As threatened.
First, let me state up front that I'm not a sports fan. I've never understood the attraction of watching other people play a game. This may make me un-American, or perhaps just mentally deficient in some indefinable way in the eyes of many of you, but please keep in mind that I'm still a decent person nonetheless.*
* If you don't believe me, just ask me and I'll remind you.
I lived in Colorado for many years, during which the Broncos had a shot at the Superbowl a few times (and flubbed it something like three times in a row, if faulty memory serves). I thought Bronco fans had lost their minds, quite frankly. People painted their faces and their cars and their HOUSES orange and blue. People were murdered over football disputes in living rooms. I just thought that was bad. I never had a basis for comparison until I moved to Alabama.
I'd heard about Auburn and Crimson Tide fans now and again, and thought, "That's silly. Why...these aren't even professional teams!" From a football idiot such as myself, it seems illogical that people would get thrown in jail over a professional team, but completely laughable that people would hock their entire future for a college team.
I can be so naive sometimes.
The reality of my situation hit home one day when I was driving back from Atlanta on I-85 and decided to pop into The Mellow Mushroom at Auburn for a fresh pizza and some Purple Haze* on tap.
* Until a few months ago, Montgomery County outlawed all tap beer. No...not kidding. I wish I had a picture of the expression on my face the first time I encountered this rule at a restaurant, where I'd innocently ordered a 22oz Killian's to accompany my steak. I thought the bartender was pulling my leg for sure.
That was a Saturday evening in the autumn. Need I say more? OK. For those of you what haven't had the experience, here's what I found: there was no place to park on the campus, on the roads, in the parking lots, in the town proper or even in people's yards. I do not exaggerate. I drove from the highway to the Mellow Mushroom (~5 mi.), and there was not a place to park within at least 3 miles of the Mushroom, illegal or otherwise. Further--and this was the creepy part--the streets were empty. It was like something from a Stephen King novel. I eventually just drove back out, hit the interstate, went home, and had a sandwich.
On another ill-fated occasion, I was returning from Atlanta a bit later on another Saturday night when I passed Auburn just as the game had (apparently) ended. Until you've driven 50 miles at 80mph at dusk neck-in-neck with hordes of football fans after a game, you just haven't lived.
These two incidents were enough to open my eyes to Alabama's true football disease. I remember talking about this with Lynne, a friend of mine from college who is from Alabama and has since relocated (from North Carolina) to Birmingham. I was hoping for insight of some sort. I learned only that she has the disease as badly as the next Alabamian. I can only suppose it was in remission while she resided out of state. She's an Auburn fan, and said she could give me the complete sports biography of every one of the players. (I ask you to take my word for it that she is, in every other way, a perfectly normal, charming, intelligent woman.) I haven't asked her husband about it, but it wouldn't surprise me if he listed the height and weight, majors and hobbies of each of the players, as well.
All this to say, Alabamians simply lose their minds over football. So I was reading in this book*, see, about Alabama and sports. Here are a couple of memorable quotes:
* Alabama in the Twentieth Century, by Wayne Flynt, University of Alabama Press, 2004.
The presidents of Auburn and the University of Alabama, together with their respective football head coaches, spoke with the media [about the state's education budget]. The object of this strategy was to mobilize football-crazed fans. The apparent supposition underlying the press conference was that in order to have college football it was necessary to have colleges.
...Universities that insisted they were in financial crisis communicated that message at a press conference conducted by two presidents whose annual salaries were nearly a quarter million dollars and two football coaches whose annual salary packages each totaled more than a million dollars. (p. 407)
Two hundred miles south of the Montgomery press conference, the superintendent of Mobile public schools devised his own strategy to stave off proration. He announced the termination of high school football, band, cheerleaders, and other extracurricular activities. The prospect of an autumn without high school football sobered Mobile County's legendary anti-tax population....But as the superintendent explained, "When I said the F-word, in Alabama that's football, it was like I had finally hit the mule on the right end." (p. 408)
[From novelist Nanci Kincaid's description of the ideal college head football coach:]
A defensive coach is better than an offensive coach. Alabama loves defense. Most of the South loves defense. This is because people here are always more interested in stopping forward movement than they are in making any forward movement of their own. (p. 421)
When Bill Curry left Georgia Tech to take the head coaching job at Alabama, his wife told friends that in Alabama "football is a religion." "They said, oh no, no, no, Carolyn. It's much more important than that." (p. 423)
The author outlines much of the corruption in the system, and how both Alabama and Auburn (illegally) set up their own football farms (such as Tuscaloosa High School, where parents of promising players were provided jobs and the children were assured of graduating from high school so they could be recruited by Alabama, was "the most important incubator in the Tide Hatchery" (p. 424)).
One of the more amusing results of football mania in the state was its role in racial integration. For many years, Alabamians refused to admit black players or play against them. Then
the Southern California Trojans came calling on Bear [Bryant's] "skinny [white]boys" at Birmingham's Legion Field. It was a welcome trip home for USC running back Clarence Davis, a Birmingham native. Fullback Cunningham, an African American, ran over, around, and through the Crimson Tide, gaining 230 yards and scoring three touchdowns. Bear claimed Cunningham did more to integrate southern football in 60 minutes than king had done in 20 years. (p. 431)
Shortly thereafter, Bryant began looking for skilled black players in earnest, thus ending segregation on Alabama football fields.
Football was used in November 2000 to get the Alabama House of Representatives to move on a tax proposal. They were told that if they didn't pass it, they'd still be at the statehouse during the following Saturday's Alabama-Auburn game. The package was quickly approved. (p. 424)
Football happens to be something Southern boys are good at. It's a game that bonds not just them, but the community, and gives them a means to routinely trample (and show their superiority to) Yankees. Football is rife with tradition, another thing Southerners love and cling to. It gives the whole state bragging rights, and it's an individualistic rough and tough manly (and therefore respectable) sport. I understand what football gives them. I just don't understand why they continue to short-change education to get it.
d
