Now that I live in Florida, I live in the hotbed of the college football world.

People here worry less about winning the National Championship. They'll settle for a state championship, which, for years was almost the equivalent of a national title.

Now that Florida State and Miami pretty much suck, it's not quite as competitive as it used to be. Couple that with the growing success of such schools as the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida and you now have five very solid programs all in one state.

Florida has so much high school football talent that nearly every major college program in America literally feasts at the "Sunshine State" table. A school can only sign so many top-notch athletes. Some pretty terrific players, who want to stay in state, are bound to end up in places like Orlando at UCF and Tampa at USF. Many others gravitate to Georgia, South Carolina or Clemson.

Say what you wish about football rivalries, there is none greater than South Carolina versus Clemson. Carolina fans pull for two teams - the Gamecocks and whoever is playing "Climpson" that particular day. They love to kid about it. How do you get to "Climpson"? You go north till you smell it and west till you step in it.

Clemson fans are just as bad, constantly picking on the "chickens" that label themselves as Gamecocks.

What do you get when you cross a "Climpson" graduate with a gorilla? You get one of two things: a gorilla with a low I-Q or a very hairy county agent.

This Carolina graduate was flying down the highway one day when a highway patrolman pulled him over. The patrolman asked, "Son, do you a governor on this truck?" He responded, "No sir… the governor… he's over there in the capital. That's fertilizer you smell!"

My favorite pastime was going to Carolina football games and tailgating. The late Craig Kelly, an attorney and sports agent, was a partner of mine in several ventures and we each joined forces to donate a couple of bucks to Carolina's scholarship program, mainly to get 50 yard-line tickets and a parking space in the shadows of Williams-Brice stadium.

On the days that it rained, we ate in the scholarship donors lounge, but if the weather was pretty, we always tailgated, feeding as man as 100 people out of the back of my old pickup truck.

Our favorite tailgate food was a Beaufort Stew, all of which was finger food and could be cooked on the spot and eaten with out a utensil. I would throw my huge potbelly black pot and cooker into the back of the pickup truck and we were in business.

To cook a Beaufort Stew, you start by boiling a pot of water. Next, I throw in Polish Kielbasa sausage and let them cook thoroughly, marinating the water with the oils of the sausage and flavoring it nicely. Next, we toss in the corn on the cob, preferably from Zellwood, Florida, the corn capital of this part of the world.

Finally, I used big baskets to lower those beautiful Carolina shrimp into the boiling water. Don't leave the shrimp in too long. Nothing is worse than overcooked shrimp. I pull the entire batch out and throw it into tin pans and people eat till their heart's delight. This is precisely how I arrived at 305 pounds of weight, causing me to take drastic measures to get down to my current playing weight.

Our tailgating extravaganza was so popular that the University of South Carolina featured us in one of their football programs one year.

God I miss those days. Now I relegated to watching USC and Clemson on ESPN.