Gamecocks prove mettle, nothing stopping USC now
The two-time defending national champion South Carolina baseball team (I doubt Gamecock fans will ever tire of hearing, reading or saying that) spent a great deal of its non-playing time this past season on Twitter. So, it was fitting the most prolific tweeter of the bunch so succinctly summed up what this repeat College World Series title means in the big picture on the social media site the day after the fact.
Responding to a fan asking why he decided to throw the baseball he caught for the final out of USC’s Game 2 win over Florida, Jackie Bradley Jr. tweeted back, “It is just a ball.”
There is no need to go on a wild goose chase like the one for the 2010 championship-clinching ball that has dragged on for over a year now. That ball, which flew off Whit Merrifield’s bat and into right field at Rosenblatt Stadium for the game-winning RBI against UCLA, is more than a ball. It is a symbol of Carolina’s seminal athletic achievement, of its dream of dreams at long last being realized. Every effort should be made to recover it from UCLA outfielder Brett Krill’s mystery USC student pal or whomever may have it held hostage.
But the 2011 ball? It’s just a ball. Let it sit — covered with signatures acquired outside the team bus after the 5-2 win over Florida — on the mantle of 19-year-old Dominique Hawkins from Omaha, Neb., for the rest of time. Let him “frame it,” as he told the Omaha World-Herald he would after it was revealed he was the lucky fan who caught the ball after Bradley threw it up and over the outfield wall. Let this all happen because the paradigm has permanently shifted.
This national championship for South Carolina was no surprise. It wasn’t divine intervention. It was the best team winning by playing the best. Period. Bradley is dead on — the final out ball is just a ball. About five or so ounces, made of rawhide, yarn and cork. The Gamecocks don’t need it to catch cobwebs somewhere inside Carolina Stadium. The NCAA doesn’t need it lying around in a museum. It’s just a ball. USC’s ability to win it all again made it that.
South Carolina is no longer a little engine that could. It’s a bullet train. The Gamecocks are winners, now and forever, in both baseball and other sports. Not only is the Chicken Curse dead, so too is any concept of its once-purported existence. Baseball, football, women’s soccer, men’s soccer, women’s basketball (some day) — there are many championships in USC’s rearview mirror starting with the fall of 2009, and even more are coming in the future. The glass ceiling has been shattered, and with emphasis.
No one can even argue now that the 2010 title was a fluke, the product of unbelievable luck and good fortune. That argument was rendered void on this go-round in Omaha. USC is for real, and in proving so it helped further open the golden era of Gamecock athletics. Excuses are out, expectations are in. Every Carolina baseball team (and athletic squad) from here on out should believe it can reach the pinnacle of its sport every season. Will they all? No — but the fact is the possibility will be there every time. The facilities, the inspiration, the precedent are all present now.
And if that answer isn’t good enough for some fans — and it probably isn’t — they should be able to take solace and cut their losses with this fact: Chances are, there will be a lot more keepsake baseballs, and footballs, and soccer balls, and basketballs, to be displayed in the years to come.