Tiger Walk Before each Auburn home football game, thousands of Auburn fans line Donahue Avenue to cheer on the team as they walk from the Auburn Athletic Complex to
Jordan–Hare Stadium. The tradition began in the 1960s when groups of kids would walk up the street to greet the team and get autographs. During the tenure of coach Doug Barfield, the coach urged fans to come out and support the team, and thousands did. Auburn is the first known school to conduct an organized procession of players into the stadium. Today the team, led by the coaches, walks down the hill and into the stadium surrounded by fans who pat them on the back and shake their hands as they walk. The largest Tiger Walk occurred on December 2, 1989, before the first ever home football game against rival
Alabama—the
Iron Bowl. On that day, an estimated 20,000 fans packed the one block section of road leading to the stadium. According to former athletic director David Housel, Tiger Walk has become "the most copied tradition in all of college football." As it grew in popularity, the Tiger Walk has become a fixture for road games. Fans will gather at visiting stadiums and cheer the team on from the buses into the stadium. in Auburn, which marks the transition from downtown Auburn to the university campus, is known as Toomer's Corner. It is named for businessman and State Senator
Sheldon Toomer who founded the Bank of Auburn on the corner of Magnolia Avenue and College Street in 1907. Toomer's Drugs is a small business on the corner that has been an Auburn landmark for over 130 years.
Toomer's Trees and the Rolling Tradition Hanging over the corner were two massive
southern live oak trees, and anytime anything good happened concerning Auburn,
toilet paper could usually be found hanging from the trees. Also known as "rolling the corner" or "rolling Toomer's", this tradition is thought to have originated in the 1950s to celebrate away victories; however, in recent years it has become a way to celebrate anything good that happens concerning Auburn. On January 10, 2011, when Auburn football won the
2011 BCS National Championship Game, a celebration was held at the corner which involved the traditional papering. The trees were removed on April 23, 2013, due to poisoning in 2010. New trees were planted in their place in 2015, and were open to rolling in August 2023.
Toomer's Trees poisoned On January 27, 2011, a man calling himself "Al" and claiming to be from
Dadeville, a town thirty minutes from Auburn, called into
Paul Finebaum's sports talk radio show. "Al" claimed to have poisoned the Toomer's trees with an herbicide called
Spike 80DF (Tebuthiuron) the weekend following the 2010
Iron Bowl. He said he did this in retaliation for photos that he saw in an article in
The Birmingham News that depicted Auburn fans rolling Toomer's Corner after announcement of former University of Alabama head-coach
Paul "Bear" Bryant's death in 1983 as well as of an Auburn #2 (number of 2010 Auburn quarterback
Cam Newton)
Under Armour T-shirt taped to Bryant's statue earlier in the 2010 season. He ended his call by saying, "Roll damn Tide!" An exhaustive search of newspapers found no evidence of Toomer's Corner being rolled upon Bryant's death. The caller's claims prompted Auburn to take soil samples. On February 16, 2011, Auburn officials announced that the live oak trees at Toomer's Corner had been poisoned with a large quantity of Spike 80DF, a herbicide governed by Alabama state agricultural laws and the Environmental Protection Agency; Spike 80DF was not used by Auburn University. Tests of soil samples showed the lowest levels of Spike 80DF to be 0.78ppm, which experts stated was enough to be a "very lethal dose." The highest levels of concentration were measured to be 51ppm. Gary Keever, an Auburn University professor of horticulture and a member of Auburn's Tree Preservation Committee has said "[Spike 80DF] is extremely active and persistent [and] it's likely to be in the soil for 3 to 5 years." Concerns about the poisoned groundwater were dropped following further soil analysis, but later the soil from Toomer's Corner was completely excavated and replaced with untainted soil. Auburn University and city police both launched investigations into the matter. Finebaum later reported that Federal authorities were also involved due to concerns of the herbicide having entered the groundwater. Both Auburn University President
Jay Gogue and University of Alabama Athletic Director
Mal Moore condemned this act. Police traced the call to the home of Harvey Updyke Jr. of Dadeville. Updyke, a retired
Texas state trooper, was taken into custody at 1:26 am CST on February 17, 2011, and charged with one count of criminal mischief, a class C felony in Alabama. On March 22, 2013, he received a 3-year split sentence, which includes 6 months' incarceration and jail credit for time already served. Upon release, Updyke was sentenced to 5 years' supervised probation with a 7 p.m. curfew. He was also prohibited from attending any collegiate sports event and banned from Auburn University property. The efforts made by the university to save the trees proved unsuccessful. "It came to a point where we realized it wasn't going to work, and the amount of poison in the ground was such that the trees were not going to survive," said Mike Clardy, Auburn University's Communications Director. The oak trees at Toomer's Corner were removed on April 23, 2013. On November 8, 2013, Circuit Judge Jacob A. Walker III ruled that Updyke (who had moved to
Louisiana) owed Auburn University $796,731.98 in
restitution, to be paid in installments of $500 per month. Auburn University sought more than $1 million in damages, the greater part of which was based on a soil-analysis estimate of $521,396.74 by the
Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries. Updyke was released to 5 years' supervised probation after having served 104 days of incarceration. He died from natural causes on July 30, 2020, at the age of 71. On February 14, 2015, two 35-foot-tall live oaks were planted to replace the original oaks. The university requested that fans not roll the trees with toilet paper until the Fall 2016 season, to allow the trees to acclimate to their new environment. Despite this precaution, one of the two replacement trees died within a few months and was scheduled to be replaced yet again. Wood from the original oaks was fashioned into memorabilia, the profits going to a scholarship fund. The replacement tree fronting Magnolia Avenue was set on fire on September 25, 2016, during celebrations for Auburn's victory against LSU the previous night. As of October 2016, an assessment of the tree's health revealed that 60–70% of the canopy was dead, and prospects for the tree's survival were not favorable. The other tree fronting College Street, while not damaged by the fire, had failed to become properly established. In February 2017, two 30-foot-tall live oaks were planted to replace the two previous failing trees.
War Eagle There are many stories surrounding the origins of Auburn's battle cry, "War Eagle." The most popular account involves the first Auburn football game in 1892 between Auburn and the
University of Georgia. According to the story, in the stands that day was an old Civil War soldier with an eagle that he had found injured on a battlefield and kept as a pet. The eagle broke free and began to soar over the field, and Auburn began to march toward the Georgia end zone. The crowd began to chant "War Eagle" as the eagle soared. After Auburn won the game, the eagle crashed to the field and died, but according to the legend, his spirit lives on every time an Auburn man or woman yells "War Eagle!" The battle cry also functions as a greeting for those associated with the university. For many years, a live
golden eagle has embodied the spirit of this tradition. The eagle was once housed on campus in The Eagle's Cage, but the aviary was taken down and the eagle moved to the nearby raptor center.
Wreck Tech Pajama Parade The Wreck Tech Pajama Parade originated in 1896, when a group of mischievous Auburn
ROTC cadets, determined to show up the better-known engineers from
Georgia Tech, sneaked out of their dorms the night before the football game between Auburn and Tech and greased the railroad tracks. According to the story, the train carrying the Georgia Tech team slid through town and didn't stop until it was halfway to the neighboring town of
Loachapoka, Alabama, The Georgia Tech team was forced to walk the five miles back to Auburn and, not surprisingly, were rather weary at the end of their journey. This likely contributed to their 45–0 loss. While the railroad long ago ceased to be the way teams traveled to Auburn and students never greased the tracks again, the tradition continues in the form of a parade through downtown Auburn. Students parade through the streets in their pajamas and organizations build floats. This tradition was renewed in 2005 with Georgia Tech returning to Auburn's schedule after nearly two decades of absence.
Rivals Auburn's two traditional rivals are the
University of Alabama and the
University of Georgia. The stretch of games, at the end of the season, against these two schools is known as "Amen Corner". The
Alabama Crimson Tide is the most heated rival, and this rivalry is considered to be one of the most intense in the country. Competitions between the schools are known as the
Iron Bowl. Alabama holds the all-time edge with a record of 50 wins, 37 losses and 1 tie.
Georgia and Auburn compete in the
Deep South's Oldest Rivalry, dating back to 1892. The game was played in
Piedmont Park in
Atlanta,
Georgia. Georgia leads the series 64-56–8 as of the end of the 2023 season. It is one of the longest running and most played series in the NCAA. Auburn also has a heated rivalry with the
LSU Tigers, commonly referred to as the
Tiger Classic. The two share more than just a nickname, as they have both enjoyed success in the SEC's Western Division. Auburn or LSU won at least a share of the SEC Western Division championship eight times between 2000 and 2011, and appeared in the SEC Championship game in seven of those years. Auburn won it outright in 2000, 2004, and 2010, LSU won it outright in 2007, 2011, and LSU won tiebreakers against Auburn in 2001 and 2005, and against Ole Miss in 2003. The only four times Auburn or LSU did not go to Atlanta during that span was 2002 when Arkansas won the three-way tie breaker with the two Tiger teams, in 2006 when Arkansas made it to Atlanta with a win over Auburn, and 2008 and 2009 when Alabama won the division. Some of Auburn's former rivals included the
Florida Gators, the
Tennessee Volunteers, the
Tulane Green Wave, and the
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, each of which was mitigated (or, in the case of Georgia Tech, ended) with the SEC expansion and division restructuring, as well as past long series with the
Clemson Tigers, the
Texas Longhorns, and the
Florida State Seminoles. While basketball does not enjoy the same popularity as football at Auburn, the
Iron Bowl of Basketball is very competitive. It is also popular for the halftime ceremony in which the
Foy-ODK Sportsmanship Award is awarded to the school that won the football matchup earlier that academic year. The baseball team also has in-state rivalries with the
Samford Bulldogs and
Troy Trojans.
Swimming and diving Auburn's swimming and diving team has a fierce rivalry with
Texas, as the two have combined for 17 NCAA National Titles since 1981 (9 for Texas, 8 for Auburn) and between 1999 and 2007 won every national title awarded. The two regularly face-off in a meet during the regular season, Auburn's men own a 12–9 record over the Longhorns. The women just recently began an annual series, with the Tigers winning the series so far 3–1. Texas was the only team to beat the Auburn men between 2001 and 2007. ==References==