The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  Also by Stuart Stevens

  The Big Enchilada: Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics

  Feeding Frenzy: Across Europe in Search of the Perfect Meal

  Scorched Earth: A Political Love Story

  Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure

  Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China’s Ancient Silk Road

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Stevens

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Stevens, Stuart.

  The last season : a father, a son, and a lifetime of college football / Stuart Stevens. — First United States Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35302-1 (hardcover; alk. paper); ISBN 978-0-385-35344-1 (eBook)

  1. Stevens, Stuart. 2. Fathers and sons—United States—Biography. 3. Football—United States—Anecdotes. 4. University of Mississippi—Football. I. Title.

  GV939.S743A3 2015 796.3320973—dc23 2015003268

  eBook ISBN 9780385353441

  Cover photograph by George Baier IV

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Stuart Stevens

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  A Note About the Author

  For all the wonderful teachers who taught me how to read and tried to teach me to write

  “There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it.”

  —A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”

  Prologue

  It was the first Ole Miss game that season in Jackson, and I’d been looking forward to it all summer. I had an Ole Miss hat, sort of a cross between a baseball hat and a newsboy cap that I wore to bed most nights. I knew the names of every starting Rebel as though they were family members: the all-American quarterback Glynn Griffing; the running back Lou Guy; the fullback and linebacker Buck Randall. I knew them all. The way the radio announcers described them was how I thought of the Rebels: “rocket-armed” Griffing; “swivel-hipped” Guy; “bruising” Randall. They were like titles bestowed upon knights competing on fields of battle.

  I was ten years old.

  My parents had a party before most Ole Miss games in Jackson. My favorite was the party before the Arkansas Razorbacks game, which was always a “hog roast” with lots of great barbeque and a big pig. I loved the pig.

  The opening home game of that 1962 season was against the Kentucky Wildcats. You can’t roast a wildcat, but it was still a good party. They always had good parties.

  The bootlegger came to the house before every party. Mississippi was the only state in the country that had not repealed Prohibition, so the entire state was dry and everybody had a bootlegger. Ours drove a pickup truck with cases of booze in the back. Not very discreet, but nobody really tried to hide bootlegging. The state tax collector even received a percentage of a bootlegger’s tax. You could make a lot of money, and one famous candidate for the office, when asked how long he intended to serve, said, “I figure it will only take one term.”

  I liked our bootlegger. He was a friendly guy who always gave me an ice-cold Coke. Once I saw a pistol in the cab of his pickup, and I asked my father if he was a police officer. He laughed and said that he wasn’t but he probably had a lot of friends who were.

  The pregame parties always ended with a couple of the Ole Miss chants, “Hotty Toddy,” and a dash for the stadium. For evening games, there would be an inevitable clothing ritual with my mother that played out with the predictability of a catechism.

  “Take a coat. It’s going to get cool.”

  “I’ve got a jacket.” I held up the light Ole Miss Windbreaker that had been a birthday present the year before. I’d learned not to fight these things. Submission was inevitable, so best to make it speedy.

  “Is that heavy enough? Shouldn’t you wear that nice wool coat we got you for Christmas?”

  The wool coat was the sort of thing that the lead character in Sergeant Preston of the Yukon wore in one of my favorite television shows. Unless the temperature plummeted seventy degrees, I knew I’d want to abandon it on the walk to Memorial Stadium, like heavy equipment on the German retreat from Stalingrad. I’d seen pictures of that in the Life magazine book of World War II that I kept in my room. Next to the Rebels, I was probably in love with World War II more than anything.

  “I’m okay. Really, Mom. I’ve got a coat.”

  As he always did at some point, my father stepped in. “He’s fine,” he reassured her. Then he held up the overly warm coat he had slung over his arm as a talisman to head off the next round of antihypothermia suggestions.

  My dad and I always went to Memorial Stadium the same way: he’d drive just a couple of miles to the parking lot of Bailey Junior High School, and we’d walk. My aunt taught at Bailey, and later it was where I went to school. It was a formidable-looking art deco structure that always reminded me, not in a positive way, of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. It was about a mile to the stadium from our usual parking spot. I loved that last stretch. Dad and I would hold hands and talk about the different ways the Rebels were going to win. He usually wore a snazzy hat, and sometimes when the afternoon sun caught us just right, our shadows fell long and lean on the sidewalk, stretching his hat out in funny shapes that made me laugh. The walk never felt routine. Even from a distance, the band warming up the crowd always seemed impossibly loud. The roar probably had something to do with the sound being funneled by the structure and amplified through the crowd. But it might have been my imagination teased to a frenzy in anticipation.

  Walking to the game wasn’t like going to the Capri movie theater, our neighborhood favorite. Even if you didn’t know what was going to happen in a movie, it had already been made. But the game was different. Nobody had made what was going to unfold. No one had any idea what was going to happen. We were walking to history. I imagined families all across the country huddled around radios and big cabinet televisions like the huge Zenith in our living room, listening and watching what we were going to see for real. Going to the game seemed like being on the inside of the most important secret in the world.

  I knew that my friends at school who didn’t go to the game would ask over and over, “What was it like?” Some wouldn’t want to believe that I had really been there. I always carried the ticket stubs with me for at least a week after a game.

  —

  On the way to the game, Confederate flags were everywhere, but that was normal. What would Rebel games be without Rebel flags? Cars drove by with guys and sometimes a girl holding flags and yelling, “Go to hell, Kentucky!”

  I always loved the way the crowds got bigger the closer we got to the stadium. It was like seeing kids on the playground before the first day of school after the long summer. Not that I was friends with my fellow fans, or even knew more than a handful of them, but they were Rebel fans. We were Rebel fans. Perfect strangers would greet each other with “Hotty To
ddy,” and it was like a password into our special clubhouse.

  But this time, my dad steered us clear of any large groups. There was a crowd in the parking lot shouting, “Hell no!” and even I could tell they were drunk.

  At halftime, Ole Miss was ahead 7–0. But my father seemed uneasy, shaking his head and talking about how “sloppy” the team had played. One of my favorite players, Buck Randall, had scored, but the refs called it back on holding. “We should be killin’ ’em,” my dad told me, and I nodded solemnly.

  As soon as the teams had headed to the locker room, Colonel Reb, the Ole Miss mascot, led out the world’s largest Confederate flag, which seemed to cover the field, followed by the Ole Miss band wearing their standard uniforms of Confederate battle dress. This was the ritual of every Ole Miss game: Colonel Reb, the giant flag, and when the marching band finished its famous rendition of “Dixie,” the crowd would rise as one to shout, “The South shall rise again!”

  But tonight, the ritual changed. A podium was placed in the center of the field, and a man I had seen before but couldn’t have named came out flanked by Mississippi highway patrolmen.

  “It’s Ross!” somebody shouted.

  “Hey, Governor!”

  Governor Ross Barnett looked old and addled. People were laughing. Someone handed us a leaflet with the words for a new Mississippi anthem. The band started playing the Ross Barnett campaign song that I’d heard on the radio many times, “Roll with Ross,” but now the crowd was singing the new lyrics:

  States may sing their songs of praise

  With waving flags and hip-hoo-rays,

  Let cymbals crash and let bells ring

  ’Cause here’s one song I’m proud to sing:

  Go, Mississippi, keep rolling along,

  Go, Mississippi, you cannot go wrong,

  Go, Mississippi, we’re singing your song,

  M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I!

  A few people near us in the stands looked uncomfortable, but most were laughing and singing. My father pushed his hat back on his head and stared at the paper. I wanted to join in, of course, but his look told me not to.

  Ross Barnett was now waving his arms like a conductor. The crowd tore into the next verse:

  We will not yield an inch of any field.

  Fix us another toddy, ain’t yielding to nobody.

  Ross is standing like Gibraltar, he shall never falter.

  Ask us what we say, it’s to hell with Bobby K.

  Never shall our emblem go

  From Colonel Rebel to Ole Black Joe.

  That was more than enough for my father. “Time to go,” he said and pulled on my hand. I assumed he meant time to get some hot dogs. I loved hot dogs. We started to move down our row toward an aisle. Barnett was bellowing, “I love Mississippi! I love Mississippi! I love her people! Our customs! I love and respect our heritage!”

  The crowd had stopped laughing and cheered wildly.

  When we got to the hot dog stands on the ground floor, I stopped because I thought it was hot dog time. My father walked ahead for a few steps, then came back. “Halftime hot dog?” he asked. He bought me one, but he didn’t look happy.

  “Aren’t you getting one?”

  “Not tonight,” he said, and instead of turning to go back into the stadium, he motioned toward the exit. “Let’s go home.”

  “Home?”

  He looked at me and then rubbed his stomach. “I don’t feel good. I ate too much at that party. We can listen to the second half at home.” Then, when he saw me hesitating, he said, “There’s peach cobbler left from the party.”

  I loved the cobbler. I took a big bite out of the hot dog, and we walked out. Ross Barnett was still shouting.

  Twenty-four hours later, the Ole Miss campus was a war zone in the last battle of the Civil War, federal troops fighting southerners over integration. Two weeks after that, the United States and Russia would come close to war over nuclear missiles in Cuba. But for me, 1962 will always be most remembered as the year my father and I cheered as Ole Miss went undefeated and won the national championship. It’s there, floating in memory, that perfect season in that most imperfect year.

  There were other seasons, some good, some not so good, but always shared with my father. And then life’s wheel began to spin, and days and nights spent in stadiums faded into the past.

  Until one day I woke up at the age of sixty and realized that what I wanted most in the world was one more season. With my father and football and the Ole Miss Rebels. It didn’t need to be a perfect season. One last season would be perfect enough.

  1

  The fortunate among us realize early that loss is the key in which much of life is played. I was a little late coming to this realization. My life and sense of self-worth had been constructed around a very simple paradigm: there was winning and there was losing and nothing gray in between. It was part of what I liked most about politics. For a while, when I won, I was happy. Over time, that slowly changed to the point where winning was the absence of pain more than some form of joy. What hadn’t changed was the horrible self-loathing that came with losing. It wasn’t abstract or remote but a depressing, long-lasting sort of funk when no food tasted good and the best days were still lousy ones. Even when I knew that a campaign had gone as well as could be expected and we’d lost because of larger forces, it offered little comfort.

  This was terribly predictable and not in the least profound. I had maneuvered through life with basically the emotional construct of the homecoming game. When you came off the field and the scoreboard showed you had won, you had…won. And what could possibly be better than winning? Or worse than losing?

  On election night 2012 as I was getting numbers from small courthouses around Ohio, I found myself starting to think more about loss. Not just the election loss and the moments ahead, when I would have to walk into a hotel suite with a man and his family I had come to care for deeply and tell them that we had failed. It was a larger sense of loss. As grim staffers kept pushing new pieces of paper into my hand with vote counts, I tried to focus on the next steps. You do that in a campaign. You process information, good or bad, and move forward. We were going to lose this campaign. I had lost before, though not often and never at this level. The secret of success as a political consultant is to work for candidates who were going to win anyway and not screw it up. I’d picked candidates well.

  Walking to Mitt Romney’s hotel room on election night, down a hallway that wasn’t long enough, I found myself asking the sorts of probing questions that an industry of self-help experts argue are essential to a well-led life: When was the last time I’d really been happy? What was it that I really cared about in life? Those experts may tell you such riddles open a path to happiness, but I had long suspected that they were employed mostly by those who believe—really, really believe—that the love of their life is just waiting on Match.com. I couldn’t remember ever asking myself questions like this on a night when we’d won. I suppose I’d always thought self-examination and introspection were what losers did instead of celebrating.

  It had been a long campaign. I had turned sixty on a campaign plane a couple of weeks earlier, an event I’d made sure no one “celebrated.” I hated birthdays, and the notion of a campaign plane party, with some cake purchased by an advance staffer and reporters hovering around tweeting photographs, made me want to hurl myself straight out an emergency door. But it wasn’t really me or my birthday I was thinking about; it was my father’s. In six weeks or so, he would turn ninety-five.

  Ninety-five is a pretty unimaginable number, but then turning sixty was a baffling notion as well. In the long hours after concession, waiting for the sun to come up to muddle through the inevitable awful day after, I suddenly realized I had an answer to one of the perennial campaign questions, “What do you plan to do after the race?” This had always been an easy question for me because, win or lose, I knew what I’d do: another campaign. I had never been interested in working in government of any s
ort and was confident I’d be terrible at the effort, even if it had appeal. I was one of those guys whose usefulness, if any, was in the taking of Baghdad, not the running of it.

  But now I had a different sort of answer. I wanted to spend time with my mother and father while it was still possible. And I knew exactly how I wanted to do it.

  —

  When I was growing up, the ritual of going to Ole Miss football games had been one of those special connections that fortunate fathers and sons discover. We had stumbled onto this shared joy the first time my father brought me to a game and found it was a way of being close without seeming to work at it. We tried to keep that ritual alive as the usual forces fought to move us apart: college, jobs, and wider horizons to explore.

  When I was honest with myself, and no doubt some of my frantic pace was a way of avoiding honest reflection, I didn’t think anything I’d done in life had meant as much to me, or brought as much sheer joy, as the Saturdays spent down south in stadiums with my dad. I could have kept doing that over the years, made the effort to make sure my father and I had that special time together. But of course I hadn’t. And he was never one to pressure me to do this or that. It just wasn’t his style. He had never urged me to go to Ole Miss and become a lawyer, as he and his grandfather had done, or to live in the South. He’d been one of those fathers who were for what I was for.

  But now it was suddenly clear that nothing was more important than getting back to those games with my dad. Everything else seemed stale and trite. All the goals I’d set for myself, that rushing around to gulp in more life like a buffet at closing time, none of that seemed to mean a thing compared with just walking with him through a dark stadium tunnel to share the perfection of the hundred yards, bathed in sunlight or the magical glow of the field lights, hovering over the stadium like a giant UFO. I didn’t have to chase all over the world or put myself through the meat grinder of politics. I could just go back home, and it was there, waiting for me.