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.
