You would be hard pressed to find a bigger football fan than Billy Ott.
There are a lot of super fans who are dedicated to their team and follow them religiously. There aren’t that many who have shown as much dedication and support as Ott has over the past six decades. His loyalty to the Berkeley High Football team has been constant since 1964.
Ott, at the age of 76, attended his 700th Stags Football game Oct. 16. There he saw Berkeley defeat school-district rival Goose Creek 45-6.
“Some of us just bleed blue and gold,” Ott said. “We have a saying that we all live by ‘students today, leaders tomorrow, Stags forever.’ It’s a feeling of tradition, loyalty. I think I started it to have a Friday night out, plus it gave the wife a break from me.”
He never played football or was very interested in sports when it began, but it was cheap and his interest quickly developed.
“I liked seeing the boys play their hearts out and it became a habit,” he said. “The fellowship with the fans from Berkeley and other schools became a Friday night thing and (traditions grew) as the years ran by.”
He’s put a lot of mileage on his cars traveling to away games, but loved every minute of it. On Oct. 9 he made the trip to Carolina Forest. That evening marked another milestone for the Stags super fan since the Carolina stadium is the 100th different venue where he has watched Berkeley play over the years.
“I’ve been all over the state, Columbia, Greenville, Spartanburg,” he said. “I think probably, the longest run for a year was when we went to Class 3A in 2010 and traveled to Camden, then to Midland Valley past Aiken and then to Myrtle Beach where we suffered a playoff loss.”
He doesn’t miss a Stags’ game unless he has too. To his recollection, he has only missed four since he began.
“I missed my first game in September of 1996,” he said. “I thought I had pneumonia and went into hospital. They found cancer in my left lung and cut half of it out. I was in hospital when we played Sumter, but was out for the next game at Spring Valley. The second one I missed was in 2016. I had A Fib and once again was in hospital when the Stags nipped Hanahan.”
