Meet the coaches, athletes, and notable characters that laid the foundation for today's Gamecock Nation. The summer of 1971 was especially hot in Columbia and not just because of the weather. It was that year that a long-simmering conflict between the University of South Carolina and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) reached the point of boiling over. Frustrations over the ACC's recruiting and admission standards, and growing pressure from influential athletics director and head football coach Paul Dietzel, led the board of trustees to cast a vote in favor of leaving the conference that USC had helped to found eighteen years earlier. This vote would mark the beginning of a new independent era of Gamecock athletics, but few at the time could have imagined the resulting twenty-year odyssey. In A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era, Alan Piercy chronicles the significant events and describes the larger-than-life characters of the years following the university's departure from the ACC. The University of South Carolina experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows in its athletics history. Tales of interpersonal clashes between football head coach Paul Dietzel and men's basketball head coach Frank McGuire; the rise and fall of women's basketball coach Pam Parsons; George Rogers and his magical Heisman Trophy–winning season; the birth of USC's beloved mascot, Cocky; and other USC sports stories converge, stirring feelings of amusement, nostalgia, and pride. With colorful storytelling and Gamecock pride, Piercy gives college sports fans a behind-the-scenes tour of these raucous decades. He explains how South Carolina's independent era tells the broader story of NCAA sports conference realignment, Title IX, the impact of the civil rights movement on college athletics, the evolution of college sports media coverage, and the development of college sports into a multi-billion-dollar business sustained by TV broadcast and licensing rights. A Gamecock Odyssey captures the spirit of the time and shows the reader how those years influenced today's Gamecock culture and national obsession with college athletics.

Colonel Larry Williams spent twenty-seven years in the United States Marine Corps commanding ten units and organizations while serving from Japan and Vietnam to Moscow and Beirut. Here is his account. It started by a chance discovery and years later was dramatically reoriented by a coin toss. As the high school class of 1953 anticipated graduation they chatted in the hallways exchanging ideas about future plans. His afternoon and Saturday jobs during high school did not provide enough money for college. One day while changing classes he observed a booklet on his homeroom teacher's desk that described the NROTC as how one might earn a commission in the United States Navy and even compete for a college scholarship. It contained an application! Upon graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill four years later he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps preparing to serve the obligated four years payback for his free education. It seemed like a good plan, but life often has little respect for planning. Within three years he was on Okinawa separated from his wife and their two newborns for a thirteen month deployment. On his return he joined the faculty at the Army Artillery and Missile School. Then it was another thirteen months away this time in Vietnam. Reassigned to Frankfurt, Germany he commanded Marine Security Guards in twenty-seven diplomatic posts in Europe including six "behind the Iron Curtain.” Upon graduation from the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk he and a classmate were informed by Headquarters, Marine Corps that they both were to be reassigned to WestPac (western pacific) for a year with one going to Okinawa and the other to Vietnam. Headquarters asked for their preferences. Both wanted to return to Vietnam. He lost the coin toss and it was back to Okinawa. That coin toss was to significantly restructure his career – and his life. The subsequent years included managing the security at the Naval Air Station, Alameda, California made turbulent by the prevailing civil rights and antiwar environment, contributing to the Marine Corps becoming the only military service to support every dollar spent with explicit cost-benefit analysis, in spite of opposition by the Army and the DoD fielding a totally new light armor combat capability into the Marine Corps with an innovative acquisition program completing within budget and only 2.25 years from concept to production, conducting Arctic exercises in North Norway including a night amphibious landing unseen by Russians just a mountain range away in Murmansk, commanding the largest artillery organization in the world and trying unsuccessfully to contribute to a peaceful resolution to conflict in Lebanon in 1983.

Arguably the best football conference in America, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) contains some of the most storied programs in the history of college football. In Where Football is King, Christopher Walsh provides a team-by-team history of the SEC and describes the classic games, players and coaches in the conference's seventy-three-year history. The genesis of the SEC really begins with the introduction of football to the University of Georgia in 1891 by a chemistry professor, Charles Herty. While Georgia's first game was against Mercer University that Fall, the South's oldest rivalry was born when Georgia took on Auburn on February 20, 1892 at Atlanta's Piedmont Park. From there, Walsh recounts, the sport took off like wildfire, and the SEC was able to formally organize some four decades later. Originally a thirteen-team conference, through attrition and addition the SEC eventually became comprised of Georgia, Auburn, Vanderbilt, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, LSU, Kentucky Tennessee, Mississippi State, South Carolina, and Auburn. From his unique vantage point as beat writer for Alabama football for the Tuscaloosa News, Walsh also gives insight into the culture and traditions of football in the South, where, it is said (and probably widely believed), the game is "greater than religion." Legendary figures and legendary games pass through the pages Where Football is King: players such as Joe Namath, Ken Stabler, Herschel Walker, Terrell Davis, and Payton Manning, and games such as the "Iron Bowl," the intense annual rivalry between Auburn and Alabama. As colorful as the SEC is competitive, this history will be essential reading for any fan of the game of football.

The Odyssey of a Southerner, an interpretive biography of Gustavus Woodson Smith, takes a look at a life that spanned almost seventy-five years of the 19th century. The focus of this book lies in Smith's activity in the Civil War. Jefferson Davis's commission of Smith as a major general called attention to the problems of the Confederate system of appointments which made a sick man of unproven competence the second in command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac. Hudson uses a wide variety of sources including manuscript collections, government documents, official records, and newspapers to recreate the life of Smith.

Most South Carolina football fans have attended a game at Williams-Brice Stadium, seen highlights of a young George Rogers, and can recite memorable quotes from the team’s “Head Ball Coach,” Steve Spurrier. But only real fans know the history of the team’s alternate black uniforms, remember when Cocky first appeared as the team’s mascot, or know all the lyrics to “The Fighting Gamecocks Lead the Way.” 100 Things South Carolina Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die reveals the most critical moments and important facts about past and present players, coaches, and teams that are part of the storied history that is South Carolina football. Scattered throughout the pages, are pep talks, records, and Gamecocks lore to test fans’ knowledge, including the formative years of South Carolina football, from its origins in the 1800s to Paul Dietzel’s tenure in the 1960s and 1970s; George Rogers’ unforgettable 1980 Heisman Trophy season, including South Carolina’s upset of Bo Schembechler’s favored Michigan team in Ann Arbor; South Carolina’s entrance into the SEC in 1992 and Lou Holtz’s memorable tenure as Gamecocks head coach before Spurrier arrived in Columbia; and profiles of memorable Gamecocks figures such as Joe Morrison, Rogers, Dietzel, Jim Carlen, and recent stars Marcus Lattimore and Jadeveon Clowney. Die-hard fans from the days of George Rogers as well as new supporters of head coach Spurrier’s squad will enjoy this guide to everything Gamecocks fans should know, see, and do in their lifetime.

With one of the most amazing football turnarounds in NCAA history, from 0-21 in 1998-99 to a 2001 Outback Bowl victory over Ohio State and six subsequent championships since, the South Carolina Gamecocks rang in the new century with a bang. For 45 years, author Tom Price was in Columbia, South Carolina recording the stories that have made the Gamecocks one of America's greatest collegiate sports teams. Whether it’s tales of football, basketball, soccer, baseball, golf, track and field, or any one of the Gamecocks’ many other sports, this book, first published in 2001, captures it all through engaging anecdotes gleaned from the author’s many years of personal experience and interviews with athletes and others connected with the university. Perfect for the shelf of any fan of the garnet and black! Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.