RM: This is written by Teresa Morris, a native of Athens, Alabama.

Sweet Home...Athens, Alabama

*How did PR first get your attention?

Our girls were in Elementary school when Coach Rivers came to Athens
High. Being the ages that our girls were, they started asking to go to
football games. They wanted to go because all their friends were going.
We wanted to check out this new coach and his son that we had been
hearing about. The buzz around town was that he was a really good player
and that most importantly, Coach Rivers didn’t play favorites with his
team.

It didn’t take long to find Philip on the sidelines. He was always as
excitable as he is now. Maybe more so because he had that reckless high
school abandon thing going for him back then. He was on the sidelines,
with his head stuck in everything, watching every detail that went on
but at the same time, he was all over the place talking to all his
teammates.

People around here eat, breathe, and sleep football. It’s that way with
all sports, but football is king. Athens has had some really good QB’s
through the years. We’ve had some good coaches. But Coach Rivers brought
something new to the table. And, there on the sidelines with him, was
Philip. The team became fun to watch again. They just never really
seemed to be out of a game. Even with a loss, there was something
different. There was an electricity about the team that wasn’t there
before. A 'fire', I guess you could say. As the football season quickly
went by and Philip took over as quarterback, it became clear that a huge
part of that fire and electricity was Philip Rivers.

Next to football, there’s small town gossip, or call it 'loving concern
for your fellow human beings'. ;-) But with Philip Rivers there was only
one type of gossip-- The 'sticky sweet make you feel good about life' kind.

He was the kid you’d sit in the stands and hear these almost too good to
be true stories about.

How he’d walk his baby sister around the neighborhood in her stroller
when he got home from football practice.

How he’d seen a group of much younger kids in the neighborhood playing a
game of backyard football during a birthday party, and he went over to
join them and take pictures with them all.

How he was the one at high school parties who insisted on driving home
the one’s who had too much too drink. How after a graduation ceremony,
he first went to his little brother’s baseball game, still in his dress
pants and tie, took out a folding chair and watched the game instead of
partying with his classmates.

The football team would go to the Elementary schools and read to the
kids. The kids also had “football buddies” that they wrote letters to
each week. Around here, everything was connected to Friday Night Lights
and football and all the kids were totally taken in by Philip Rivers.
The little boys wanted to be him. The little girls giggled when he
walked by. The parents wanted a son just like him and hoped and prayed
their little girls grew up to marry someone just like him. He always had
a smile on his face and honestly, in the many years since the Rivers
family first moved to Athens, I’ve never heard one bad word about any
member of that family. In a town like this, where gossip and football
reign supreme... that says so much.

Then there are the stories about Philip and Tiffany.

Philip’s claims of love at first sight way go back to the middle school
years. Here they are, years later, having moved away from family and
friends for Philip to attend college, and now clear across the country
to California, married, with three beautiful little girls and a living
an absolute fairy tale. You want to try to explain to the teenage girls
around here that all boys are bums and that they are up to no good?
Don’t even go there. They know the drill. Philip Rivers is a prince and
Tiffany is his princess and sometimes your dreams really do come true.
And for some of these now teenage girls, Philip was a “prince” when they
were little bitty things in Elementary school. He was the Quarterback at
Athens High. That was the same as royalty, of course.

To be continued...

Posted by Bo Navarro on November 8, 2006 06:58 PM

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/sports/chargers/cfx/2006/11/sweet_homeathens_alabama...