The Pledge/Brother Football Game

I pledged ATO two weeks after arriving at the University of

Florida in 1966.

The fall of 1966 at Florida, despite Vietnam raging, very much like the movie Animal House.

A toga party. Music groups booked for football weekend parties variations of Otis Day and the Knights.

The pledging experience very much like the one in Animal House.

The ‘Animal House’ at Florida not us, but the Sigma Nu’s, and the Sigma Nu’s made Delta Tau Chi seem a group of sedate seminarians.

Their Bluto, a short stocky brother named ‘Little’ Dicky Calvitt, who won hundreds of dollars during the football season by betting that he could run a block backwards faster than any

Florida football player could run it forwards.

He was a blur backwards.

‘Little’ referring to Dickie’s enormous member that we hypothesized he strapped down his leg to allow him to run so fast.

Shortly after becoming a pledge class, we played in a Pledge/Brother football game.

A tradition meant to bind the Pledge Class together and begin the Brotherhood.

The ATO Fraternity had been founded in 1865 by three young Confederate veterans who had fought through the war together.

So traumatized by the killing, cruelty, hatred, and destruction they had seen as Americans fought Americans that they decided to do something about it.

They created a fraternity based on a creed:

- To bind men together in a brotherhood based upon eternal and

immutable principles, with a bond as strong as right itself and as

lasting as humanity; to know no North, no South, no East, no

West, but to know man as man, to teach that true men the world

over should stand together and contend for supremacy of good

over evil; to teach, not politics, but morals; to foster, not

partisanship, but the recognition of true merit wherever found;

to have no narrower limits within which to work together for the

elevation of man than the outlines of the world. -

As pledges, hoping to be initiated as Brothers, we had to

memorize and recite it on demand from any brother. As well as

always carrying matches to light cigarettes, and knowing the

names of all the Brothers, their hometowns, girlfriends and, if in

a sorority, which one?

One Saturday in October, we caravanned out to some older ATO’s

horse farm outside Gainesville. Parked the cars on the sidelines

of a marked off with flags, football field.

Kegs of beer. The owner providing BBQ and tables.

Heavy drinking from ATO labeled steins.

I don’t remember anything about the game. Almost all the pledges and brothers had played football in high school so, at least at the beginning, the quality of play was high.

Two-hand touch degenerating into savage tackle football until the ATO faculty advisor/umpire blew his whistle to end the game. He gathered everyone together to recite the Creed and sing ‘We Are the Boys from Old Florida’.

It was a quaint time.

Then a Pledge/Brother pissing contest.

How far could you piss? A line of pledges standing on the goal line. Some impressive outputs.

Brother Walt Cannon, an older guy (Vietnam veteran?) walked up to a VW Beetle parked along the sideline. The only Brother contestant. Unlimbered the basis for his family’s name, and pissed a forearm thick stream over the roof of the VW without a drop landing on it.

Then turned, walked out to midfield, and showing off, let fly from the fifty yard line to the twenty.

No problem.

The game and pissing contest over, we got into our cars and headed back to the highway from the temporary football field.

My older brother Greg, and future Federal Judge Don Middlebrooks sat on the bench front seat of future death penalty defense attorney, Robert Augustus Harper Jr’s, beautiful, perfect,

1956 (?) T-Bird.

Bobby, to this day remembered by all who met him as the coolest guy they ever met, was the President of the ATO House.

A Southern gentleman from Alabama. Soft spoken, a deep voice, with a gentle Alabama accent. Otherworldly handsome.

Always well dressed. Carried a pistol with him at all times.

‘You never know, Mockle’, he explained.

Cut my brother’s wedding cake with a samurai sword.

Only a Bobby Harper would think to bring one to a wedding.

Bobby fishtailed away in the T-Bird.

I’m riding in Wally Colson’s battleship gray 396 Chevelle SS.

The fastest car in Gainesville.

Wally gets on Bobby’s back bumper.

We head in tandem, at speed, across the large field.

A barbed wire fence on the far end looms.

Of course, Wally, driving, thinks, Bobby will slow down and turn away from the fence.

Nope, he goes straight through it not even tapping the brakes.

Wally guns the Chevelle 396 SS and follows through the hole made by the T-Bird.

Harper doing a half mile in diameter circle in the private golf club fairway quality grass. We follow through the hole and in his tracks.

The T-Bird trailing fence.

After two circuits, the T-Bird heads back toward the hole to get back to the highway and the ATO House.

Bobby doesn’t even try to maneuver through the hole, but punches a new one.

We slowed to a halt in absolute admiration. Got out.

Looked back at the torn up field.

Looked at the two holes made in the barbed wire fence. Fifty feet

apart.

Got out our iPhones to memorialize the dramatic aftermath of our first Pledge/Brother football game.

Took selfies. Forwarded photos and video to Instagram and FaceBook.

Oops. That’s right, we had no cellphones nor cellphone cameras.

We just had to remember it.

Caught up to Bobby, Middlebrooks, and Greg on the highway back to the house. They were standing next to the T-Bird in a shallow ditch.

Harper had spun out on a curve, did two or three 360s, and ended

up there.

No seatbelts in those days.

On the second 360, Middlebrooks had been launched into some sort of suborbital spacewalk but Greg, a very strong guy, had reached up and pulled him out of the air, back into the car, by his belt.

Middlebrooks shaken. Greg laughing.

Bobby as cool as a drunk cucumber could be.

We had become a brotherhood.

We still are.