A Saturday spent at Sanford Stadium, the best in the land

Call the Dawgs. Between the Hedges. The Battle Hymn of the Bulldog Nation. If you know what we’re talking about, chances are you’re a University of Georgia football fan. You’ve stepped inside the hallowed ground known today as Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium, or you know somebody who has. If it’s Saturday in Athens, there’s only one place to be.

It’s a majestic trip to a wide-open, triple-tiered stadium, a perfect mix of Old South history and West Coast innovation. The year was 1927, and UGA president Dr. S. V. Sanford decreed that Georgia’s football team was worthy of a stadium just like the one that hosts the legendary game they call the Granddaddy of Them All: the Rose Bowl. Sanford took it upon himself to find the money (a then-eyeball-popping $300,000, or almost $4.3 million in today’s dollars) to fund the Georgia Bulldogs’ new home. The first game at Sanford Stadium was played on October 12, 1929. Yes, Dawgs fans: This year Sanford Stadium celebrates its 90th birthday. The university also christened the field Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium in honor of Vince Dooley, the Dawgs’ winningest football coach.

The party begins long before kickoff. Dawg fans take their tailgating seriously; where else do you need a university decree that no tailgating setups are allowed before 7 a.m. on game day? Lucinda Johnson, a UGA grad whose whole family attended the school, brings her trademark hot fudge cake all the way from Roswell, a 90-minute drive away. There’s barbecue with all the trimmings. And this is just the warmup act.

You walk into the stadium. “It’s electrifying,” Johnson says. Her father, a UGA law school grad, brought his daughters to games starting when they were children. “Dad loved the Bulldogs so much. I get teary when I go in [to the stadium].”

It’s pregame time, and that means the Redcoat Band is on the field. The band spells out G-E-O-R-G-I-A at midfield (“One of the greatest traditions in all of college football!” exults Brook Whitmire, the voice of Sanford Stadium since 1992). The strains of the Battle Hymn of the Bulldog Nation (a special arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic) drift through the crowd, with a solemn brass solo featured in the only quiet moment you’ll get all day in Athens.

Then the band marches to one side of the field as a highlight video proclaims the obvious: It’s Saturday in Athens! The Georgia flags appear, the team rushes in, and the players gather on the sidelines near the iconic evergreen hedges that line the field. When you play Georgia, you literally play them “between the hedges.” Trivia note: They’re hedges because the roses they’re inspired by at the Rose Bowl don’t thrive in Southern heat. Among Sanford Stadium’s other storied athletic contests were women’s soccer matches at the 1996 Olympics, when the hedges had to be removed.

Sanford has played host to some of the greatest players in college football — perhaps none more storied than Herschel Walker. You can’t mention the Bulldogs without an homage to Walker, Georgia’s greatest player. Walker won the 1982 Heisman Trophy, was an NFL Pro Bowler, and represented the United States in bobsleigh at the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics. Other famous Dawgs include quarterbacks Fran Tarkenton and Matt Stafford. Yet another legendary Sanford Stadium great did his work off the field: the late Larry Munson, whose voice was pure joy as he called Georgia games on the radio for 42 years.

And then there’s Georgia’s mascot, Uga the bulldog. Pronounced “UH-gah,” Uga is part of a Georgia tradition that dates back to 1956, when a Savannah, Georgia, attorney by the name of Sonny Seiler dressed up his pet bulldog with a Georgia “G” shirt fashioned from a child’s kit. A star was born. Since then, Uga has become the most celebrated mascot in all of college football, with a Sports Illustrated cover and USA Today honors as the top collegiate mascot in the country. When an Uga passes on, he lives forever in a custom-built mausoleum housed on the stadium grounds. There have been 10 Ugas so far, and every one of them has walked the stadium grounds on game day to the delight of Georgia’s legion of fans, who pay Uga the highest compliment: “Damn good dog.”

One more note about this storied stadium: How many other college teams can say that the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, not only wrote a song just for them, but performed it at halftime inside their home stadium? That would be “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs,” performed by Brown, an Augusta native, during UGA’s homecoming game against Kentucky in 1977. Prince Charles attended that game, too. (The crowds in the student section cheered “Damn good prince” according to one game attendee who later wrote about the experience for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) Brown might have shown up to Sanford Stadium two hours late for rehearsal that day, but few fans will ever forget his performance — including his midsong acrobatic split that temporarily knocked out the stadium’s sound system and cracked the wooden stage.

Committing to the split? At Georgia, as they say, it’s all about committing to the G. It’s time to unleash the junkyard dogs. It’s Saturday in Athens, and Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium is the only place to be.