The Clemson Dubcast

Nic Brown

By age 22, Nic Brown had achieved rock-music stardom.

 

As the drummer in the band Athenaeum, a group that initially came together for a middle-school dance when Brown was in the eighth grade, he was touring the country and sharing the stage with major acts including the Foo Fighters.

 

From the outside, the trajectory for this pop-rock band seemed limitless as it had already enjoyed one of its songs rising to No. 14 on the charts.

 

And that's when Brown decided to quit the band and move to New York to pursue a career in creative writing.

 

Brown, now an associate professor of creative writing at Clemson, joins the podcast to discuss his recently-published memoir Bang Bang Crash.

 

Over the last nine years of living in Clemson, Brown almost never played the drums and was uncomfortable even discussing his musical past when it came up in conversation socially.

 

But writing the book, and now talking about it, brought self-discovery to the point that Brown is back to playing the drums again at his family's home near Clemson's campus.

 

Brown is the author of the novels In Every Way, Doubles, and Floodmarkers, which was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. 

 

He is the fiction editor of the South Carolina Review, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, and the Harvard Review, among many other publications. 

 

A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has served as the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

The Cheap Seats turns 20

A few weeks before Clemson's 2003 baseball season began, a group of students sat in their apartment and one of the guys was skimming classified ads looking for interesting things for sale.

He came across this ad:

"Bus. $400 with spare engine."

The idea was hatched to buy the bus and turn it into a tailgating machine.

Twenty years later, the bus is a fixture beyond the right-field fence at Doug Kingsmore Stadium.

Garrett Edens, president of The Cheap Seats, joins the podcast to dig into the rollicking, irreverent, passionate history of the people who have made this a ritual during every home baseball weekend.

They stand on top of a bus and drink beer, talk good-natured smack to opposing outfielders, and watch every pitch in every game featuring their beloved Tigers.

Some people view sporting events as a social event, taking occasional glances at the action unfolding on the field. The inhabitants of The Cheap Seats are the purists.

Athletics departments spend a lot of time and money trying to create magnetic home-field atmospheres. But sometimes, vital features of extraordinary game-day settings are not manufactured and occur organically. They gradually build attachment and magnetism by doing the same thing year after year after year, to the point that the people involved can't imagine doing it any other way -- and the people watching from afar can't imagine a Clemson baseball setting without The Cheap Seats.

J.C. Harper

J.C. Harper remembers growing up in Clemson as the son of iconic assistant coach Tom Harper, the architect of the Tigers' rampaging defensive lines in the 1980s.

At Daniel High School, J.C. attracted attention from recruiters and Georgia's Vince Dooley began appearing at his games. After committing to the Bulldogs, J.C. braced himself for his father's reaction.

"Son, did you commit to Georgia?"

"Yes sir."

"Why?"

"Because Coach Dooley came to two of my games."

"Son, I came to all of your games."

"But you're my dad. You're supposed to do that."

J.C. ended up switching to Clemson after a long car ride with Danny Ford, and all these years later he still treasures his memories from those days.

He also has a connection with current Clemson offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, a quarterback who transferred to Stephen F. Austin when J.C. was the head coach of the Lumberjacks.

Riley helped Harper install the Air Raid offense that Mike Leach popularized at nearby Texas Tech.

Harper has been out of coaching for the better part of a decade, but he still loves talking about the old days that include stints as an assistant under Lou Holtz at Notre Dame and Mack Brown at North Carolina.

Harper lives in Lake Charles, La., with his family and works in real estate.

 

Ron Green Jr.

Ron Green Jr. doesn't need an introduction to Michael Jordan. He covered Jordan as a writer for the student newspaper at North Carolina when Jordan was in Chapel Hill.

Green has been around a long time -- long enough to have covered Danny Ford during Clemson's first golden era, to have developed a relationship with Tiger Woods, and to have played golf with Donald Trump long before Trump became President.

"He picked up a five-foot putt and said it was a gimme," Green said. "I said: 'You know I've never seen you miss one of those. I've also never seen you putt one of those.'"

Green, one of the great sportswriting stylists of the newspaper era, has managed to continue making a living after leaving The Charlotte Observer 11 years ago.

He travels the world as a writer for the Global Golf Post. At the upcoming Masters Tournament, he will receive the PGA of America's Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

Green is the 32nd recipient of the award. His 93-year-old father, Ron Green Sr., won the award in 2006 for his own golf coverage and was a longtime Observer sports columnist. They are the first father-son duo to separately win the award.

Green Jr., 66, worked at The Charlotte Observer for 23 years. He got to know Ford, Clemson's legendary coach, while working in Greenville as a sportswriter covering the Tigers in the 1980s.

Green Jr. says he dearly misses covering big college football and basketball games in the ACC, but he wonders where college sports is headed in the age of NIL and the transfer portal.

Green Jr. still covers about 15 pro golf tournaments per year. He has covered about 100 of golf's majors, including 41 Masters tournaments.

 

Ruffin McNeill and Greg McElroy

Ruffin McNeill is basically like family to Garrett Riley and Lincoln Riley, so with Dabo Swinney's major hire of TCU's former offensive coordinator McNeill had a lot to say about Garrett and his history with him.

In the mid-1980s, McNeill got his start in college coaching as a grad assistant for Clemson under Danny Ford. He considers those years two of the most formative of his entire career coaching football.

Greg McElroy of ESPN covered Clemson's final game of 2022, a dispiriting loss to Tennessee in the Orange Bowl in which the offense put up a bunch of yards but reached the end zone just one time.

McElroy gives his own take on the Riley acquisition, and the state of Clemson football not just after two years of the Tigers not reaching the playoff, but amid Georgia's rise to dominance.

McElroy believes it's time for Swinney to totally step away from the offense and hand the keys totally to Riley.

"It's time for him to take a knee," McElroy said.

 

 

Todd Dodge and Jay Mathews

Todd Dodge is firmly in the inner circle of Cade Klubnik, and the same is true of Jay Mathews and Christopher Vizzina.

Dodge and Mathews were featured prominently in the recent series of articles at Tigerillustrated.com exploring the backgrounds of Clemson's two highly regarded quarterbacks.

This podcast presents the raw audio from the interviews of those two figures, conducted in late December.

Dodge, now retired, was a legendary Texas high school coach who completed his career at Westlake High School in Austin.

Mathews is the athletics director and quarterbacks coach at Briarwood Christian in Birmingham.

 

 

 

 

Fred Cunningham

Fred Cunningham is an Upstate TV news institution who's been working in South Carolina since 1984, when he left his home state of Indiana and entered a whole new world.

His first indoctrination into big-time college football was in Athens when Clemson visited Georgia for a major matchup in 1984. Kevin Butler won the game on a 60-yard field goal, and Cunningham walked away mesmerized by the experience.

"I called some friends back home and said: This isn't the Big Ten down here," he said.

Cunningham spent the better part of two decades covering sports before deciding to move to the more structured environment of news anchor.

His morning show begins at 4:30 AM, and his alarm goes off at 1:40.

"I go to bed at 7 PM," he said. "I probably should go to bed earlier."

Fred is a two-time winner of the Associated Press Best Sportscast award in South Carolina. In addition to his news duties, Fred has hosted the Miss South Carolina Pageant.

Fred also shot a scene – portraying a sports reporter – opposite actor Will Ferrell for the movie Talladega Nights.

The Indiana University graduate served as a sports reporter for WOLO-TV in Columbia until April of 1987.

Before moving to the anchor desk, Fred spent 15 years as the weekend sports anchor for 7NEWS. He covered Clemson University and University of South Carolina athletics as well as NASCAR racing, the Masters and Heritage golf tournaments, the Carolina Panthers, three Super Bowls, and the rise of the Atlanta Braves into one of baseball’s most successful franchises.

In his spare time, Fred loves playing golf, running, all while suffering the endless frustration of being a Chicago Cubs and Indiana Pacers fan. 

 

 

 

Mickey Plyler

 

Mickey Plyler visits the podcast to try to make some sense of the current college football world from bowl opt-outs, to the transfer portal, to NIL, and to Clemson's dispiriting performance in the Orange Bowl against Tennessee.

What to make of six losses for Clemson the past two years? Does it signal a significant decline worthy of Dabo Swinney making some changes, or are the Tigers on the way back with Cade Klubnik showing real promise in the last two games of 2022?

Four years ago it seemed like a Clemson-Alabama world, and entering the 2019 season there was seemingly legitimate talk of the Tigers going 45-0 with Trevor Lawrence after the freshman tore apart the 2018 CFP.

Since then there have been new arrivals to the party -- LSU, Ohio State, Georgia, Michigan, TCU -- and the Tigers and Crimson Tide found themselves on the outside looking in this season.

Plyler has spent the week fielding calls and texts on his radio show saying that the party is over for Clemson, and that Swinney needs to change his ways. What's a fair criticism? What's an unfair criticism? We try to sort it out in this postseason conversation with the WCCP-FM host.

 

 

 

 

Dubcast Rewind: Wayne ”Cheech” Coffman

We revisit this interview from November of 2018 with Clemson Hall of Fame member Wayne Coffman, an icon in athletics and academic support.

Coffman talks his relationship with Dabo Swinney, the pressures of being an academic adviser for a high-profile sport, growing up in a household of 13 children, and how in the world he got the nickname "Cheech."

Both of Coffman's parents passed away by the time he was age 18, and no one in his family had completed any education beyond high school.

At Clemson, Coffman became not only a college graduate and Atlantic Coast Conference champion in cross country, but he also went on to earn a master’s degree from the school in education counseling.

Coffman became head coach of the Clemson's women’s track and field program at age 27 and went on to coach for the next 12 years, leading the team to the first ever ACC women’s track and field and women’s cross country championships. He was a five-time ACC Coach of the Year.

Dubcast Rewind: Behind the scenes with Cade Klubnik

In December of 2021, Tigerillustrated.com reported an in-depth series of articles on freshman quarterback Cade Klubnik as he prepared to arrive at Clemson from his home in Austin, Texas.

In this podcast, we revisit the lengthy interviews we conducted then with Klubnik's mother Kim, his pastor Brad Thomas (a Clemson grad) and Klubnik himself.

Klubnik has become a sensation again after replacing DJ Uiagalelei early in the ACC championship game and breathing life into not just the quarterback position but the entire team.

Klubnik leads Clemson into its Orange Bowl clash with Tennessee on Dec. 30.