You always remember your first time.
Like how Tommy Tuberville celebrated an Egg Bowl win in his first year as Ole Miss head football coach in November 1995 after upsetting favored Mississippi State in Starkville.
Driving back to Oxford with his wife and his mother, he pulled into a small-town convenience
You look just like that guy who just won the Egg Bowl,” the stunned cashier said to a pleasantly surprised Tuberville.
“Yes, ma’am, that’s me,” Tuberville confirmed.
That was a pretty good game,” the cashier replied. “But you’re the last person I thought I’d see in here eating fried chicken right after a game.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m just hungry,” Tuberville said.
Tuberville has never forgotten that exchange with a stranger he never saw before or since.
“I was thinking how I went places all over the state of Mississippi that year and normally nobody knew who I was,” Tuberville recalled a few days ago. “It took winning the Egg Bowl to get somebody to recognize me.”
Right then and there, on a Saturday night in the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, holding a greasy box of fried chicken, Tuberville clearly understood the reverence of Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State.
Tonight in Oxford in the 115th annual Rebels-Bulldogs game and the 92nd Battle for the Golden Egg that started in 1927, Mississippi State’s Joe Moorhead becomes the newest head coach between the two schools to participate in a rivalry that lives and breathes each day of every year from Olive Branch to Biloxi.
Like Moorhead’s MSU predecessor Dan Mullen who was raised in New Hampshire, Moorhead grew up in Pittsburgh far removed from a Southern football rivalry that often leapfrogs the lines of civility and sportsmanship.
