What It Is, Is Football

September has arrived and that is a very special month in the South.  For decades, the month has been the start of a frenzied period that must be witnessed to be understood and I am getting reacquainted with it this year.  No, I’m not talking about celebrating the end of summer, the scramble to readjust to the start of the school year, or anything that trivial but something far, far more serious.  September means the start of the college football season, a season which hangs on the words of the late Michigan State football coach Duffy Daugherty when he said, “A big game is not simply a matter of life or death…it is more important than that.”

Now before I go on let me clarify something.  I love college football and have since I was thirteen years old.  I was born in Pennsylvania, and the first college football team I learned anything about was Notre Dame.  Then I got acquainted with Penn State football, but the first college to really claim my allegiance was the University of Alabama and its Crimson Tide squad.

My parents were born in Alabama and when my father retired from the Army he moved our family back to his and my mother’s hometown of Birmingham.  My father never attended college and my mother had only a year or so of it before getting married.  When my parents were of college age, blacks were barred from attending both the University of Alabama and Auburn University, the top two educational establishments in the state.  Those were the days when the Jim Crow segregation laws were in full force, and the only reason black people had for setting foot on either campus was to work as janitors and maids.

My cousin Percy Jones was the first member of my family to attend Alabama.  He got his degree in History upon graduation in 1971 and was a tireless worker for civil rights on the campus.  Thanks to his efforts as well as other early black pioneer students, the atmosphere of unrelieved hostility toward us had largely dissipated when I arrived on the campus in 1974 as the second member of my family to go to school there.  I did not graduate but left in 1977.  My cousin Janice was the third family member to attend Alabama and graduated with a nursing degree in 1983.

Despite the Jim Crow laws and racial barriers against us, most of my relatives were Crimson Tide fans.  The big exception was my brother Joe who attended Auburn in the 1980s.  While I was as student at Alabama, I avidly attended football and basketball games.  Alabama’s football history has indeed been a storied and magnificent one.  Appearances in college football’s premiere game, the Rose Bowl, burnished its image in the 1930s; the reign of Paul “Bear” Bryant as head football coach and the six national championships he won were another source of pride.  Other colleges have won more football games than Alabama, but none has won more national championships.  And while Auburn’s football heritage is nothing to sneeze at, its football program has always been overshadowed by Alabama’s.

This history has given rise to a culture that has football as its lifeblood.  When I returned in April, the talk was all about the approaching spring scrimmage at Alabama that would mark the end of spring practice for the Crimson Tide.  I couldn’t help but compare attendance figures for the spring games at Alabama and the University of Colorado whose own scrimmage was held on the same day.  About 15,000 people may have showed up at Colorado’s spring game in 53,000-seat Folsom Field in Boulder, whereas only 95,000 bothered to attend at 101,000-seat Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa.  More than 80,000 made the pilgrimage to Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium for the spring game.

Not a week went by during the spring and on into the summer that some mention wasn’t made of football at Alabama and/or Auburn.  The Olympic Games in London took a back seat to trivial stories about Alabama head coach Nick Saban’s golf game or Auburn coach Gene Chizik’s lamenting the youth and inexperience of his squad.  As the college football season openers for Alabama and Auburn approached, excitement grew with every passing day.  Listening to all the talk, you would have thought that the first Saturday in September would surely see the Second Coming rather than a college football game.

All the other colleges in the state take part in this as well.  The University of Alabama has a sprawling campus right here on Birmingham’s south side and now UAB has a football team.  Compared to Alabama and Auburn, UAB is indeed the poor cousin, but that doesn’t stop tens of thousands from going to games at the mammoth 80,000-seat Legion Field football stadium which is a thirty-minute walk from my house.  Then there are the smaller schools which don’t have football factories on their campuses but which have their legions of devoted fans that flock to their games.

People deck themselves in team paraphernalia which boldly declare their collegiate loyalties.  Alabama and Auburn jerseys, jackets, caps, banners and other insignia are everywhere you look.  You’ll hear people shout, “ROLL TIDE!!!” or “WAR EAGLE!!” (Auburn’s battle cry), with a more than religious fervor.  So when you see people wearing crimson-and-white, you know they are an Alabama supporter.  Orange and blue are Auburn’s colors while UAB’s are green and gold.

This phenomenon is not limited to the state of Alabama but is rife throughout the South from Kentucky, the Virginias and Maryland to Florida and westward into Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.  The professional football teams in the region, of which there are ten, don’t come close to commanding this kind of devotion.  When I moved to Alabama back in 1972, I couldn’t believe the intensity of the feelings college football would incite.  I saw grown men break down in tears over a team’s loss; fistfights erupt among high school students over game results; scores of Alabama-Auburn games spray-painted on the sides of public buildings; and coaches worshiped as if they were God Almighty.

In the more than thirty years of my absence, this fanaticism has grown even greater.  Maybe that is because the population has increased and so there are more fans than ever.  Football season is now here, and Saturday is the preferred day of worship and sacred service.  Alabama opened its season with a surprisingly easy victory over a highly regarded Michigan squad in Dallas while Auburn was getting its comeuppance at the hands of Clemson in Atlanta.  Alabama is currently the top-ranked college team in the country, and don’t think for one second that its fans don’t revel in that.  The Crimson Tide is also the defending national champion and its faithful are expecting a repeat performance this season.

Where does all this come from?  What are the roots of this devotion and loyalty?  I think the answer lies back in the first quarter of the twentieth century.  The South back then was still mired in depression and defeat.  There were many who could still remember the Civil War and how it ended with the South in ruins.  The North and West went on to greater prosperity while the South wallowed in poverty.  There was little to recommend the region to others with the possible exception of its climate and even that didn’t attract the new blood that could possibly have led to a genuine revival.  The South’s greatest heroes had not given it the independence it craved, but instead had led it to ignominy and disgrace.  There was nothing to look toward with any pride.

Football changed all that.  The big state-supported colleges and universities fielded football teams that were made up of tough, wily players who asked and gave no quarter on the gridiron.  They played each other to sort out a pecking order of sorts, and when that had been determined, they were ready to take on other foes.  As the twentieth century moved into its second quarter, there arose a beacon of glory to which Southern teams could aspire:  the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, California.  Southern teams like Alabama and Georgia Tech went west and emerged victorious, bringing home coveted trophies to Tuscaloosa and Atlanta while the rest of the nation was forced to admit that Southern teams were a force to be reckoned with.

The Rose Bowl spawned other bowl games:  the Orange in Miami; the Sugar in New Orleans; and the Cotton in Dallas.  These games showcased Southern venues and featured Southern teams paired against the best from the North and the West.  Winter-weary radio listeners and later television viewers would hear and see games in which their teams would be cut down by the despised Southern schools.  Leading the way in racking up victories in the bowl games were teams like Alabama, LSU and Texas.  The host cities reaped a financial windfall as well because outsiders flocked to them during the holiday season, enjoying themselves mightily and spending tons of money.

All of this fueled pride for a region that had little else to be proud of.  The Jim Crow laws were cruelly enforced.  Economic opportunities for people of color were severely limited.  Material progress seemed to skip over the South and put down roots elsewhere.  Men like George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond became the face of the white South, men who were despised and loathed in other parts of the country.  Meanwhile people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Julian Bond were hailed as pioneers and freedom fighters.

Compared to such contrasting and negative images, the college football teams of the South emerged as some of the few positive assets the region had, and they built a fan base that has spanned generations and transcended sociology and politics.  Today, with Southern teams featuring so many black players instead of the all-white ones of bygone days—and thereby hangs a tale I’ll share in another entry—that now rainbow fan base is as strident as its predecessors of seventy and eighty years ago were.  It has been a remarkable transformation, but certainly not a unique one.  South Africa has seen much the same thing happen in its national sports scene since the end of the apartheid era.

Where does all of this leave Yours Truly?  Well, I am a University of Colorado Golden Buffalo.  I wear my CU cap when I go out and it has drawn a few curious looks but no challenges.  While a part of me bleeds crimson-and-white from my days at the University of Alabama, I am a dyed-in-the-wool CU Buff and I let everyone know it.  I tell them I won’t take sides in their intrastate rivalries because my loyalties lay elsewhere.  Besides, while I certainly still love college football and have spent these first Saturdays of the season in front of the TV watching games, football is still a game, a diversion to relieve the stress of everyday living—or at least that is how I want to view it.  That has given me a peace of mind that many are finding elusive this time of year, and I plan to keep it that way.