University of Alabama - Rammer, jammer, yellow, hammer: a journey into the heart of fan mania

TABLE OF CONTENTS

For my parents

A singular example of mental perversion, an absurd and immoral custom tenaciously held fast in mob-mind, has its genesis in the partisan zeal of athletic spectator-crowds. I refer to the practice of organized cheering, known in college argot as rooting.

G. E. HOWARD, Social Psychology of the Spectator, 1912

You Will Suffer Humiliation When the Team from My Area Defeats the Team from Your Area

Headline from the Onion, 2001

INTRODUCTION

At some point in the life of every sports fan there comes a moment of reckoning. It may happen when your team wins on a last-second field goal or three-point basket and you suddenly find yourself clenched in a loving embrace with a large hairy man youve never met and with whom you have nothing in common except allegiance to the same team. Or it may come in the long, hormonally depleted days after a loss, when youre felled by a sensation oddly similar to the one you felt when you first experienced the death of a pet. In such moments, even the fan who rigorously avoids anything approaching self-awareness is sometimes forced to confront a version of the question othersspouses, friends, children, and colleagueshave asked for years: Why do I care? In very general terms thats what this book is aboutthe human obsession with contests.

I grew up in Alabamapossibly the worst place on earth to acquire a healthy perspective on the importance of spectator sports. If you were a scientist hoping to isolate the fan gene, Alabama would make the perfect laboratory. People in Alabama have a general interest in almost all sportsthe state is second only to Nevada in the amount of money that its citizens bet on sports, despite the fact that in Alabama, unlike Nevada, sports gambling is illegal. But the sport that inspires true fervorthe one that compels people there to name their children after a popular coach and to heave bricks through the windows of an unpopular oneis college football. A recent poll by the Mobile Register found that 90 percent of the states citizens describe themselves as college football fans. Eighty-six percent of them pull for one of the two major football powers there, Alabama or Auburn, and 4 percent pull for other teamsFlorida, Notre Dame, Georgia, Tennessee, and Michigan, or smaller schools like Alabama A&M or Alabama State. To understand what an absolute minority nonfans are in Alabama, consider this: they are outnumbered there by atheists.

My team is the Alabama Crimson Tide. Growing up a Tide fan in the 1970s gave me an unrealistic sense of what it means to be a fan, for the simple reason that in the 1970s Alabama won, and being a sports fan is largely about learning to cope with losing. In most sports there is just one champion per yearevery four years if youre into a sport like World Cup soccerso for the overwhelming majority of fans, losing at least once a season is a near certainty. In my childhood, this small kink in the works of the fans life went more or less unexposed.

The primary agent of this obfuscation was a man named Paul Bear Bryant, the gravelly voiced football coach with an old-growth frame who coached Alabama to six national championships and who, when I was eleven, set the record for the most wins of any college football coach in history. Along the way, the Bear, as he was called for taking up a childhood dare to wrestle a bear at a local fair, became a populist hero who hovered over the consciousness not just of every little kid in the state but of nearly every adult as well; his photograph, usually in his houndstooth fedora, hung on the wall of every barbecue and burger joint from Mobile to Muscle Shoals. His exalted status was proclaimed on thousands of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and homemade shrines. Socially and historically, the Bear was a complicated figure; he waited until 1970 to integrate the Alabama football team, and on matters of race Bryant was more or less silent. Given his stature in Alabama at the time of the civil rights struggle, that silence could only be interpreted as a tacit, if not wholehearted, endorsement of the status quo. But to a kid who didnt yet understand the connection of sports to culture and politics, these were incomprehensible complexities at the time. To me back then, the Bear was just a football coach.

Early in the morning of October 17, 1982, a Sunday and my thirteenth birthday, my father woke me and told me to put on a sweater and some khakis, to tuck my shirt in, and to get a move on. He had a friend who owned a local lawnmower dealership that sponsored The Bear Bryant Show, the Sunday morning postgame recap that enthralled Tide fans the way televised papal sermons seize the attention of devout Catholics, and the friend had managed to get me invited on the set. I didnt know this at the time, but I had an inkling where we might be headedbesides church, little else of importance happened early on Sunday mornings in Birmingham, and I was fairly sure that my birthday present wasnt going to consist of a morning of hymn singing at Independent Presbyterian. But the other possibilitythat I was going to stand face to face with the most revered man in the state of Alabama and the architect of more joyful Saturdays in my young life than I could countwas too terrifying to contemplate. I had an exaggerated view of the man; once in grade school I looked at a picture of Mt. Rushmore and noted what a poor job the sculptor had done of capturing the Bears likeness, and that hed forgotten the hat.

We rode in silence through the empty streets, past the Tudor and clapboard houses with lawns like swatches of green felt, past the red clay outcroppings near Birminghams iron ore seam, and up the winding road to the television studios, where Bryant taped his show for broadcast that afternoon. The parking lot, which overlooked downtown Birmingham, was empty save a few cars and some smashed soda cans. As soon as I got out of the car, I spotted Bryants bodyguard, a black university policeman named Billy Varner, who was sitting at the door in front of the studio, a wide-brimmed troopers hat low over his eyes. Id seen him standing on the sideline of every Alabama game Id been to, and in almost every television shot or photograph Id ever seen of Bryant. The Bear couldnt be more than a few feet away.

Hows the Coach? my father asked as we walked by, using the mans proper title, as all Tide fans knew to do.

Not too good, Varner replied.

The day before, Alabama had lost to Tennessee, something that hadnt happened since my first birthday, in 1970. Varner had the Sunday morning Birmingham News at his feet; the outcome of the game was front-page news. Bryant was sixty-nine, and even as a kid, I sensed something ominous about the loss. It broached the unspeakable possibility that perhaps the old coach was losing his stuff. I walked through two sets of large steel doors, and there he was: a glowering hulk of a man with a voice so deep it seemed to vibrate the floor. He was sitting behind a desk like a news anchor, on a sky blue soundstage hung with signs advertising Coca-Cola and Golden Flake potato chips. His gray hair was slicked back, his cheeks were still red from the game-day sun. But his face was fixed in a steely grimace, and his eyes were bloodshot and wet, as though he hadnt slept. The Bear looked like he was grieving. I felt a pang of resignation: my one chance to meet the Bear and his mood was positively black.