
[ Southern Country music ]
HOST:
Today on campus it’s 2010, and we are sweltering among the gators in Gainsville, Florida. We find ourselves a stone’s throw away from ‘The Swamp’ – Hill Griffin Stadium – one of the loudest stadiums in all of college football. In the heat of it all however, there is a freshman whose been blessed with the unusual gift of volume. Who has been blessed with a rather unusual gift – volume.
Today we meet this superfan student, a kid who desperately wants to leave his mark at a nationally televised game. And as you may guess, it ends up leaving a mark on him. A rather distinctive mark. Stay tuned for this cautionary tale, a lesson in life not found in textbooks or in any lectures – Your parents may not know everything, but some of it may save your skin someday.
[ Marching band music ]
This is Once, In College. I’m Pete Griffith. Today’s episode was sent in and written by an author who wants to remain completely anonymous. For a painfully good reason. But more on that later, class is about to begin.
[ Bells from campus tower ]
Today’s episode is a true story. Some of the particulars have been changed for the sake of privacy. Most notably, Pete, as we will call him now, doesn’t want his real named to be shared. So for the sake of this first story, we’ll call him Pete, literally, for Pete’s sake.
[ Southern Country Music ]
NARRATOR:
Pete loved everything about his freshman year landlocked in the middle of Florida. Especially the fall. Everything about it seemed so foreign compared to cold, upstate New Hampshire where he grew up – including, and most importantly, the weather.
Gainsville stayed hot. Scorching hot. Sweltering hot. All the time. Wearing shorts year-round was not just a welcomed luxury now for Pete, it was why he vowed to stay in Florida after graduation and live there his whole life.
He had wanted to leave since he was sixteen. Get as far away from his parents and their quiet, boring, methodical life as pharmacists silently counting out pill after pill into small plastic jars. Everything about his life there was stale. Useless, he thought. He hadn’t learned much from them anyway. Nothing useful, at least. And so he bolted to the University of Florida the first day his college dorm was available to move in.
By the third month of classes, co-eds and the endless cafeteria bar-b-que, Pete had bought into southern college life hook, line and sinker. Especially when it came to Gator football games. They were loud.
As an engineering student, he learned the playing surface is below ground level. The stands are steep and expansions enclose the field on all sides. All this helps trap the noise inside the stadium which results in sound levels on the field which have been measured at 115 decibels – just short of the threshold of pain. Which was music to his ears.
Pete had a talent, a gift really, of being able to belt a scream so loud from the student section, his voice alone could travel through the helmets of the players on the field and smash face first into the opposing players on the opposite sideline. When he wound it up, it was like a locomotive that couldn’t be stopped.
The veins in his neck would pop out like worms wreathing to the surface and his face would turn a bright red that’s only found in the neon signs of seedy bars.
His inspiration was from a monster truck rally he had been to at a kid’s birthday party. And after he was done channeling the memory of that day, the crowd would clap enthusiastically, 95% directed towards the Gators, but a least five percent of that applause dedicated expressly for his performance.
Yet somehow mid-season, this campus king of screaming would reach a different register than even he would have ever believed possible. And we warn you, the truth we are about to unfold is not for the faint of heart.
[ Sounds of a sticky southern night – cicadas, distant bullfrogs, swampy slide guitar. ]
It started after a few beers in, the night before a nationally televised Saturday afternoon game against what Pete describes as ‘that other lowly Florida state school. In fact, the name of that institution is so viled by the Pete, he requested we also never mention it’s real name in this story.
On September 10th, 2010, long after the sun had set that night and the branches of the southern magnolias outside were finally able to relax and droop a bit out of the sun’s pounding blaze, the heat stuck around. It decided to linger all night. The air was so thick and sticky that nobody want to move around much. So Pete sat alone in his dorm room without a shirt on, or even shorts. Only a pair of tighty-whities that, after putting on his obligatory freshman 15, were now even more tighty than they were white.
Pete squatted himself on the floor and sat Indian style with his shins and ankles crossed, to let his boys air out a bit. He was surrounded by everything he needed to make a sign for the game to get on TV. In his words, an epic sign. There would only need to be one word on it, ‘SCREAM’.
Pete knew the exact arc of the sun overhead during the game. The bold, fat letters in shiny tinfoil he had already adhered would be enough to bounce that sunlight right into the cameras and he’d get spotted. For added measure, he would outline each letter by bending and supergluing metallic pipe cleaners around them. He was reminded of how crafty his mom was and thought that DNA strand would be one good part they passed on to him.
Hovering the superglue over the first pipe cleaner, he realized those suckers were a lot thinner than their fuzzy bodies made them out to be. They can shake and wobble like crazy, even held with the steadiest of hands. Pete’s first two drops of superglue missed the trembling target altogether.
There were four screams after that.
Few heard the first one. It was really more of a quick, frustrated swear word. The type born in frustration that instantly boils itself from anger. But it was deep, guttural and haunting all the same.
The second yell however, took a haunting turn for the worse. No distinguishable words per say, just a cry of utter horror and fear. For when the drops of superglue landed, they landed on his tighty-whities, at the end of his lap. More specifically, on the thinly worn-out fabric stretched over his right testicle.
[ Two drops ping when landing ]
Surprisingly, this second yell started softly, almost as a whine or whimper. But then it slowly and gradually rose in pitch and volume, the cry getting higher and higher, louder and louder. The more he watched the glue slowly soaking and spreading into his cotton briefs, the more his voice rose in pitch and volume, his voice getting higher and higher, louder and louder. He remembers his body shaking a little.
The third yell… Well… To this day, Pete is unable to recreate the sound, for it can only be triggered by the chemical reaction of a compound so powerful, it is able to bind the hard hat on a man’s head to an iron beam above him without the ability to ever pull the two apart again. Some describe the sensation, nay the pain, as being worse than a bullet fired into your body only to stop and burn your innards within. But it was worse than that for Pete. For he was not only about to witnessed, but feel the marriage of two things below him, his testicle and tighty-whitie, that were now to be bound together, forever, till death do they part.
Which, was only the prelude to Pete’s final and most horrifying scream.
It took more than a few seconds for Pete to cycle through all the next possible actions and outcomes before acting. 15 to 20 seconds, it would seem. The exact time the instructions on the bottle says it takes for superglue to instantly and permanently set. So when Pete finally made the rash, or to be fair, a fight or flight decision to quickly rip his white cotton underwear away from his testicle as fast as possible, he did. Off it went. Along with a quarter sized chunk of his testicle stuck to it. That fourth scream was silent at first. And then…
[ Scream that builds then fades into a marching band and crowd at a huge football stadium ]
Pete didn’t sit in the stands that next day. He stood. The entire game. The temperature at kickoff was 96 degrees and most everyone else just sat in the seats, stewing in their sweat. Those who were there considered him a superfan throughout that rivalry for doing so, but those who knew, knew it was out of practicality. Pure survival of sorts.
The rest of his freshman year, Pete never dated anyone. Any time he had to dress or undress in a locker room, he would do so in a particularly odd fashion, going out of his way to hide his privates. Rumors that he couldn’t walk in a straight line anymore but veer to the left are completely unfounded. But what it true is that nobody ever heard him yell as loud, or for as long at the end of the school’s fight song or any song for that matter, ever again.
Calling his mom and dad would have been awkward enough. He hadn’t left his pharmacist parents on a particularly good note, so he never asked them for advice on how to best patch something like this up. But now the lively dinner table conversations between his parents that he hated, ones of weird customer requests and squeamish injuries, all seemed to carry some value now. With time and knowledge of staggering the correct amounts of ointment, gauze and air, Pete would eventually heal and function properly again.
He shares all this as a cautionary tale. He hopes that in telling it, others may someday prevent themselves from making the same fateful error he made and the consequences he was forced to endure.
Pipe cleaners are notoriously wobbly. And no matter how far or desperately you may want to get away from your parents, there will always be something from them you’ll want to retain.
[ Southern Country music ]
HOST:
Today’s episode was produced by Rob Wallace, Marie Newman and myself, with a special shout out to Michael Henery who made all these sounds sizzle better than a blackened fish taco.
A follow up to this story will be available where we get into more detail of what superglue really is and what it can do to a body. As well as some lip-biting stories from an ER doc who has seen his fair share of sad superglue scenarios.
Hopefully something like today’s tragedy never happened to you. But if you lived through an embarrassing or traumatic incident in college, we’d love to hear about it. It’s cathartic to talk about it. Leave us a comment or two, or visit us at onceincollege.com and connect with us there. We are looking for unique or unusual experiences, no matter how painful. Stuff that you experienced outside a book or a lecture. Which reminds us…
We want to thank the anonymous author again for reminding us that you should always keep an open ear and mind to what your parents tell you. Ya never know when even the weirdest tidbits you overhear may come in handy.
If you liked any of this, give us a like. Or share this episode with someone who you may have caused bodily harm back in the day. And if you want to hear our upcoming stories the moment they come out, please subscribe to our podcast. It really helps us more than you’d ever think. More than our GPAs ever did.
Until then, I’m Pete Griffith, back next week with more stories like this, all from a time Once, In College.
[ Podcast theme music ]