JOE MORRISON ONLY SHOWS UP TO YOUR PARTY IN A LIMO

What you need to know about former South Carolina coach Joe Morrison: He is the kind of man a local limo company would use in their ad in the 1980s.

That means a few things. It means that Joe Morrison had some Ric Flair to him, and could conceivably be the type of man to pull off—nay, require a limo to meet him as he disembarked from what in retrospect appears to be a perilously tiny private jet. This checks out with everything else Joe Morrison did as a coach at South Carolina. He was the guy who introduced the tradition of playing “2001” before kickoffs, actually won a good number of games in Columbia and got them to a #2 ranking at one point in the 1984 season, and made the “Black Magic” uniforms a thing for South Carolina. He smoked on the sideline, had half the team on steroids (which became a scandal later), and had a mistress who followed him to Columbia from his old gig at New Mexico (which became less of a scandal than one might think, actually.)

He was also sort of like a wrestler in that he died very suddenly at the age of 51 after playing racquetball with defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn and a few buddies. Is it super South Carolina to have your best coach not named Steve Spurrier drop dead after coaching just six seasons at the school? Yes, yes it is, particularly if the stretch afterwards for the program is one long desolation of middling performances at best and disasters at worst.

It also means he was at least local cable ad famous enough to merit a tidy check and probably complimentary limo service from a Charleston car company. And do you have that? And if not, then why? What are you even doing with your life if you’re not showing up to restaurants in Charleston in a stretch limo and all-black? What, reader, are you indeed doing with yourself, besides not living your best 1988 life?*

*Note: everyone in the 1980s either drove a stretch limo, or was driven in one. This was the entirety of the Reagan/Bush campaign platform. It was INSANELY POPULAR.