My Southern Journey (29 page)

Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn, says the South’s devotion to college football probably reaches that far, to a time before there even was any football, to defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, “to a whole lot of times when we just got the hell beat out of us, as a culture.”

Reconstruction starved us. Then, the Ku Klux Klan swept candidates into pretty much every elected office in the state of Alabama and burned crosses on the skyline across the South. The rest of the nation, not that it was without sin, looked down in disdain. Then, just after Christmas 1925, the Alabama football team boarded a train for California, for the 1926 Rose Bowl, and fought back against that derision, even if the players did not know they were doing so at the time. Those young men drew, Flynt explains, “on a long history of not being afraid,” of the hottest days of endless rows of cotton or a million bales of hay. “It’s not like you’re unprepared for a little physical suffering,” he says,
and next to the pain of just living down here, football was, well, like playing games.

Not knowing any of this, the rest of the nation gave Alabama no chance against its Rose Bowl opponent, the vaunted University of Washington, but Southerners knew there was too much at stake to lose. “Even the president of Auburn sent a telegram,” says Flynt, “telling them, ‘You are defending the honor of the South, and God’s not gonna let you lose this game.’ ” Halfback Johnny Mack Brown ran, as one writer described, like a “slippery eel,” and the South won something of great value, at last.

Years later, as the apparatus of Southern politics threw itself violently into the shameful oppression of civil rights, white Southern players again won national championships and acclaim on the gridiron, as front-page headlines belittled and ridiculed the region for its backwardness. College football was not a cure, not a tonic for what was wrong in the South, merely a balm.

Then, as black athletes finally made their way into predominantly white universities, they fought their own battles on those Southern fields, “for something else,” says Flynt, for a place not only of acceptance in the greater society and therefore a heroic place in the national history, but also a place in that shining legacy of championships, until the color line in college football finally faded away. Most of us cannot even imagine a team of any other character. And through it all, the winning continued ’til it became expectation.

Other parts of the country would try to condemn us for the South’s very success, which made about as much sense, Flynt says, as our condemning someone else for being good at math. Our climate, culture, and history made us supreme at this thing. “Why should you put us down,” he says, “because we are?”

Elsewhere, fans still grumble that Southern colleges are dominant at football for reasons that are, amusingly, no different from what makes their own programs successful from time to time. They say we have better athletes because we have lower academic standards, but that notion has become a glass house in which other colleges in other regions no longer wish to throw stones. Because history has shown that all programs have intelligent young men, some who possess the potential of Rhodes Scholars, and other young men who think you spell that r-o-a-d-s. But region has little to do with which teams have more of the latter. Alabama’s graduation ranking, as Saban points out, was third among BCS schools last season, behind Penn State and Stanford.

A recruiting scandal has also proved to have no geographical bias, as much as other programs would like to pretend it only happens, down here. USC, for instance, the place where Reggie Bush’s Heisman once sat, could not be farther from the South unless it was floating in the Pacific on a barge. Intolerance for losing has no geography either—losing coaches are fired, even in places with ice fishing. The people who say “They’re football-crazy down there” probably play on something called Smurf Turf, or wear blocks of foam-rubber cheese on their heads. The people who say “Football is religion down there” should be reminded that we did not invent Touchdown Jesus.

And the greatest scandal of college football, the greatest darkness, did not descend on the South but in Happy Valley, a tragedy beyond comprehension for another storied program, one that would rewrite a legend. The entire history of Southern football, in all its fanaticism, with all its lust for winning, has nothing to compare. But like SEC commissioner Mike Slive said, there is a warning in that lesson for everyone, including us.

We do lose, of course. We feel the air grow thick when we do. Our limbs grow heavy. I have stood on the beautiful campuses of Southern universities and seen what, I swear, was a kind of graying of the landscape, as if losing had bleached out the beautiful red of the bricks and green of the lawns. It cannot be true, of course, but it feels true, and it lingers for days. Books are read, papers written, problems solved. But it feels a little like the day after Christmas.

“It’s absolutely spiritual; there is no tomorrow,” says Mike Foley, master lecturer and Hugh Cunningham professor in Journalism Excellence at Florida, who has a Gator tattooed on his right shoulder. He got it in a fit of youthful exuberance and impetuousness. He was 40-something. Somewhere in this steamy landscape—Ole Miss, perhaps, or Vanderbilt—a regular-season loss is not the end of the world, and there are such things as moral victories and good college tries.

Not Tuscaloosa. Not Baton Rouge. Not Auburn. Not Athens. Not Fayetteville, where they wear rubber pigs on their heads and yell “Sooooooieeeeeeee.” Judges do that.

Deacons. Florists. Presidents.

“It’s a pretty damn hard league,” said Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin, when asked by reporters about playing his first SEC West schedule. As my grandmother, God rest her soul, would say, he might need prayer. Yet the supremacy will someday end—probably
on a bad call. “This, surely, can’t last forever,” says Rable, the Alabama professor from Ohio. “Texas will be back. USC will be back.”

Says Foley: “God, that would be horrible. Lane Kiffin…” Tennessee people still hope to catch him in a crosswalk for what he did to them.

Says Rable: “I was in Ohio and they already had T-shirts in the malls that read ‘Urban Nation.’”

I wish, often, that we cared as deeply about other things here in my native South as we do football. “It has become,” Rable says, “what’s important,” sometimes to exclusion. But we are going to be football crazy anyway, my wife once told me, so we might as well beat everyone else. The fact is, it lifts our hearts. It always has.

In the winter of 1993, in an attic apartment in Cambridge, Mass., I sat homesick and watched Alabama beat the trash-talkin’ Hurricanes—I mean beat them like they
stole somethin’
—to win its first national championship since Bear died. Late that night I walked through a deserted Harvard Yard, through snow and bitter cold, and I thought I might yell “Roll Tide,” though no one else would hear. I did it anyway.

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: September 2011

I
know why I love it. It goes back to nights in Paul Snow Stadium, where the Fighting Gamecocks of Jacksonville State whipped Troy, or Tennessee-Martin, or Delta State. In my memory we always won, as, in dreams, you never hit bottom when you fall. My uncles, good men, took me there as a boy in the 1970s and bought me hot dogs wrapped in aluminum foil. We always sat up high, so I could see the stadium fill with people I knew: the insurance man, the lady from the Five-and-Dime, and every pretty girl in five counties.

The JSU school colors were red and white but might as well have been dark blue, from all the company jackets from U.S. Pipe or Goodyear. If it rained we hid under Caterpillar caps and programs, but not umbrellas. We did not believe in umbrellas. On occasion, one would unfurl in the seats in front of us, and my uncles would grumble that “We’d see some football, if it wasn’t for all these parasols.” Our heroes were Ralph Brock—he could throw a football from here to Edwardsville—and Boyce Callahan, who ran for his life. He’s a chiropractor now. He was like lightning, then.

We never looked away at halftime. With a great pounding of drums and sounding of brass, the Marching Southerners, in perfect step, would sweep onto the grass. They played music from our history, and, if you listened close, you might hear a tuba
player sing:
In the sky the bright stars glittered/ On the bank the pale moon shone/ And twas from Aunt Dinah’s quilting party/ I was seeing Nellie home.

And the beautiful Marching Ballerinas, in red velvet, kicked their white boots high in the air. Why do we love football? How could we not?

I teach now in the shade of the great stadium at The University of Alabama, and though my joy of football has hardened in middle age it has not faded. On Sundays, after a rare loss, the air goes stale. It seems harder to move. I have friends who say it is the same in Auburn, Athens, anyplace people live and die on a holding call, and joke that their new state flower is a satellite dish with high definition.

When Chris Roberts, an Alabama professor, explains our fascination “to the infidels,” he describes his route to work: “Past the Bryant Bank on the left, then over the Bryant Bridge. Eventually, I turn onto Bryant Drive, home of the Bryant Museum and Bryant Conference Center. I park near the northwest end zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Then I walk past the Bryant statue. If they’re not convinced, I show my ATM card—the one with Bear Bryant on it.”

I do not know if I would love it as much if I had discovered it at an age of chat rooms, of anonymous bad-mouthing. I learned to love it in an age of newspapers, of fat Sunday sports pages filled with the lore of the game, all but lost in a time when every quarter-back’s tweet from behind a velvet rope sends ESPN all atremble.

Would I? Probably. “How could a game be better?” said Alabama fan Ken Fowler, who, for seven decades, has suffered and exulted through Saturday afternoons. “People united in common interest, in the outdoors, against one enemy. And, it reminds us that all in this world is not hurricanes and volcanoes.”

I hope your teams, at least in distant memory, always win. Unless they are playing one of mine.

ALL SAINTS’ DAY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: October 2011

M
aybe it is why this city is so hard to kill, even when drowned. New Orleans is too comfortable with death to be consumed by it.

In most American cities, this is the season of the witch, though the witch may decide at the last minute to be a ballerina, or a fairy princess, or a Hannah Montana, though I am not altogether certain what that is, and am almost surely three years behind on what the cool kids are wearing. It is the same in New Orleans, where real witches, vampires, and such are said to convene, and not just on Halloween, but on Saint Patrick’s Day, Boxing Day, the third Monday in January, and whatever that odd, tacked-on day is in a leap year.

October 31 is a wild night in the Crescent City, where voodoo priests in tall, black top hats glare from behind white greasepaint, and zombies wail and stagger along Bourbon Street, though that might have been just a bunch of frat boys on the way back from Pat O’Brien’s. I once saw a young woman dressed as a New York City taxicab, wearing mostly just a license plate. I blushed and looked away... eventually.