Warming up before playing the No. 1 team in the country, South Carolina forward Lakeem Jackson noticed a peculiar group of students in the front row of the student section.
Dressed in blue and donning Kentucky jerseys, USC students Anna Gayle Scott, Carly Cambron and Catherine Combs arrived at Colonial Life Arena two and a half hours early for the game before sprinting to their seats on the front row.
"I felt bad because one of the players walked up to us and was like, 'What are you doing?'" said Combs, a first-year broadcast journalism student. "We were like, 'I'm sorry. We've lived in Lexington our whole lives.' He kind of laughed."
Scott, Cambron and Combs, all natives of Lexington, Ky., were hardly in the minority at USC's game. In the highest attended game the South Carolina basketball team has seen in Columbia, a safe majority of the fans wore blue, both in the upper and lower decks. As the clock wound down on the Wildcats' 34-point victory, Big Blue Nation loudly chanted, "Go, Big Blue!"
Even in the student section, Scott, Cambron and Combs, who were joined by four friends — two gentlemen, who wore garnet into the game but changed into blue once they got to their seats, and two other women in UK attire — were not alone as the "Garnet Army" had smatterings of blue.
"To grow up in Lexington, everything is centered around basketball," said Scott, a second-year biomedical engineering student. "They talk about basketball in church, so growing up, you learn to love UK and hate Louisville. You watch basketball games whenever they come on. I don't think I could ever change my opinion of that. It's just so strong."
The girls, who admittedly didn't know much about USC basketball other than the fact that one player plays both football and basketball and that USC coach Darrin Horn is a native of Lexington, were surprised that the arena was empty when they got to their seats. Kentucky coach John Calipari noted that Wildcat fans arrived early to take pictures of the UK players during warm-ups, as if they were rock stars. Calipari said that the atmosphere for an away game was "unusual" even with a large fan base like Kentucky's.
"It didn't seem unusual to me," Scott said. "They are celebrities. When you see them in Lexington, everybody stops to stare at them. They're not like another kid you have in class with you, but really, I guess they are."
Freshman center Anthony Davis said after the game that it felt like a home game, which mirrored the sentiment of Ohio State sophomore forward Jared Sullinger, who tweeted after the Buckeyes' game against USC that it felt like a home game with the number of OSU fans in attendance.
"I kept forgetting that I was even in Columbia," Combs said. "I felt like I was in Rupp (Arena)."
The Gamecocks have had notoriously poor attendance figures throughout the season, due in part to playing in an arena that seats 18,000. In a Wednesday night game against Alabama, USC announced attendance was 7,807, though the actual attendance was undoubtedly lower. Against No. 1 Kentucky, the announced attendance was 16,527. The scene at Colonial Life sharply contrasts that of Kentucky's Rupp Arena.
"My parents said that when they were first married and living in Lexington, they would always sit in the top deck," said Cambron, a second-year art education student. "They said those were some of the best games they've ever seen. They were happy to just be in the arena — literally, in the nosebleeds, it's so high up."
The fact that a seat at Rupp Arena is so in-demand is one of the reasons the girls showed up at 3:30 in the afternoon to wait to get into a game that started at 6 p.m.
"That's why it was such a big deal to be in the front row just watching Kentucky," Combs said. "That doesn't happen."
Though the girls supported Kentucky on Saturday night, they all emphasized how much they love the Gamecocks, saying that they all wore garnet when UK came to Columbia for the football game.
"I was sitting right behind the South Carolina bench when they played in Rupp Arena, so I did feel kind of bad," Cambron said. "Seeing the garnet made me miss school because I love South Carolina, but we were raised where it's like a religion."
Though Horn said his team lost because Kentucky played better and it didn't have anything to do with the crowd, the girls disagreed and thought that if Horn was given time to create a tradition, then Colonial Life would see increased attendance.
"Especially with Darrin Horn being from Kentucky, I know he knows what that's like," Scott said. "I wish there was more support."
