Regarding Auburn’s eclectic, esoteric mascot culture, we now test the talons of our historical expertise on “the Auburn Tiger”—that’s how Pam Smith’s husband proudly referred to her when I called to make sure I had the right person. And I did. And though that title doesn’t accompany her name in the 1971 Glomerata, that’s what she looks like in the photo, lying on the field in front of the cheerleaders in a plush, hooded tiger-striped jumpsuit.

David Painter has turned his 1,200 square ft. basement into a veritable Bo Jackson museum. His collection has been featured in various newspapers. It’s been featured in Sports Collectors’ Digest. When Auburn’s athletic museum needed pieces for a display to commemorate Bo’s induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1998, they called Painter.

When The Legendary Beverly Bradford (TLBB) dumped the Auburn Plainsman’s weekly Loveliest of the Plains feature, her first act of defiance as 1970-71 editor, she preemptively countered objections to the decision by listing the titles still available for Auburn coeds to compete for—Miss Rat Hat, Miss Fall Rush, Glomerata Beauties, Miss A-Day, ad infinitum. But she left off one of the most important…

Thanks to the first story, we manged to get in touch with and interview the person who hung out with and took pictures of Bjork in Auburn, and we have since received new visions—like, oh, you know, Bjork popping a bottle of champagne in the dressing room after the show next to an Auburn cup that she presumably used to drink it with— and new revelations…
… like that The Sugarcubes wrote a song about Hey Day.

There is one thing related to the Heisman Trophy that Alabama will never have, can never have. Sure, Auburn remains the only school where John Heisman coached football to have a player win the Heisman Trophy. We know this. We brag about it in media guides. We put it on T-shirts. But I’m talking more than trivia. I’m talking about something physically and emotionally tangible. I’m talking about a letter.

Why did Ken Burns feature Katharine Phillips so prominently in The War? Probably because she’s got a great accent, and she’s got great stories. Why are we featuring her so prominently in this post? She’s got a great accent, and those great stories aren’t just WWII stories—they’re Auburn stories.
And because she’s super-cute.

If you’re an Auburn fan and love it, you’ll probably love it more. If you hate it, you’ll probably have to tolerate it now, or at least hate it a little less. Either way, you’ll probably never listen to it the same way again… unless of course you already knew that the undisputed heavyweight champion of Christmas novelty songs was recorded by an Auburn Man.

At the beginning of the 1987 school year, St. Joseph’s University, a Jesuit school up in Philadelphia without a football team to cheer for, decided they’d adopt one to cheer for. They printed ballots in the school newspaper and put it to a vote: Notre Dame? No. Penn State? No. San Jose State? No. UCLA? No.
Auburn? Yes. And cheer they did.

Maybe you saw the sign. Whoever made it probably had to explain it the GameDay censors—they were pretty sensitive last week—so they could hold it up: “No, it’s not a dirty inside joke, it’s a shout out to Clifford Grubbs, an old Auburn player with the coolest nickname of any old Auburn player ever.”

For the Auburn Tigers, the 1980s did not end on Dec. 2 or even Dec. 31, 1989. No, for Auburn football, the decade of the Eighties actually ended on a slick field in Tampa, Florida on January 1, 1990, vs. the Ohio State Buckeyes in the Hall of Fame Bowl
Let’s sit down and watch the game—for the first time in two decades, for some of us—and talk about it.