Coming soon to a bookstore near you

So a few months ago I’m spending some time catching up with old friend Travis Haney, who covers the Gamecocks for my old shop at The Post and Courier in Charleston.

Haney was in the Upstate doing a signing of his book on South Carolina’s run to the 2010 College World Series title. We were perched at the bar of the Blue Heron in downtown Clemson, grabbing a pint and a bite.

“Oh, by the way,” Travis asks, as if he’s about to tell me something fairly unimportant and unexciting.

“Do you want to help me write a book on the Clemson-Carolina football rivalry?”

Well it didn’t take long to say yes. For the sake of accuracy, it might actually have been “Hell yes.”

The fine folks who published Travis’ first book, The History Press in Charleston, were excited about the reception it received. So they wanted to keep up the momentum with another sports-themed book, and their idea was a definitive work on the Gamecocks-Tigers rivalry.

Numerous books have been published on this topic over the years, and all of them have been good in their own way. But no one has endeavored to dig beneath the play-by-play and unearth all the great stories in written form.

That’s the task Travis and I spent our summers tackling. And I feel completely safe saying that, of all the cool things I’ve been lucky enough to do in more than 13 years of doing this for a living, this is by far the most thrilling and fulfilling.

Guessing part of it is because I’m from this state and grew up with the rivalry. It probably helps that grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts and cousins who came before me did as well, from both sides of it. Doing a book on, say, the Georgia-Georgia Tech rivalry probably wouldn’t have been nearly as appealing. It’d have seemed like work. This one sounded like … fun.

The theme of it is identifying 20 stories that have defined the rivalry that dates back to 1896. I have 10 chapters, and Travis has 10. The object of each chapter is to bring a particular story back to life by heavy research and interviews with the people who were involved with the stories.

Some stories are easy to tell because they’re easy to remember. The brawl of 2004. The 63-17 smashing in 2003. Steve Taneyhill’s antics in 1992.

Others aren’t so easy. Reconstructing what happened in 1946 takes some homework. And there’s no one to talk to who was around for the crazy events of 1902.

So my second homes for most of the summer were the Special Collections department of the Strom Thurmond Institute and the microfilm section of the Cooper Library. It was a bit of an weird and surreal feeling to actually look forward to scanning old newspapers for hours on end. The stories and anecdotes discovered in those clippings were just that good.

I hope this doesn’t come off as bragging, but if this book is nearly as exciting and compelling to read as it has been to report and write, then it’s going to be something fans on both sides will enjoy and even treasure. It’s surprising no one else has taken on this project to this extent, because the stories and the overall history are impossible to put down.

The working title is: State of Disunion: Bad Blood and Classic Clashes in the Clemson-Carolina football rivalry, though that has not been finalized and could be tweaked between now and the book’s anticipated release date of early November.

I’m also ecstatic to report that The History Press has signed off on allowing book excerpts to be published on Tigerillustrated.com. So you folks will have quite the sneak preview coming this fall.

We’ll have plenty more on it in coming months. Just wanted to let you folks know what’s coming.

Travis, by the way, has a lot going on right now. In addition to wrapping up work on the book and covering the Gamecocks in August camp, he’s preparing for a move to Oklahoma to cover the Sooners for The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City.

It’s a great opportunity for him, and he leaves some expansive shoes to fill on the Gamecocks beat.

I’m just glad he thought of me for this particular opportunity. It’s been an honor.

LW