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UCLA football: Tennessee fans don’t miss the boat

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UCLA fans may think they have a sophisticated Bruins Nation, but does it have a Navy? Tennessee does.

It’s Friday afternoon in Knoxville and already on the Tennessee River there are boats docking, decked out in orange, to await Saturday’s game against UCLA. This is a tradition that goes back more than 40 years.

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Former Volunteers’ broadcaster George Mooney found a way to circumvent heavy traffic on game day in 1962. He navigated his boat down the Tennessee River to Neyland Stadium and the idea caught on. Within a few years the Volunteer Navy was officially launched.

“When we first did this, we had a little runabout,’ Mooney once told the Knoxville News Sentinel. “But there was no dock, so we had to tie the boat to a tree and climb over the rocks and weeds to get to the stadium.”

By game time Saturday there will be hundreds of boats docked at Volunteer Landing.

According to newspaper accounts, at least once over the years -- believed to be during the 1975 LSU game -- the public address announcer at the stadium has had to ask a fan to “please move your boat” so a barge could continue on the river.

Meanwhile, this will not be the Bruins last foray to the East Coast. The Bruins play at Rutgers in 2016, but Coach Rick Neuheisel said he is open to games being arranged sooner than 2016, if the schedule permits. UCLA officials had talks with Auburn this year to open 2010 in the Georgia Dome, but the idea fizzled when Auburn officials cooled on the idea.

“We got a responsibility to our kids, and our future kids, to [play in the east,]” Neuheisel said. “We have to create those experiences and expose our program to other portions of the country if we’re trying to become a national program.”

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-- Chris Foster

Chris.foster@latimes.com

Twitter.com/cfosterlatimes

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