 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Mike Safran")
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When 7:30 rolls around Thursday night, more than 80,250 seats at Williams-Brice Stadium will be filled for a nationally televised ESPN contest. But how many people know that in that very same spot in 1934, the same building held just 17,600 people?
How many of those fans realize that even before that, the USC football team played its games on the grounds where they now enjoy the Grand Market Place, Chick-fil-A or Taco Bell?
In 1896, USC's football team played Clemson on the other side of Elmwood Avenue, where the game was held on what was then the fairgrounds. The annual game was held there until 1902, when a group of Clemson students marched on the Carolina campus only to find the USC faithful waiting for them armed and dangerous. When the series renewed in 1909, the game was held at the corner of Rosewood and Assembly, where the fairgrounds stand today. The game was played on the fairgrounds every year until 1959, when the game became a home-and-home series.
However, the Clemson game was the exception to the rule. The original USC football team played most of its games on Melton Field, which stood where the Russell house is today. The final game at Melton field featured a jam-packed crowd of 4,800 people, according to USC historian Tom Price. For bigger games, the team would sometimes use the adjacent Davis Field, which had better bleachers and was home to Carolina's baseball team.
In 1934, university officials realized Melton Field was becoming overcrowded and that its wooden bleachers would not be able to contain the Gamecock faithful any longer.
So the Work Progress Administration, a program created under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, began construction on a new football stadium, Columbia Municipal Stadium, adjacent to the state fairgrounds. The City of Columbia would later turn the stadium over to the university after World War II, and it was aptly renamed Carolina Stadium.
When first constructed, the stadium held 17,600 people. The Gamecocks' first game in their new home was Oct. 2, 1934, when USC defeated Virginia Military Institute, 22-7.
One end of what was then Carolina Stadium was filled in the early 1940s, increasing stadium capacity to 34,000.
Coach Warren Giese, who was at USC from 1956 to 1960, oversaw another expansion in which the horseshoe like stadium was completed into a bowl and the capacity was increased to 43,000.
Williams-Brice Stadium is known for its combination of the upper deck and the lighting structures, which make the stadium look like a "cockroach," as some have called it. Imagine the cockroach with only one side of its legs. That's what the stadium looked like as of a 1971-1972 expansion. After rebuilding the lower level of the west stands, USC built an upper deck, but only half of one. Mrs. Martha Williams-Brice, the wife of Gamecock letterman Thomas Brice, left a large inheritance to her two nephews, who left a great deal of it to USC. Now with a capacity of more than 54,000, the stadium was renamed Williams-Brice Stadium on Sept. 9, 1972.
The university finally finished the upper deck in 1982 after 10 years of having a lop-sided Williams-Brice. However, unlike the west side, the east side lower level was not rebuilt, leaving it as the only original part of Columbia Municipal Stadium that still stands today.
Beginning in 1983, fans began to notice that the newly constructed east upper-deck appeared to be swaying. Some claimed the stadium moved a good number of inches, and some even claimed the structure swayed over a foot.
Bumper stickers and other items were released featuring the saying "If it ain't swaying, we ain't playing" before architects and engineers supposedly "fixed" the problem before the 1987 season.
The project boosted the stadium's capacity into the low-70 thousands under new coach Joe Morrison. Morrison ripped up the artificial turf that had served as the playing surface and reinstalled natural grass.
During a two-year period from 1995-1996, USC spent more than $20 million to expand Williams-Brice; renovations included the building of the new South endzone, new press and luxury boxes, a new football office building and an 11,000-square-foot banquet facility known as "The Zone".
Finally, with the dedication of the Dr. Charles Crews Football Facility this year, Williams-Brice Stadium is the home of a state-of-the-art workout and meeting room facility that cost the university more than $3 million.
From Melton Field, to Columbia Municipal, to Williams-Brice Stadium, the Gamecock football team has enjoyed 112 years of football and on Thursday looks to start 112 more.
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