But despite their status as campus icons, the hedges endure a considerable amount of punishment each fall. Television camera crews regularly drape the hedges with cables and signs, which Pauley and his staff dutifully remove. Pauley winces every time a player crashes into the hedges, but he understands -- a Western Carolina punter in the early '90s, Pauley was nearly flung into the hedges by Georgia blockers during a Garrison Hearst return.
Possums, birds and insects can damage the hedges, as can another kind of natural predator: opponents' fans. Pauley's staff recently caught one inebriated enemy rooter from a school that shall remain nameless attempting to, uh, irrigate the hedges. In , Georgia Tech fans celebrated their first win over Georgia since by tearing off pieces of the hedges and putting them in their mouths, much like players from the Pac and Big Ten do upon clinching a Rose Bowl berth.
And Georgia fans sometimes just can't help themselves when they encounter the legendary hedges in person. It's no surprise, then, that privet Ligustrum is, in Athens at least, a protected species. The field and the hedges are guarded by a state-of-the-art camera surveillance system, and intruders, be they innocuous, intoxicated college kids or would-be vandals, are greeted with a loud, ear-splitting alarm that sends them scrambling for the nearest exit.
Pauley routinely finds evidence of these invasions, from a pair of Crocs to miscellaneous articles of clothing, most of which are torn or shredded, proof that the hedges assisted by the hidden chain-link fence can hold their own.
Yet, as a necessary precaution against any possible thefts, plant sickness or destruction, Pauley grows and maintains replacement hedges at an undisclosed location in case of an emergency. For the historic Georgia hedges, after all, no level of security is sufficient, no amount of care too much, no expense too great. A tradition that, in entering its ninth decade, is both figuratively and literally still growing. Writer and college football historian John D.
Lukacs is a consultant to "College GameDay. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Lukacs: A journey back 'between the hedges' at Georgia's Sanford Stadium. Georgia Bulldogs. Fantasy football rankings: NFL Week NFL Week 10 fantasy football inactives watch: Who's in and who's out? KU stuns Texas on walk-on's winning 2-point grab.
Kansas Jayhawks. Sources: OBJ may return punts in Rams debut. Los Angeles Rams. Big Ben out vs. Pittsburgh Steelers. Sources: Panthers acting as if Darnold out for ' Carolina Panthers. Timme nets career-high 37 as Zags roll past Texas. Gonzaga Bulldogs. Irked Riley: Baylor timeout for FG breaks 'code'. Oklahoma Sooners. Joerger leaving Sixers to have cancer treatments. Philadelphia 76ers. Because a soccer field is 25 percent larger than a football field, the hedges and a concrete path had to be removed.
Around this time, groundskeepers also discovered that the hedges were slowly dying of a parasitic nematode. When the hedges were replanted immediately following the Games in , groundskeepers placed shrubs edge to edge every two feet on either side of a low chain-link fence.
Unfortunately, symbolic flora can often fall victim to rivalries. Just ask Auburn University, which has had to replace its beloved live oaks twice after acts of vandalism. It was hard to see it destroyed that night. Breaking the streak and earning career win No. We had some of that at Oklahoma and at Marshall when we won championships—and that was kind of a championship moment for us—but attention quickly changed to make sure that everybody was safe.
One of those students who got injured on the field was year-old Kristine Yu of Roswell, Georgia. Mary's Hospital. We've been trying to avoid those things ever since and had been up to that point.
When you have one in critical condition and you have to go over and see the parents, it's pretty awakening. Yu was released from the hospital three days later, according to the Athens Banner-Herald , and her family thanked the community for the support it received during her hospital stay. It pulled off the mad scramble, and Sanford Stadium was salvaged for the rest of the season.
Primarily, though, the thinking was, since we got some national attention from it in a negative way and that field storming was a national trend at the time, that TV needed to be able to see and show the gouged hedges for the rest of the year. The field at Sanford Stadium hasn't been rushed since that early-October night, which pleases everybody associated with the program.
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