BRAVE HEART
Whenever he's being confronted by overzealous Vol fans, Mitton says he can "...just reason with them..." He has yet to be physically threatened.

Why would an inveterate Florida fanatic move into the heart of Vol country? To give fans here a taste of the Orange and Blue, whether they like it or not.

by John Clendenon

Robert Mitton has taken all the usual precautions with parking and seating and it has still come down to this. As he eyeballs "The Swamp Thing's" doused rear fender, he ponders the possible culprits. Either a mischievous Vol fan has dumped a beer on his Gator-decorated town car or a giant condor has dropped a scud missile in the parking lot of the Cumberland Avenue sports bar. Duh. He knows he doesn't really need DNA results for this one.

In Mitton's mind, justice will be served Sept. 19 on an Orange and Blue platter a few hundred yards away at Neyland Stadium, in this year's annual Game of the Century. And next time he will just take a table closer to the window so he can better observe "The Swamp Thing," a 1964 blue Pontiac Tempest plastered with Gator stickers and flags. Mitton, who was actually listed a couple years ago as R Gator in the Knoxville phone book, is a Florida football fanatic who purposely flaunts it big time right here in Vol country. He owns six other vehicles but drives "The Swamp Thing" around the UT campus and the Old City to attract attention. Dressed head to toe in Gator stuff on this early August day, he just smiles when a waitress wanders over to his table a few minutes earlier at the sports bar and says with a grin, "It's a little early for your type, isn't it?" She obviously hadn't overheard Mitton telling an acquaintance, "Peyton Manning is the most overrated quarterback in the history of college football."

Between the car and outrageous comments like that, one wonders how Mitton has escaped having the crap knocked out of him at least once since he moved here 43 months ago. There's no denying how life-and-death serious a lot of people here feel about UT football and how much they hate Florida. Maybe it's because he comes across as a fun-loving, 43-year-old kid who picks his spots—he rarely goes to sports bars, for instance, and his strongest opinions seem to be reserved for friends and neutral observers. And not many people can outrun a car.

Still, as "The Swamp Thing" leaves the campus strip and winds its way to Mitton's West Knoxville home—he has promised to show off his Gator memorabilia—the passenger visualizes a man-made moat with computer-simulated Gators and a neighbor screaming, "For the last time I'm telling ya to haul your ass back to Florida!" But we digress.

People choose a place to live for various reasons—job, family, climate, the ever-popular quality of life factor as defined by some university geek. Robert Mitton, obviously marching to a different beat in life, admits he moved to Knoxville "to let Tennessee fans know this is really Little Orange Country; UT holds no claim to being the real orange." Va voom. The seed was planted when he attended his first UT-Florida game in 1994 at Neyland: "That's when I realized how much they hated the Gators," he recalls. "We won 31-0 and I figured that was an open invitation to move here."

He moved from Baltimore the following January and hasn't missed a UT-Florida game nor any of the Gator bowl games since. He claims he's not trying to irritate Vol fans. "Following the Gators is my hobby. And traveling to games has replaced going to rock concerts like Springsteen, the Pretenders, King Crimson, The Damned. I throw myself into everything. I'm just having good, clean fun."

Mitton grew up in Florida near St. Petersburg and says he was basically raised a Gator by his parents. "And, in school, Friday is college day when you dress up in the colors of your favorite team. The teachers almost made you choose between Florida and Florida State; most of them were graduates of one or the other." The confirmed bachelor never attended college and is an electrician by trade. He says Knoxville is also a good hub for a new business he started in 1990 because most of his travel is on the Eastern seaboard. Mitton specializes in the installation and isolation of ceiling-mounted surgical microscopes used for vascular and neurosurgery and says he was the first person to give written guarantees they wouldn't vibrate.

"My friend was selling them in Florida and told me about the vibration problem. Engineers told me it was impossible to correct, but I did some research, brainstormed an idea. I have no competition." For this special talent he gets $750 an hour, although the work is sporadic and he is not wealthy. He has, however, enough loot to follow his favorite team on the road and buy an estimated $25,000 worth of Gator collectibles.

Most of Mitton's taunting is done by driving the "The Swamp Thing" around town ("I love its lines.") and he says it has escaped serious damage, save a few broken flags and ripped-off stickers. His specialty is the pre-game spin around campus, "but come game time I'll take it home and come back with another vehicle. And when I go shopping I'll take another car." He claims there are days when he gets as many thumbs up as finger salutes. He also says he has never been physically threatened.

"When someone gets a little carried away when I'm out I'll just reason with them, get them to laugh, say 'Hey, it's only a game.'" And there's always Walter, a friend from Atlanta—"he's huge, about 6-foot-4, 260 pounds"—who will once again serve as a game day presence next month at Neyland Stadium. Mitton's only stadium confrontation occurred in Birmingham several years ago at the SEC title game when "a 70-year-old Alabama fan threw a Coke at me when I kept screaming 'Orange! Orange!' after the Gators faked a punt and scored on a 30-yard touchdown pass. But the other Alabama fans in our section apologized for him."

So Mitton has basically survived the living-in-the-home-of-the-enemy-by-choice Knoxville experience without getting his car or body trashed. He was evicted from his Old City apartment, however, in the fall of '96, when his landlord, Underground owner Harold McKinney, claimed Mitton broke his lease by flying Gator flags out the window of his second-floor digs the weekend of the UT-Florida game. Mitton took McKinney to court four months later, losing to "the good ole boy network—can you believe even though I took the flags down the judge ruled against me because they said a flagpole holder was still on the wall."

Mitton's homestead is an unpretentious ranch house. A neighbor sits on her porch and talks on a cell phone while a child plays in the yard. Both ignore the arrival of "The Swamp Thing," the only Gator thing in sight, although some might argue that is more than enough. No orange and blue carpeting or birds singing the Florida fight song are inside as Mitton leads a visitor to "the room." The large living area is basically a shrine to Steve Spurrier and Danny Wuerffel.

The walls are decorated with autographed prints of Florida's two Heisman Trophy winners, including one of Wuerffel that cost $1,100 framed. There is one of Spurrier kicking the winning field goal against Auburn in 1966 that clinched the Heisman. Mitton got it for $400 at an art store in Tampa. He points to a two-foot stack of Gator T-shirts near his computer. "I've got over 400," he says, "including 53 national championship T-shirts. I've got a lot of stuff in storage downtown. Some day I'm going to open an R Gator Collectibles."

He pauses to open the door and let Wuerffel, his cat, out to play with the little girl next door, then returns to demonstrate his "interactive, multi-media" setup. Told that he's speaking to a computer-impaired person, he explains that the Apple is interactive with his home entertainment set, a 37-inch television perched nine feet off the floor.

"I can download clips—video and audio—from the Internet and shoot them on the screen and get stuff off Primestar into the computer and save it," he says. He shoots a couple of his favorite clips onto the big screen—replays of Lawrence Wright's bone-rattling hit on Joey Kent in 1995 and Tony George's 89-yard interception return for a TD that sealed the Vols' fate last year.

His take on this year's game: "I'm taking bets. If they give me 3-1 odds, I'll bet Tennessee won't score an offensive touchdown. The Gators will win 31-0." And while we're at it, his spin on Knoxville: "I'm leaving after this football season, probably to Atlanta. I'm tired of living on the farm; this isn't a city, it's just a town. It's the worst restaurant town in America—they're all chains. And the shopping's terrible, too." Va voom.

On the return trip downtown, a car catches up with "The Swamp Thing." A teenager sticks her head out the back window and yells, "We're Gator haters!" Mitton smiles. Been there, done that.