The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  It may seem strange to some that football would be so connected to my sense of family and home, but I doubt many southerners will find it mystifying. When I was growing up in Mississippi, football, particularly college football, loomed so large it reduced most endeavors to vaguely silly pursuits, a variation on racewalking or croquet.

  I thought of the simple rituals my dad and I had developed going to games together, losing ourselves in their pleasures. What did it mean that the first memory I had of holding my father’s hand was going to the Ole Miss–Arkansas game at Jackson Memorial Stadium? It was a rickety old stadium not that far from our house. The parking lot was filled with insane Arkansas fans yelling, “Woo Pig Sooie!” I was terrified. Everyone seemed to know my father. He was wearing a sport coat and a hat, sort of like the one that Bear Bryant would later make famous. I was nine years old. When we got to the steps, he offered to carry me, but I wanted to walk because only little kids were carried. So we walked, slowly.

  Years later, I found the ticket stubs in the back of a drawer in my childhood room. I still remember the score: Ole Miss 16, Arkansas 0.

  I loved everything about it, of course: the crowd, the yelling, the messy hot dogs, and the whiff of violence that hung in the air like a mist. I was too young to understand the game, but that would change, and with it grew a deep love. Most of all, I loved feeling safe with my dad. Now at sixty, reeling from a shattering defeat, I missed the confidence and comfort that as a boy those moments had so effortlessly provided.

  Dad with me and my sister, Riverside Park, Jackson

  The games of my youth were huge spectacles: foggy nights in LSU’s Tiger Stadium, hot afternoons at Jackson Memorial Stadium, long car drives to the hills of Arkansas to face the dreaded Razorbacks. We’d talk about the game all the way, and if we won, we’d talk about it all the way back. If we lost, mostly we rode in silence and played over and over in our heads what could have been, should have been. There came a time—I can’t remember when exactly, and no doubt it was more gradual than sudden—when I realized it was being together with my father that I looked forward to as much as the game. When civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate were ripping apart our country, my father and I could talk about anything by talking about nothing but football. It was a secret language that needed no translation. Those seasons had come and gone, and though we’d caught a game here or there and talked on the phone after a big, sweet moment like Ole Miss upsetting Tim Tebow and Florida, it didn’t have the continuity of a real season. It was a casual drop by, not a shared passion that bound us together. But it didn’t have to be that way. What was stopping us from grabbing one more season together? What was more valuable than a chance to spend time with my parents, to steal one more season?

  And there’d be the games, those wonderful Saturdays that were always so perfect because they never were. Love of sports will always break your heart, but in doing so, it reminds us we have one. At this point in my life, that seemed like a worthy goal.

  —

  I flew to Charlotte and drove to Asheville, where my parents lived, on a hot summer day. The shortest way is west toward Spartanburg, South Carolina, but I like a slightly longer northern route through Hickory, North Carolina. Once I escaped from the suburbs of Charlotte, there was no city traffic, and soon the road began to tilt upward to the Smokies. I’d made this drive many times in the years since my parents moved to Asheville, and I always found the return reassuring.

  My parents moved to Asheville because it was one of those places that always had a certain mystical tug for my mother. It was more than just mountains and Thomas Wolfe. For our family, and not a few Mississippians, North Carolina was a place to be envied. It was far enough north that summers were cooler and the schools the stuff of legend, but it was still part of a southerner’s world. It was over the horizon but not beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

  They had originally settled in a Methodist retirement community in Asheville. I thought it was great: organized and pleasant with someone to take care of everything. There was a large campus for the community, and their house was big and comfortable, with plenty of room in the basement for my bike and a big desk to write. But my mother never liked it. The uniformity of it wore on her, and compared with her touchstone of all that was aesthetically pleasing, New Orleans, it was one rabbit hutch of a house after another. So, inevitably, they left and moved to a condo in Asheville just minutes from a tennis club where my father at ninety-five still played. We had lived in one place—Piedmont Street in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi—from the time I was born until some time after I left college. Then it seems my parents, freed from kids, had succumbed to a long-suppressed peripatetic instinct. They sold the house and embarked on a succession of moves that ended for a longish stretch in Fairhope, Alabama. Along the way, there were apartments in New Orleans and one French Quarter renovation. My mother, who had mostly grown up in New Orleans, was never really happy without some connection to the city.

  Now they divided their time between Asheville and New Orleans. My sister was not far away during the summers, west in the mountains in Cashiers, North Carolina, the rest of the year in Laurel, Mississippi. It was like this for many southerners; part of us longed to be elsewhere, but we could never quite make the break. I’d managed to pretend I’d left, but it was a sham; I’d always be not only a southerner but a Mississippian. It was like shaving my head to change hair color. It would always grow back the same.

  The drive to Asheville was one more reenactment of the ritual I’d begun when I left home at fourteen to go to school in the far north of Virginia. But for the first time in a very long time, it wasn’t just to drop by with a few moments to steal while the world waited at the door and the screen of my phone. This time I was here to talk about spending more time. It wasn’t as if I were putting the world on hold. Now I wanted my world to revolve around those special Saturdays with my dad.

  I pulled up in front of their one-story condominium, thinking about how I was going to put it to my parents that we spend the fall with the Ole Miss team. A large man, gray and old, really old, came out carrying a big garbage can. It took me a second to realize it was my father. He looked at me and smiled, and then I didn’t feel sixty and he didn’t seem ninety-five. I got out of the car. “What do you think about going to some Ole Miss games this year?”

  2

  Vanderbilt was the first game, in Nashville, an early game set to prime the pump for SEC football craziness. The year before, Ole Miss had lost to them in the final seconds. Both teams had charismatic young coaches who were in the middle of building new programs with great promise. It was easy to understand why it was being featured on television as the season’s big opener.

  In theory, driving from Asheville to Nashville is a simple matter. But travel with my family, even by car, has always been a complicated business, and my parents being eighty-six and ninety-five did not make it easier. The drive should take four and a half hours. The game started at 9:15 p.m., late because of the television schedule. The hotel was so close to the stadium they touted that some of the best seats for the game were from the rooms. “We should leave early,” my mother said, “to beat the traffic.”

  “What traffic?” my father asked. “We’re going through the mountains. There’ll be more deer than cars. Anyway, we have all day. Game starts at 9:15 tonight.”

  “You don’t know what will happen,” my mother countered.

  This was the kind of statement to which there really was no effective comeback. How could you argue, “Well, actually, I know exactly what will happen”? There was something reassuringly familiar about this travel routine. No matter how seemingly easy the journey, my mother would approach each as if she were running mission control for the first manned landing on Mars. Multiple alternatives would be explored and then planned in detail, like possible reentry sites in case of bad weather.

  Outside their bedroom door was a growing pile of luggage. I had a bad feeling but had to ask
, “What’s this?”

  “Don’t be mean,” my mother said. Then a bit more tentatively, “Do you think it will all fit?”

  It took forever to pack the car. My parents had not bought new luggage since the middle of the last century; gathered together, it looked like the stuff you see homeless people pushing around in certain sad urban areas. Actually, it looked more like the belongings of a small convention of homeless people: a dozen small bags of various sorts stuffed with everything from shoes to pillows, tattered suitcases with broken zippers. And a lot of ripped plastic hang-up bags from various long-defunct clothing stores.

  After a long struggle, we managed to get about two-thirds into the apartment-sized trunk of their old Toyota Avalon. As a tribute to Japanese technology, the car ran beautifully after more than 125,000 miles but was so battered and dented that it seemed to have been driven off the set of a Mad Max remake. My parents thought any bodywork was superficial and vain. As I struggled to fit the last of the bags and suitcases inside, I asked my mother, “Is all this stuff necessary?”

  My mother paused and said thoughtfully, “We’d have to talk about what ‘necessary’ means.”

  I pleaded, “Does all of this have to come in tonight?”

  “Maybe we should just watch the game on television right here,” my father said, looking exhausted at the thought of moving more luggage.

  “They will have bell captains at the hotel,” my mother said reassuringly.

  “Captains?” my father said incredulously. “They’ll need platoons to get all this inside.” Then he added gravely, “Let’s make sure to stop at the ATM on the way out of town.”

  “We’ll need a fortune for tips,” I agreed. When I was growing up, my mother had so traumatized me about not tipping enough for any services that the first time I flew by myself, I tried to tip the stewardess. I was nine, I think.

  When we finally got on the road to Nashville, my father announced, “If no one really needs me, I’m going to sleep,” and promptly nodded off in the only part of the backseat that wasn’t piled high with luggage.

  It took only about ten minutes for me to remember what driving with my mother was like. I’m tempted to say it was a lot like Driving Miss Daisy, but it would be presumptuous to suggest I have Morgan Freeman’s patience or charm. My mother approaches driving with the basic assumption that these annoying humans are on her road and she would prefer they disappear. Trucks, in particular, are taken as a personal affront. “Do they have to be so large?” she asked as a massive oil tanker passed us and a lumber truck in front swayed ominously. It was asked as if the size of the trucks reflected some personal overindulgence, like overweight families at the All You Can Eat dessert buffet lining up for fourths. A Ford pickup truck, looking small in comparison, honked at the oil truck, then swerved in front of us, accelerated, and quickly shot back into the passing lane.

  My mother jolted backward and sighed loudly. To get her mind off the moment, I told her a story of driving in Italy on the Autostrada and being almost run off the road by tiny Fiats going a million miles an hour and then seeing one smash into a fuel truck, creating the most spectacular crash I’d ever seen. The satisfaction of it almost made up for the hours-long traffic jam that ensued. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

  “Well…” She had a point. “This is a really big, safe car. We’re fine.”

  She looked at me and smiled. “You can stop trying to make me feel better now.”

  “Is that because it won’t work or you feel okay?”

  “Good Lord,” she murmured as two massive tractor trailers lumbered by, appearing to race each other to the next exit. I braked as one cut in front of us.

  My father rose up from the backseat. “We’re stopping?”

  “No, I was just telling Mother about this crash in Italy when a little Fiat hit an oil tanker truck.”

  “Yeah? What happened?” my father asked eagerly.

  “There was this explosion like—”

  “Your son is trying to torture me,” my mother interrupted.

  “Why don’t I drive?” Dad asked.

  To my astonishment, the State of North Carolina had recently renewed his driver’s license. He had to take a written and driving test, but he had passed. I felt like calling up the governor of North Carolina and asking, “Are you out of your mind? He’s ninety-five!”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s not that far.” My father took that as permission to fall back asleep while my mother tried to distract herself from thoughts of impending crashes by working on her epically long Christmas present list. I had grade school teachers who were still on that list.

  It felt good to be driving to the first game of a new season. It was a time of limitless possibility, when every team was undefeated and the games stretched out tantalizingly, like a long buffet of favorite treats. All fans have different golden ages for their favorite sports, but I’ve observed it tends to be the time when your favorite team first finds great success. I was lucky. My love affair with Ole Miss football began when I was seven years old and Ole Miss won its first national championship.

  My dad and I watched the games on a huge Zenith cabinet television in our basement. My mother never wanted a television in the living room. It had a remote control called Space Command that made funny sounds and vibrated like a tuning fork when you pressed the buttons. I played with it endlessly, discovering that if you hit it against something solid, it would send confusing signals that made the set dance through the few channels. This never failed to delight.

  For the first six games of the 1959 season, Ole Miss allowed only one touchdown. They romped over everyone like gods playing mortals: Houston, Kentucky, Memphis State, Vanderbilt, Tulane.

  Then came Arkansas, ranked number ten in the nation. My father would say, over and over, “The Hogs are tough, always tough.” I’m not sure how old I was before I realized that hogs were animals as well as football players. The year before, Ole Miss had almost lost to them, barely squeaking out a two-point win in a brutal game. This year, Ole Miss was unstoppable, dominating the Hogs 28–0. Ole Miss’s great fullback, Charlie Flowers, ran through Arkansas like a mule through corn. When Ole Miss scored, my dad would pick me up and swing me, and we’d yell together, “Go, Rebels!” It was probably then, swinging in my father’s arms, that I began to fall in love with college football. How could I not?

  After Arkansas came LSU. “LSU. LSU is always tough,” he said.

  “The Hogs were tough!” I shouted.

  “But LSU…” His voice trailed off seriously. “LSU is special.”

  All that week, no one talked about anything but LSU versus Ole Miss. LSU ranked number one in the country. Ole Miss ranked number three. I was in the second grade at Power Elementary, and our teacher put a large Rebel flag on the wall. It was right next to the U.S. flag that we faced when we said the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. Naturally, I assumed we were pledging to both: the Ole Miss Rebels and the American flag. At seven years old, any connection to that thing called the Confederacy was totally lost. It was just the Ole Miss Rebel flag.

  Today it would probably be called the Game of the Century. Maybe it was then, too; I don’t remember. All that week, I fell asleep holding a Rebel flag. I had cut out the team roster from the Jackson Daily News, and every day I would go through it position by position.

  When I got home from school on Friday, my father was at the house. This was unusual; he never got home much before supper. And he wasn’t wearing a coat and tie. He was dressed like it was Saturday.

  “What do you think about us going to see the Rebels play?”

  I was confused. The Rebels played on Saturday. This was Friday. And then my mother was talking about what a long drive it was and we should be going, and then I slowly began to grasp it. But it still seemed impossible. We were going to see the Rebels play, and that meant not heading to the basement to watch them on the big cabinet television but in person. The Rebels versus the LSU Tig
ers. And LSU was tough.

  It’s a three-hour drive now from Jackson to Baton Rouge, but then it must have taken much longer. We stayed in a motel along the way, the first time I’d slept in a motel. The next day, the road seemed filled with cars with Rebel flags attached.

  We parked what seemed like miles from the stadium. The streets were filled with swarming pirates with cutlasses, witches, and tigers. A lot of tigers. “It’s Halloween,” my father reminded me, pulling me a bit closer. In the distance, a giant structure loomed. Music and a strange roaring sound seemed to come from its depths. It was fascinating and terrifying. I stopped, wanting to go back to the car.

  “It’s okay,” my father said, wiping my face, and then I realized I was crying. He pulled me up on his shoulders. “It’s just football.”

  And so it was. And if this was football, how could anything else in life compete? The crowd was in a frenzy from the start. The Ole Miss section taunted the Tigers: “Hotty Toddy, God almighty! Who the hell are we? Flim Flam, Bim Bam, Ole Miss, by damn!” I’m sure I would have been terrified if my father hadn’t pulled me tight and made me laugh.

  Ole Miss kicked a field goal and played defense all night, punting on second and third downs, daring LSU to score. All my favorite players were there—Charlie Flowers, the great quarterback Doug Elmore, Jake Gibbs.

  Somehow I fell asleep and woke up to even more screaming and my father leaping to his feet, holding me. Down below Billy Cannon of LSU had fielded a punt from Jake Gibbs and was running through the entire Ole Miss team. Then there was only Gibbs between Cannon and the goal line. Cannon did something with his hips, and Gibbs grabbed at air, and Cannon trotted into the end zone. Seven to three, LSU over Ole Miss.