Mark Woods: In RV City, Florida and Georgia fans like having annual Jacksonville reunion

Donald Joiner set up at the entrance of a row of motorhomes in RV City known as “Alligator Alley." A banner on the side of his Fleetwood RV said: “Win or Lose … Big Shot Gators Come to Booze!”

“I’ve been in this same spot since the early ‘80s," Joiner said, "back when it was a dirt parking lot and the whole place would flood when it rained.”

He walked over to his pickup truck and pulled out several old photos.

Just from the attire in the pictures, you can tell it’s the 1980s. And the RV is an old one. But it’s the same spot across the street from a stadium that has changed names numerous times in the last 40 years.

And there’s Joiner, in his early 20s, standing in ankle-deep water.

He’s 63 now, his long hair and beard turned white. Since he started doing this — he thinks his first year was 1982 — he’s never missed a Florida-Georgia game. He now has seniority on Alligator Alley.

He says he’s seen a lot of good games and plenty of bad ones. (In 1982, Florida lost 44-0.) Win or lose, he keeps coming back to this spot. Not that he has to travel far to get here.

He lives in Jacksonville and owns a construction company on the Northside. So he could easily stay at home, roll out of bed Saturday morning and come down to the stadium before kickoff. But spending a few days in RV City is part of the fun. It’s why he — and others around him — have this Saturday circled on their calendars every year.

He has season tickets for Gators home games and goes to some road games. But he’d hate to see this matchup become like every other one, alternating between Gainesville and Athens.

“It would be crazy to move it,” he said. “It’s tradition."

And, he said, it's different from other games. He pointed beyond Alligator Alley.

"I have a lot of Georgia friends that I talk to during the year on the phone," he said. "We see each other once a year. Here, at this game.”

Millions of reasons why tradition won't end

The question I asked while wandering RV City about 48 hours before kickoff: Do you like having the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville? Or would you rather it be played in Gainesville and Athens?

Granted, asking this question in this setting leads to a skewed answer. Go to a bar in Athens before this game and ask people if they like having a home game in Florida and you might get less consensus. But in my highly unscientific RV City survey, I got an emphatic response. Fans of Florida, Georgia and Alabama (more on that later) said they like having the game here.

There often are rumblings about ending the tradition that goes back to 1933 (interrupted only by two years in the 1990s for stadium renovation). Those rumblings have been a bit louder in recent years. And with the game likely to be moved away from Jacksonville during the latest renovations to EverBank Stadium, some have suggested that break will be a good time for the two schools to rethink playing it here.

The Times-Union recently ran a guest column from a Jacksonville native and UF grad who now is an assistant professor at Troy University in Alabama. He said that growing up in Jacksonville, he attended countless games in Gainesville, but has long avoided the one played in his hometown. He described what happens on the fourth Saturday in October as “an ugly affair that resembles more dive-bar deluge than Southeastern Conference football game,” said he’d never expose his children to it, and argued that it’s time to end the neutral-site matchup.

He isn’t the only one who has said such things — although one colleague who I won’t name said he hears “dive-bar deluge” and considers this a strong selling point.

Others for a variety of other reasons — see some of Georgia coach Kirby Smart’s past comments — have said they’d rather see a traditional home-and-away series.

It seems unlikely that this will happen. Not simply because of tradition, unless you’re talking about the tradition of money driving college football decisions. In this case, each program returns home with more than $3 million each year.

Not that this is what the fans in RV City talked about when asked the question.

A family reunion

A couple of rows over from Alligator Alley, music blared from a RV with an exterior elaborately decorated in a mix of Halloween and Georgia football. An inflatable Georgia helmet/pumpkin. A giant skeleton holding a national champions banner. A half dozen red tents. A couple of awards from previous years proclaiming this RV — owned by Henry Hinjosa of Orlando — as the winner of the “Best Bulldog Spirit” award.

Tony Ramirez, Hinjosa’s cousin, sat in a golf cart in front of the RV, wearing red from head (red baseball hat) to toes (red Nikes), along with red-tinted glasses.

“This is like a family reunion for us,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez, 40, is active duty Navy and lives in Norfolk, Virginia. He grew up in Georgia and first came to Jacksonville with the Navy in 2015. The next year they began their family tradition of gathering in RV City. Since then, the families have grown. He now has a son and a daughter.

He expects to miss next year's game. He'll be deployed. So he was making a point to savor being back in Jacksonville this year.

“This isn’t all about partying,” he said. “It’s about seeing everyone again.”

And by this, he doesn’t just mean family. He means the extended family of RV City. Bulldogs and Gators.

He says he has met Florida fans here that he catches up with every year. And he echoes something Joiner says in Alligator Alley. This is part of what makes this game special — in a way it wouldn’t be if it alternated between Gainesville and Athens.

Ramirez pointed at the nearby RVs and said it’s like a neighborhood, one that comes together once a year.

'Here for the party'

Just around the corner in this neighborhood, Kenya McCall sat in front her RV.

McCall, 52, is from Jacksonville. She and her husband, Thaddeus, are part of a group of five RVs that have been doing this for seven years. Her RV stands out because it’s hard to tell whether they’re Gators or Bulldogs fans — which, it turns out, is because the answer is neither.

“My team is Alabama,” she said.

So while she doesn’t even go to the game, she likes having it in Jacksonville for the same reason as some Gators and Bulldogs.

“I’m here for the party,” she said.

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida Georgia fans in RV City like having game in Jacksonville