You know, from all my visits out west over the years, and not just Montana, but all the Rocky Mountain states, I've found that the people out there seem a lot less interested in spectator sports, in general, than folks in the south. They seem much more interested in _doing_ outdoors activities. I've been out there before in late March when an early spring came to the area and it was like somebody flipped a switch and everybody hung up their skis and pulled out their mountain bikes. There were bicyclists everywhere. Any of you that have driven around out there can testify that it seems like half the driveways in town have RVs of some sort parked there waiting for the next weekend camping trip. I asked one lady who works in our office now but who is from Montana to estimate what percentage of people she knew had RVs or campers. Without hesitating, she said "all of them." I kind of laughed and she said "Seriously, I'm sure there are families I know who don't have a camper, but I can't recall them off the top of my head. I'll put it this way - just about everybody I know either has a camper or wishes they had a camper."
One summer, we were traveling through on I-90 and decided to stop in a little town west of Bozeman called Three Forks. Three Forks has less than 2000 people, which is about half the size of Honea Path or Belton in SC. It's tiny. It happened that they were having their summer rodeo that weekend, so we bought tickets and stayed to watch it. The rodeo was a 2 or 3 night event and we went on Saturday night. Suddenly, the town had tripled or quadrupled in size to about 6,000 or 8,000 people and all of them were at the rodeo grounds (every town has a rodeo grounds). What a fun evening of old fashioned all-American entertainment that was. Almost every competitor at the event was from some place within 100 miles of Three Forks and it seemed like most of the crowd knew most of the competitors. Tickets were $10 but you also had to pay to park (a $2 fee that went to the local FFA or 4-H club). That evening was worth every penny of its $22 price tag.
When people ask me my favorite sporting activities, I usually say "anything sport that involves horses, motorcycles, snow skiing, or guns usually ranks pretty high on my list." The occasional round of golf isn't bad either. In my experience, all of those activities taste better in the Rockies.
In this day and age, I figure that keeping up with Gamecock sports won't be any more difficult that it is up here in the DC area. I see far more USC sports now than I ever did growing up in SC when Bob Fulton and Tommy Suggs were my portal to the Gamecocks. It will be disorienting watching the occasional football game kick off at 10am, but I can probably get used to that.
