Two brothers, their late father and the Panthers’ game in Germany that connects them
There’s a photo, taken on Christmas Eve 2011, that captures Lewis Cauthen III in his element.
Lewis is wearing jeans, sunglasses and a time-beaten Sam Mills jersey. His youngest son, Benjamin, is smiling to his right. His eldest son, Jackson, is standing to his left. The three of them are at a tailgate at a vacant lot in Charlotte before the Panthers play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and everything seems right in the world.
The grill’s going. Benjamin’s hair is getting battered by the wind. Jackson has his arm linked over his father’s shoulder, and the 20-something-year-old’s tongue is goofily hanging out for the camera, doing its best Michael Jordan impression.
Once upon a time, this was how it always was.
“Every Sunday, we were going,” Jackson Cauthen said. The now-38-year-old chuckled as he reflected on the weekly ritual that brought two sons close to their father, Lewis — a PSL owner since 1995 and the biggest Panthers fan they’ve ever known. “It didn’t matter if we were hung over. Or if it was raining. Nothing like that would stop us. Sunday, we were going to the game.”
“Honestly,” Benjamin Cauthen, now 32, added, “I feel like it’s been my whole life kinda thing.”
Life has changed a bunch since that Christmas Eve. Jackson now lives in Charleston, S.C., with his wife, Natasha. Benjamin now lives in Stuttgart, Germany, and works as an English teacher. And Lewis passed away in July 2023. The last time the brothers were in each others’ presence, they said, was at Lewis’ funeral.
Soon, however, Benjamin and Jackson will be together again.
Honoring their late father.
Doing what the three loved to do.
Jackson and Benjamin will be at Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany, on Sunday, when the Carolina Panthers play the New York Giants in what will be the second international game in franchise history. The two brothers discussed this possibility when the schedule was officially confirmed in May, but they and their dad have been giddy with excitement about this possibility for years — really since the Panthers acquired marketing rights to Germany in 2021.
The moment, considering where the game is being played and when, seems perfectly tailored to them.
Jackson plans to depart Thursday afternoon to Stuttgart, about a two-and-a-half hour drive northwest of Munich. The two will head to the game on Sunday. And then the brothers plan to explore the rest of the European country the following week. And while they’re doing all their dad’s favorite things — wandering from tailgate to tailgate, cheering for the Panthers, embarking on adventure in an unknown place — they know Lewis will be with them.
In many ways, they can feel he’s with them already.
“I’m excited for it, been emotional about it,” Benjamin said.
“We’re doing this to honor his memory,” the youngest son added.
And to make new memories, too.
A Panthers fan since Day 1
One of the earliest recollections Jackson has of his father is when he was about 9 years old, walking around the upper levels of Memorial Stadium in Clemson.
It was the Panthers’ first season in 1995. He and his dad had been to the franchise’s first workouts at Winthrop in Rock Hill. They went to Spartanburg for part of the first training camp. And now they were at one of the home games in Death Valley, trying to level up their seats.
“We were in the sky box, and kind of just opening doors,” Jackson recalled. “If someone’s in one, we’d say, ‘Oh sorry, wrong room.’ And we’d go until we found an empty one and watch it up there.”
This sense of adventure was in the eldest Cauthen’s blood. His father was in the military, and thus Lewis moved around a bunch as a kid. He lived in a variety of places, including Virginia and also parts of Germany — another connection to the European nation — before settling in Mount Pleasant, S.C., and graduating from The Citadel. He went on to become a dentist and establish Cauthen Family Dental Care in York, where Jackson was born and raised.
And Lewis loved football. Loved the tailgates, the grill smoke, the music. And Jackson loved what his dad loved. The two of them went to every home game after Jackson’s 9th birthday — and when Jackson was older, they’d travel to away games. Green Bay. New Orleans. Atlanta. Buffalo. Cleveland. Pittsburgh “a couple times.” Rarely did they have plans; always did they have fun.
“We never had a plan besides going to the game on Sunday,” Jackson said. “Everything else would kind of just fall into place.”
Benjamin came to love football a bit later. Benjamin, six years younger than Jackson, moved to the Clemson area with his mom, Susan Mauro, when his parents split up. But Benjamin has memories galore with his father: of being at the beach, of going on the boat at Lake Wylie, of doing “anything on the water.” When Benjamin was a junior at College of Charleston in 2013, he studied abroad in Germany, and his father visited him while he was out there. Lewis bunked with Benjamin for a few weeks “in my tiny little European dorm,” as Benjamin remembers it. “It was pretty funny.”
When asked about his favorite memory with his dad at a Panthers game, Benjamin, too, had a ton to pull from. He ultimately settled on the NFC Championship game in Charlotte in 2016 — a few months before he’d move to Europe for good. He still remembers his dad looking at the scoreboard as the clock ticked down, the Panthers seconds away from the Super Bowl, Lewis’ eyes welling with joy.
Benjamin was quick enough to get a picture — “one of my favorite pictures of my dad.”
Having someone to share the Panthers with
As time changed where his sons lived and the fabric of their lives, Lewis’ Panthers fandom lived on. It remained a way he connected with his sons — and how his sons connected with him.
For instance, every week, Jackson would get a call from his father. It would be about the latest thing Matt Rhule said, or the hottest trade rumors, or the Panthers’ newest draft pick in Bryce Young.
“It was something that we could talk about without having to really talk about anything, you know what I mean?” Jackson said. It was a loose reason to pick up the phone and hear each others’ voices, to check in on each other’s lives, to gush about his grandchildren or his daughter (Jackson and Benjamin’s middle sister, Margaret).
Football, in so many words, served as a ceremonial preamble before the sons and the father concluded the call by saying, “I love you.”
“Since he passed away, it’s been different keeping up with everything going on,” Jackson said. “I really didn’t have to keep up because he would kind of tell me, ‘You hear about this? What about that?’ Trades, anything.”
The past few months, Jackson said, “I didn’t really have anything to watch it for.”
Lewis passed in July 2023. A few months before, news broke that the Panthers would be playing in Germany sometime in the 2024 season. Lewis was excited. It was something he insisted the three of them do, a reuniting of his two boys and him and the team that connects them all. When the date was officially set, even with their father gone, the brothers knew they had to go. The day’s almost here.
The last thing left to do?
Benjamin and Jackson agree:
Summon a win.
“I’ve been waiting for him to pull some damn strings up there, talking to all his buddies up in heaven, trying to get some wins going,” Jackson said. Some emotions crept into his voice. “But it’s coming. It’s coming.”
A new memory to add
As you might expect, the Cauthen brothers don’t have a packed itinerary. Ask Jackson the plans outside the football game, and he’ll say he and Benjamin will “do it up good.” Ask Benjamin, and he’ll offer a similar response, saying that he expects to catch up with his brother a lot and reminisce about their shared No. 1 fan — who also happened to be a No. 1 fan of the Panthers.
There is one thing Benjamin wants to do, though.
One new memory to add.
“There’s a museum in Munich, and it’s on the main strip as you head to the town hall, and it’s got the big Glockenspiel bells and everything,” Benjamin said. The youngest son then went on to explain how, while back home for his father’s funeral last summer, he spent some time running through old photos in his childhood home. He noticed that there were a bunch of photos from this same place in Munich — in front of the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum (German hunting and fishing museum). He found one with his mother and his stepdad; one with his grandmother and uncle; one with Lewis and himself, when the father visited the son on study abroad.
“Now that I’m going with Jackson,” he said, “I definitely gotta get a picture in front of this museum.”
Another family tradition to tend to.
Another connection to their Sam Mills-loving, Panthers-praising dad.
Another way, as they always have, to make the trio smile.
