And many mooooooore: William H. Holley, Auburn's oldest living alumnus, celebrated his 105th birthday yesterday. Here he is as an Auburn freshman in the 1927 Glomerata. Carpe Diem.

When he walked at graduation William H. Holley, like many before and since, shook the hand of the university’s president, Dr. Bradford Knapp. At that time the president lived in Cater Hall. The governor was Bibb Graves. Know those names?

The oaks at Toomer’s hadn’t been planted yet. Toomer’s Drugs was still competing with Homer Wright as the local top druggist. (Wright’s phone number: Nine.) S.L. Toomer simply referred to his place as The Store On The Corner.

Screen cap from a WDHN story on Holley's birthday party.

Obligatory sports references: George Bohler was coaching both the football and basketball teams that year. The football team was 1-8, beating only Howard College. Snitz Snider — Olympic track star and future high school football coach — was hurt much of the season.  Another key player Babe Taylor — who, as a tackle, dressed at 6-feet-2 and “around two hundred pounds” as a tackle (Auburn’s current punter is bigger) — also had nagging injuries during the down year. Bohler’s basketball team went 3-13. At least the baseball team was posting winning records! Cliff Hare Stadium? Hardly.

The Bank of Auburn, in the back of Holley’s senior Glomerata, advertised four percent on savings. Burton’s Book Store was the place to get your dusty tomes. J&M was decades away. Samford Hall, Comer, Mary Martin, Smith and Langdon Halls were all a part of campus. Ramsay Hall was brand new. Perhaps you’ll have heard of Holley’s dean: Bennett Battle Ross of Ross Hall fame. That building was still being erected when Holley graduated.

Holley's Auburn offspring: Elizabeth ('59) and Bill Jr ('71).

If those things don’t sound familiar don’t worry. Auburn’s oldest living alum has a few years on you. Holley celebrated his 105th birthday Wednesday at the Henry County Nursing Home in Dothan (Auburn stuff was everywhere).

His walk into the real world coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. The 1929 graduate would work as a pharmacist in Abbeville and soon after helped soldiers get their prescriptions in France during World War II. When the Army let him go he settled with his wife and family in Headland, Ala. He became a pillar of that community where he handed out medication until he retired in 1973. His son Bill, a 1971 Auburn graduate, took over the druggist desk. His son has since retired.

But the elder Holley refused to slow down long after retirement. He has maintained two farms, one in his hometown of Samson, Ala. and another in Headland. He was famously building fence lines by hand well into his 90s. He has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren in his life. He maintained his driver’s license well beyond his centennial, “just in case.”

His API diploma, which is made of sheepskin, still proudly adorns a wall in his bedroom.

As he told Auburn Magazine, learning about Newton’s first law in a physics class has played a big role in his long life. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Living Right, he said simply, is the key. He’d know.

For video from Holley’s party, visit DothanFirst.com; h/t @migueltrivino.

Kenny graduated from Auburn at the turn of the century. He worked in newsrooms across the region and then earned a master’s degree at UAB. He met and married a Yankee, who declared her Auburn allegiance at her first home game. She’s now on the faculty at Auburn. He’s finishing his PhD at Alabama and teaches at Samford University. And he’s an assistant editor at The War Eagle Reader. See him online at www.kennysmith.org and @kennysmith.

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George Kirchoff, pioneer of the airbag, holds a photo of George Kirchoff pioneering the airbag.

How many Auburn grads does it take to save what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates to be at least 26,000 lives?

One—an engineering grad named George Kirchoff. He’s 79, he lives in Montrose, Ala, and he’s the father of the airbag. Not that you’d know.

Though he holds several patents related to the airbag’s assembly, Kirchoff has never been one to toot his own horn, as it were. But his pioneer status in the development the life-saving technology is slowly being recognized.

Here's our boy's senior photo from the 1955 Glomerata.

In 1992, Ralph Nader gave Kirchoff props–“The inventors of the airbag technology have remained anonymous for too long”–while presenting him a safety award. Nader, a former presidential candidate and consumer advocate, is the author of “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an expose on the dangers of auto manufacturing.

This year, BMW recognized Kirchoff with a lifetime achievement award for his “many years of tireless innovation on automotive airbags to help save lives and reduce serious injuries, anonymous to those you protected.”

And a feature on Kirchoff, who graduated from Auburn in 1955 with a degree in engineering and a 1946 Ford convertible without an airbag, was the cover story of yesterday’s Mobile Press-Register. You can read it here.

“A surgeon once told me, ‘You’ve saved more lives than I have,’” Kirchoff said.

h/t Miles Ball and Michael Mayberry. Photo via.

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Auburn man Elmo Shropshire in drag as a soon to be (fictional) dead grandmother.

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.

His name is Elmo Shropshire. And his grandmother apparently got run over by a reindeer. Walking home from his house Christmas Eve. You may say there’s no such thing as Santa. But as for Elmo Shropshire, he believes.

Oh, he believes.

Originally performed in 1979 by Shropshire’s San Francisco-based husband-and-wife bluegrass comedy duo Elmo and Patsy,”Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” became a holiday hit on Top 40 radio by the early 80s thanks in part to his homemade video for the song getting heavy rotation on MTV. It soon went multi-platinum—it supposedly outsold “Thriller” for a few weeks during the 1984 Christmas season—and has earned him God knows how much coin in royalties. But it’s probably safe to say that for Shropshire, every day is kind of like Christmas.

“If it weren’t for that song I’d still be worming cats for a living,” he told Auburn Magazine last year.

Shropshire is 1964 graduate of Auburn’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Here’s a photo of Elmo during his senior year from the 1964 Glomerata:

Elmo Shropshire: You couldn't think of a better name for the person who wrote "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" if you tried.

RIP, Grandma. War Damn Eagle.

Read Auburn Magazine’s full story on Shropshire here, page 40.

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So you’re obviously wanting to relive Auburn’s national championship season now more than ever.

Go to WarEagleDVD.com (great, great Christmas gift) and enter TWER as your promo code. You’ll get free shipping… and you’ll help your favorite Auburn website keep the lights on during the long winter.

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For a few weeks in early 2008, there was but one goddess of the Auburn internet. She was an Auburn student named Jessica Trainham. And she was a cheerleader.

For the Atlanta Falcons.

“Some people did assume I cheered for Auburn, but I always give them my spill of how it all worked out,” Trainham says. “It’s pretty uncommon for an NFL cheerleader to skip over college cheerleading and go to the pro’s while in school, but I transferred to Auburn from Columbus State and had to wait a semester to try out (for Auburn’s cheerleading squad) so I figured I would take a gamble and try out for the Atlanta Falcons. So I did, and the rest is history.”

Hot, hot history.

When Sports Illustrated was filling an NFL cheerleader photo spread in its 2008 swimsuit issue, they reserved a spot for Trainham, then just 22.

Currently working and living in Miami, the Phenix City native still thinks appearing in the magazine was one of the best professional decisions she’s ever made.

“I work as a fitness model and having that on my resume seems to impress a lot of people and help me land gigs,” she say. “The best thing about the whole experience was the fact that I had the opportunity to appear in one of the largest, well-known magazines in the country.”

Would she ever pose for another large, well-known magazine that promises aspiring models a leg up on their career, but that’s sold in plastic bags, one that came to Auburn looking for fresh talent when Trainham was in school in 2007, and that came back this April?

“Absolutely not!”

“It seems so many girls get caught up and think that posing nude will help their career, but unless you want to work in that industry it only hurts you,” Trainham says. “You have to be very careful in the entertainment industry and understand how it all works. I’ve never considered it because I know what type of image I want and also, morally, it’s not who I am.”

Trainham in South Beach, 2010.

In addition to her work as a model, Trainham is currently pursuing a career in television.

“I had three wonderful years as an Atlanta Falcons Cheerleader and also one year with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Cheering for both teams has
changed my life and I have wonderful memories from both organizations,” she says. “I’ve hung up my uniform for good, but I still love NFL football
and the whole experience!”

Ditto Auburn.

“I remember being really young and carrying around orange and blue pom poms on gamedays at my house growing up,” Trainham says. “My family are all Auburn fans and I’ve always loved my Tigers! Last year I came back for the Auburn-Georgia game and I’ll be back to watch us beat Bama for Thanksgiving!”

Photo of Trainham on the beach by Brian Thomas Rickey (see more here); cheerleading photos via SI.com. To see all 25 photos (plus a video) from Jessica’s Sports Illustrated photo shoot, go here.

Related: TWER interviews Auburn representative from Playboy’s “Girls of the SEC” / Sexiest Auburn cheerleader photo ever?

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The Cure for What Ale's You: Craft beer canner and 1992 Auburn graduate Dale Katechis ales it up at the Oskar Blues Brewery's Longmont, Colo. facility in 2008.

It seems that one of the reasons the 1993 Auburn Tigers played so well is because they weren’t supposed to play so well. Same with 1972. Same even with 2010. The Auburn Spirit is the spirit of the underdog. The Auburn Spirit is the spirit of the underdog.

So the success of Dale’s Pale Ale (the New York Times called it the Top American Pale Ale) comes as little surprise—the recipe was perfected in the bathtub of a trailer off Wire Road.

“I got a homebrew kit for Christmas and started making small batches of it while I was in college,” says 1992 Auburn graduate (and former off-Wire Road trailer renter) Dale Katechis, founder and owner of Oskar Blues, a Colorado brewery for which Dale’s Pale Ale serves as flagship. “I just remained an avid home brewer during my five years at Auburn.”

During that five years, Katechis bartended at Darnell’s, “that hippie bar across from Toomer’s Corner.” After graduating from Auburn with a degree in finance, he moved to Colorado.

“I had no desire to work in the banking business so I started working for a back pack manufacturer and bar tending at night and did that for about five years and eventually opened my own restaurant,” he says. “I started making the beer (Dale’s Pale Ale) there at the pub and that beer was the beer that I was brewing at Auburn. That was our (Oskar Blues’) first beer.”

And according to Katechis, its recipe remains virtually untouched since the days he was bathing regularly in Auburn. It’s also one of the best-selling craft beers in the country, which might have something do to with Dale’s revolutionary idea in 2002 of putting his tub ale in a can.

“It was too far-fetched for anyone to really believe, even in our industry, that someone would put a full-flavored, hoppy beer in a can,” Katechis told AdAge.com last November. “Some people laughed it off.”

Then they started ripping it off; according to the Brewers Associations, now more than 100 craft brewers offer their beers in cans.

“We’re the scrappy little guy that took a lot of risk,” he told AdAge. “We kind of did it while we were flipping everybody else off.”

Katechis has a history of going against the odds. There was no home brewing scene during Dale’s days in Auburn, no brew clubs lobbying to legalize the hobby.

“I was the only homebrewer that I knew of in Auburn at that time,” he says. “There weren’t any clubs to speak of, or if there were I didn’t know about them. That was back in the day when there were any homebrews available. We used to have to drive to Green’s Liquor Store in Atlanta to buy Pete’s Wicked Ale. You couldn’t even buy that in Auburn.”

Twenty years later, Dale is selling his old homebrew through 80 distributors in Colorado and across the south and the coasts. You can find Dale’s Pale Ale in BevMo. You can find Dale’s Pale Ale in Whole Foods.

Auburn alumni in and around Boulder, Colo., just 15 minutes from Lyons, can usually find it flowing at alumni club meetings.

“We sponsor some of those (alumni) events, you know, at the local bars where the beer is served,” Katechis says. “We’re trying to keep some of the Auburn Spirit alive.”

Related: Auburn Brew Club wins bet, quaffs case of Oregon homebrew.

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"I haven't been recognized in public yet," says Auburn junior—and Playboy "Girls of the SEC" model—Haley Ann. "Or at least not that I know of!"

Haley Ann has a 4.0 GPA. For an Apparel Production Design major at Auburn, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

“It’s a lot harder than people think it is,” she told an interviewer for Auburn student media project The Loveliest Village back in March. “We’re not just girls that like to wear pretty clothes.”

But no matter how well Haley Ann does in school, her college claim to fame won’t have anything to do with how well she made or designed clothes but how well she took them off. Or at least her tank top. Or at least most of it. At Chewacla State Park. In the dark. It was fun.

“We shot my pictorial at a cabin in Chewacla,” she says. “It was during a huge power outage we had in Auburn that night so that made it feel even more adventurous!”

The junior from Chicago is one of five Auburn coeds featured in Playboy’s latest “Girls of the SEC” issue. She’s the first girl from Auburn—the first girl from any school—pictured in the pictorial. All of the other are on pages like 103, 102, 100. Haley’s on page 96.

She knew landing the intro was a possibility, but she didn’t know she had until receiving a copy of the November issue in the mail a few weeks ago.

“They did mention that my shot was being considered for the opening page of the pictorial and that only made me even more excited to be a part.”

The avid Auburn football fan (she’s been to every home game since she started school) heard about Playboy’s April casting call in Auburn from a friend who thought she might be interested.

She was interested.

“It was something I had always thought would be a great experience and something I would like to do,” she says. “All my friends know about me being in Playboy and they are all supportive and excited for me.”

Even her dad is cool with it.

“He was a little hesitant to the idea at first,” Haley Ann says, “but he is being very supportive of me, along with my other family members.”

“Anyone that might be cold about my decisions probably aren’t people I’d like to be friends with anyways.”

Photos courtesy Playboy.

Related: Playboy in Auburn in 1989 / Playboy in Auburn in 1994.

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Woman of Wonders: With nearly 60 costumes and 50 conventions under her power belt, 2010 Auburn graduate Katie George is a cosplay playa.

Wonder Woman is an Auburn fan. So is Joan from Mad Men. And Dr. Girlfriend from the Venture Brothers… which is all old news to any orange and blue clad photo-oppers who’ve happened to attend the Chick-Fil-A Kick Off Classic in the last few years. Each Labor Day weekend, the game shares downtown Atlanta with Dragon*Con, the world’s largest sci-fi / fantasy convention, and one of the biggest events on cosplay extraordinaire Katie George‘s calendar.

“I have had some great War Eagle moments in costume,” George says. “Dragon*Con is always the same weekend as the Chik-fil-A bowl so the hotels will be flooded with college football fans. Auburn fans have been there before, and anytime someone in an Auburn jersey or an Auburn t-shirt asked me for a photo in costume, I’d always say ‘Sure! And War Eagle!’ and get a wonderfully enthusiastic ‘War Eagle!’ in return.”

The most football-ish fun actually came when Bama met Clemson to start the 2008 season.

Katie George as Joan Holloway from AMC's "Mad Men" in 2010.

“The Bama fans would ask me for a photo, and I’d graciously accept,” George says. “But then after they had taken it I’d say ‘and by the way…. War Damn Eagle!’ and then they’d usually go ‘Noooo!’ I’m not even kidding! That really happened! Multiple times!”

George graduated from Auburn in 2010 with a BFA in Theatre Design/Technology, with an emphasis in Costume and Make-up Design.

“I shorten it to ‘degree in costume design’ for the sake of simplicity, although sometimes I sarcastically call it my ‘cosplay degree.’”

Cosplay, short for “costume play,” is a blooming subculture that promises perpetual Halloween to all its decked out denizens. If there’s a cartoon character you’re into, then dress up like the cartoon character. A movie character? A comic book character? Make or buy a costume—George makes all of hers herself—and then get together with other cosplayers and take a road trip to Dragon*Con or Comic-Con or Conny-Con Con or wherever there are people in costumes to take pictures of and to take pictures of you.

George estimates there to be at least 280,000 cosplayers in the world, if not millions, and despite her tendency to downplay her own costumery accomplishments, she has slowly made a name for herself—her occasional nom de con (and the name of her cosplay website) is Pink Ninja—in the growing cosplay scene in the seven years since she’s been attending conventions. She’s won lookalike awards. She’s sat on numerous convention panels.

Here she is discussing the tricks of the trade in an Adult Swim featurette about Venture Brothers cosplay—and giving a shout out of sorts to her alma mater:

“I went to Auburn originally to save money before going to a film school, where I was going to study film production,” George says. “I started my first semester as an art major, then decided to switch to theatre my second semester, as theatre seemed like a good place for a girl with film aspirations. However, the minute I stepped into the costume shop, I knew that’s where my passion was going to take me”

Despite dreams of breaking into Atlanta’s burgeoning film industry as a costume or make-up designer after graduating from Auburn, George opted for a “real” job and currently works as a production coordinator at an Atlanta marketing firm. You might say her cosplay activities are a away to keep hope alive.

“My favorite character to dress up as is, hands down, Wonder Woman,” she says. “No costume gets quite the response that she gets, what with being such an incredibly mainstream and recognizable character. Adults love it, kids love it, men love it, women love it.”

“It’s also great that it’s one of the few costumes where my height (George is 5″10) really helps with the visual. People want to see an Amazonian princess who towers over them! The corset is a little constricting, but the appreciation for my effort always makes it worth it.”

George is the product of a mixed marriage—"my mom is an Auburn alum, and my dad spent a semester at Alabama… which, as you know, is more than most Bama fans"—but you can't tell from this photo ... (apparently because those dudes are her uncles).

So has the cosplaying Auburn fan ever thought of crossing the streams?

“There’s actually a character from Sailor Moon whose colors are orange and navy—Sailor Venus. Maybe one day, I’ll make that,” George says. “She’s not my favorite Sailor Moon character, but I think trying to pull off a ‘sexy Aubie’ would be sacrilege.”

h/t Teckla, photos via PinkNinja.org.

For more Auburn-Con-ishness, check out FitForDragonCon.com, maintained by an Auburn man (the same Auburn man ) who dotcommed his dreams to get in shape for Dragon*Con 2012.

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“You ain’t trying to scare me now, are you, Pat?” asked the Bear.

“No sir, because I know you don’t get scared. I’m just telling you what we’re fixing to do.”

September 1991

Patrick Fain Dye is a football coach, a solid, compact 51-year-old man of medium height with gray hair and a mumbly voice and eyes that immediately seek to take the measure of other men. He owns a farm and has been involved in several successful business ventures, but if you call him a farmer or a businessman, he will say, “Hell, no, I’m a football coach.” He does not say this as a point of modesty, however. In Alabama you do not say that you are a football coach to be modest, because in Alabama football coaches, and in particular coaches as successful as Dye, operate in that corner of southern life where business, politics and religion — where both the outer and the inner lives of the citizenry — intersect. You want someone to pitch your product and maybe sit on your board at the same time? You call Pat Dye. You want to hear someone extol the verities, sing the spirit of the South and of America, with a common touch? You call Pat Dye. You want someone to bash the pointy-heads and spoilsports at the NCAA? You call Pat Dye. In fact, you could summon the name of Pat Dye for just about anything you want, because, as he says, he is a football coach and, like the best of that breed, he is shrewd and naive, humble and arrogant, kind and cruel, idealistic and pragmatic, buddy-buddy and forever distant and inscrutable. He is something like Bryant, who was something like God.

It’s amazing what you can see in a man’s eyes. Fear. Confidence. Determination. I doubt there are many players who aren’t afraid. Who don’t have some kind of fear. Fear of failure. We deal with fear every day. That’s where courage comes in. Nobody says courage is the absence of fear. Courage is mastering fear.

Myself, I’m terrified playing golf in front of a big crowd. I’m scared I’m gonna miss the damn thing. But I can master fear in football. I can walk out there in that stadium on Saturday afternoon, and I have no more fear than if I’m taking a stroll by myself. Because that’s my damn place.

October 2010

Patrick Fain Dye is no longer a football coach. His once solid, compact body has started to lose its battle with time. Seventy years on God’s Green Earth have given his shoulders a slight slump. His eyes, though, his eyes still take stock. They see and they wait. The visitors, of course, don’t know this. They’ve just arrived and haven’t yet seen Coach Dye. Dogs, mutts all, serve as greeters as they exit the van. Feet crunch gravel. The house is all wood beams and southern spirit. A full wraparound porch hugs the wooden walls and the western face looks out over a pond. Paradise he calls it later, the three of them watching the setting sun, the mixed yellow and orange and salmon of the Auburn sunset reflected on the still surface of the water as retreating geese honk. The two visitors walk up the steps of the porch and one calls out. Dye yells back and they enter. Total silence. A bowl overflowing with wine corks sits on the kitchen counter. On a table rests a picture of a smiling aged Dye on the day Jordan-Hare Stadium’s grass surface became Pat Dye Field. On another table sit more pictures and a half-empty bottle of Evan Williams. Through a window they see the back of Dye’s silvered head. They walk through a screen door and there he is, calm and unmoving, holding a paperback copy of William Faulkner’s Three Famous Short Novels, one of the fingers on his right hand holding a spot near the halfway point. Without looking up he places the book on a table adjacent to his rocking chair.

“Y’all come on around here and get what you need. Hell, you’re late.”

They called me Pat. I was supposed to be a girl. And they were going to name me Patricia.

I was born to a woman who sold poppies for wounded veterans and to a daddy who let a 14-year-old black boy in rural Georgia drive a $10,000 tractor because he believed in the boy’s character. The sound of rain on a tin roof always reminds me of my childhood home.

I believe growing up in the environment I did, with my mother and father both highly competitive and both athletically inclined, and two older brothers who didn’t mean to lose at anything — growing up in a struggling situation for everything made me a person who hated to lose. And it was a long time before I won anything.

I started defending myself a long time before I caught up with my brothers in size. I wouldn’t let ‘em pick on me. It didn’t make no difference what I had to use: baseball bat, or axe, or shotgun, or kitchen knife, or whatever it took; I wasn’t gonna let ‘em pick on me.

I got into a couple fights. I believe one was at a Pizza Hut one night. Another time a guy ran me off the road. I got into a fight one night at a dance during the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta. Just ridiculous things. I look back on it now as stupidity.

Was I a good student? I was average. I mean I was a boy, a country boy, just full of life and energy. Studying wasn’t the most important thing to me. I did what I had to do. I had so damn much energy it was hard for me to sit still, if you know what I mean. But we never missed a day of school, never played hooky.

I played, and I wasn’t very good. Just kind of a pudgy little ole boy. But I went from maybe 115 pounds that year to 150 pounds in the ninth grade. I played, and I was pretty good for a ninth grader.

Most of the years I was playing football, practice would be over, and it would be dark, and I’d have no ride home. One of my friends would drop me off on Highway 1, 20 miles from Blythe. It would be seven or eight o’clock. I’d hitchhike home.

I believe things hurt worse when you are young than they do when you get a little older. And it hurt plenty. There was something I was born with, maybe it was a fire burning in me that the only way you could put it out was to win. Over the years it has not always been easy to control that fire. You’ve got to work at it every day. Do a lot of praying. Soul searching. You want to live the right kind of life, do the right kind of thing. Sometimes it’s hard.

September 1991

Coaching football is all Dye knows. He views the game absolutely without irony. In fact, Dye doesn’t look at football as a game at all, or as entertainment, or as a slot in the fall TV schedule, or even, for God’s sake, as some sort of metaphorical distillation of life. It is life itself, son, and what happens on that field is real, important, consequential. Football is stability, football is deliverance. The kind of boy Dye likes is the kind of boy who knows that. Poor boys, farm boys, inner-city boys, black boys. Underdogs. He grew up, he says, working next to blacks in the fields, and now, when he recruits some kid from rural south Alabama, he makes sure to visit the boy’s home, to meet his parents and make him feel like someone. He makes sure to look that boy right straight in the eye and tell him that he, Pat Dye, is going to demand more from him than his daddy ever could, that he, Pat Dye, is going to give him the wherewithal to pick himself up and make it in this world.

+++

Football wasn’t designed to be easy. If it was easy, everybody would want to play it. Football teaches sacrifice. And sacrifice teaches excellence. You can take a poor student who is hungry and make a good student out of him. If a walk-on wants to be a football player, and he’s willing to pay the price and make all the sacrifices and stay out there for four or five years, in all probability, I can make a football player out of him. The less talented guy can outwork the talented guy. I thought that was the American way. I still think it is.

October 2010

He sits in a wicker chair on Pat Dye’s porch and tries not to stare at the architect of modern Auburn football. His friend is interviewing Dye about Bo Jackson for a story celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bo’s Heisman season, a story which turned into something more. He drifts in and out of the conversation. Mostly he thinks about where he is. I’m sitting in Pat Dye’s wicker chair on Pat Dye’s wraparound porch trying to appear serene as if I’m pondering Pat Dye’s pond. Pat Dye’s dog is sitting in my lap. A different dog owned by Pat Dye is pissing on Pat Dye’s wicker table directly beside my left leg. Pat Dye does not seem to realize Pat Dye’s dog is pissing on Pat Dye’s wicker table next to Pat Dye’s guest’s left leg.

Some words he hears Pat Dye speak:

“That goes to show you how stupid some people can be. That they put a dope head, damn cocaine guy, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And what happened up in Knoxville, Bo got hurt. And you can bet your ass he would have played hurt. We just played sorry and the guy playing quarterback just had a great night. That can happen. I guess the guy’s in prison.”

“Hell, it didn’t effect the way he played. It was helping him for all I know. If he was breaking rules, I never heard about it. And it ain’t against the rules to screw a gal, as long as they givin’ it up. I’m sure there were a lot of takers over there. I’m not talking about takin’ it physically, but if they were offering it up, he’d probably take it.”

“It starts with the University, it doesn’t start with us. And make damn sure you make that plain and clear. We’re just part of the process and part of the family. And the role that we played might have been important, but nothing was more important than the University. And, you know, I think that Bo was, he was a type of individual who wasn’t going to follow the crowd. He was going to cut his own trail. That’s the way he was, and I think under ordinary circumstances we probably wouldn’t have been able to recruit him. But this individual had enough guts and confidence in himself and saw something and felt something that he liked about Auburn. That’s where he chose to come to school. And he’s made a helluva Auburn man.”

“The ones of us that saw him, like you did as a kid, and us grown folk, were blessed to have seen the greatest athlete that ever lived that we know anything else about. Now I’ve watched Willie Mays play baseball, and I’ve watched Michael Jordan play basketball, and I’ve watched Jackie Robinson, who was voted number one all time two sports athlete, and I’ve got some reservations about that, but I mean, that’s what [Bo] was. He was the Secretariat of football players, of athletes.”

The conversation about Bo, Cam, and the state of Auburn football reaches a lull. He decides to end his silence, if only so he could later say he had a conversation with the man.

“I like your column. Do you enjoy writing it?” he asks.

Dye smiles and leans forward in his chair. “I do. Have you read this week’s? I just finished it a couple hours ago.”

“No. I haven’t had a chance to read yet.”

“Well, it’s about David and Goliath. Do you know the story?”

“I do.”

“Do you think David was scared when he faced Goliath — that big bully?”

“No…” (Pat Dye’s face says wrong) “…was he?”

“Shit yeah he was scared.”

He listens as Dye explains college football using the story of David and Goliath as a metaphor. He remembers smiling a lot.

When they stand to leave, his friend stooping to gather his recorder, camera, pen, and notebook, he and Dye lock eyes. That’s when Pat Dye winks at him, a quick shutter of the left eye.

“Hang around me boy and you’ll learn some things.”

Sections under the header September 1991 and the opening quotation taken from “A New Head of State” by Tom Junod, originally published in Sports Illustrated in the October 7, 1991, issue.

All untitled sections taken from Dye’s autobiography, In the Arena. The quotation in the section recounting Dye’s childhood beginning “I was born to a woman . . .” was taken from the East Alabama Living article, “A New Season With Pat Dye.”

The author has received no compensation for this article. The reprinting and reworking of previous material was simply an effort of whim and passion. He has the utmost respect for Tom Junod’s work and would like to again stress he did not write any of the words under the September 1991 header. The author was 3 when Junod wrote his words.

Look for The Patchwork Pat Dye Part II early next week.

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When we ran into Terry at one of the recent Toomer’s cellobrations (hence the background music), we decided it was time to whip out the Flip and sleuth for the truth.

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Auburn Brit Whittle performing in Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters." A lifelong Auburn fan, Whittle says he had to drop his first name in order to be taken seriously as an actor.

Name your son Crimson, Tyde, or Bear and people will automatically think he’s a redneck.

Name your son Auburn, and people will automatically think he’s putting on airs, at least if he’s an actor.

“I actually tried to go by Auburn as an actor but nobody believed that was my name,” laughs lifelong Auburn fan Auburn Brit Whittle. “They thought I’d made up some pretentious stage name.  I was like, no, that really is my real name.”

Whittle’s father Dale, who graduated from Auburn in 1966, named his son Auburn in honor of his alma mater; Whittle, who goes by his middle name, was accepted to Auburn, but never attended.

“I couldn’t afford to go because they jacked up out of state tuition fees, but I was such an avid follower of Auburn football from the days of Joe Cribbs and James Brooks, from Barfield into Pat Dye, Lionel ‘Little Train’ James, Randy Campbell running the wishbone,” he says. “My wall was just covered in Auburn stuff.”

Whittle’s brother Whit graduated from Auburn in 1989; his nephew Joshua is currently attending Auburn on a Presidential Scholarship.

Whittle grew up in Brunswick, Georgia surrounded by Georgia and Georgia Tech fans who never failed to notice his first name.

“I kind of compare it to the song ‘Boy Named Sue,’” he says. “I went by my middle name, but I still got teased a lot.”

Things didn’t change much when he got into show business.

Currently living in New York, the 41-year-old actor regularly lands bit rolls on television shows like “Mercy” and “Blue Bloods,” and in feature films; he can be seen in the “The Adjustment Bureau,” a science fiction thriller starring Matt Damon which opens Friday.

“But the biggest (roll) so far,” Whittle says, “has been the ‘30 Rock’ thing.”

Whittle played “Man #1” on the “30 Rock: Season 3” episode “Retreat to Move Forward,” asking Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon to do another Jack Donaghy impression as she tries to cover for Jack’s hot mic-in-a-bathroom moment during a corporate synergy-building seminar.

Whittle played "Man #1" in a 2006 episode of NBC's "30 Rock."

“That was kind of a seminal moment in my career because after that, I started getting booked on soaps (“One Life to Live,” “All My Children”) without even auditioning,” Whittle says. “They would just book me.”

But would they have booked Auburn Whittle?

“When I first became an actor, I was in Atlanta and doing commercial work and theater,” he says. “I needed to make some headshots and I did it as Auburn Whittle. If you join the union and someone already has your name, your SOL.”

Along these lines, Whittle deemed Auburn — which is generally used as a girl’s name (when it’s used at all) — a safer bet than Brit.

Brit couldn't find his Auburn sweatshirt for this picture, but his girlfriend managed to find a street named Auburn... a pretentious, pretentious street.

“I thought I’d get everybody to know me as Auburn Whittle, but it just wouldn’t work,” he laughs. “I’d hand someone a headshot and they’d be like, ‘what the hell is that?’ And I was like, ‘that’s my name.’ I’d have to pull out my driver’s license to prove it.”

Whittle’s only credit as Auburn Whittle is for a play he wrote, “The Legend of Eustice Ray Jackson.”

Life as Britt, he says, is so much simpler. But he’s not afraid to go full-name when he needs to.

“Strangely, I run into a lot of Alabama fans (as an actor),” he says. “I have to throw down the gauntlet every now and then.”

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