The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  But the Rebels would come back; they always came back. “They’ll get ’em,” Dad said, and around us there was agreement.

  They almost did. Ole Miss drove down the field. With seconds left on the clock, the quarterback Doug Elmore faked a handoff and rushed toward the goal, breaking a couple of tackles. But then Billy Cannon, playing defense as well as offense, as so many did in those days, hit him hard and with the cornerback Warren Rabb pushed him back.

  It was over. LSU had won.

  I had never seen grown-ups cry before, but they did that night, all around us, or so it seemed. I did too, of course. A lot, I think. Walking to the car, my father promised me the Rebels would come back and get another shot at LSU in the Sugar Bowl. I didn’t know what the Sugar Bowl was, but I wanted to believe anything that was hopeful. Of course the Rebels would come back.

  And on New Year’s Day, a couple of months later, they did, just as my father promised. Ole Miss came back and beat LSU 21–0. The Rebels were named national champs in most postseason polls. National champions. As a boy in 1959, I knew there could be nothing so lucky in the entire world as to be from Mississippi and have the Rebels as your team.

  —

  A long line of cars was waiting to unload at the Marriott in Nashville. Most had Ole Miss logos of various sorts. Gone were the Rebel flags of old, replaced by a sweeping “Ole Miss” logo or the more understated “UM” given to the members of the booster club. My parents’ Toyota had stickers from Groton, the Hill School, and Wellesley, the schools my sister’s two daughters attended.

  “We need to get some good Ole Miss stuff on this car,” I said, impatiently waiting for the cars to creep forward. “Don’t you think it’s a little pretentious that we’re driving to Ole Miss games with ‘Wellesley’ on the car?”

  “ ‘Groton’ is probably worse,” my mother said, and I had to agree.

  “I don’t think anybody will be jealous of this car,” Dad said, making a most reasonable point. Their Toyota was surrounded by fancy SUVs and the new sedans that all looked like Lexuses even if they weren’t. Everyone seemed to be getting out and embracing each other like old friends at a bar, leaving their cars idling. I was remembering, not with great fondness, how much southerners liked to talk. No one was in a hurry. It would take forever to get inside the rooms.

  I pulled out of the line and headed to self-park in a garage. “We can just walk from the parking garage,” I said, relieved to be out of the line.

  “How far is it?” my mother asked, and I glanced over at her worried expression. Of course, walking distance mattered to them, especially my father. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get around, but fifty yards versus a hundred yards mattered. It was the sort of stuff I wasn’t used to thinking about, and it made me feel terrible.

  “I can just let you out, and I’ll go park,” I said.

  “Let’s stay together,” my dad said, and I glanced over at him and saw his concern. It suddenly hit me that the idea of being separated, of being in a confusing crowd, troubled him.

  “The line is moving now,” my mother suggested.

  I turned the car around and lined back up for the Marriott drop-off. It was over ninety degrees outside, and I could see my father react when we finally got out of the car at the door. I grabbed a luggage cart, and a young bellman quickly followed. “Let me help with that,” he said, then did a double take when I opened the trunk stuffed with luggage. “Maybe I should get two carts,” he suggested gamely.

  “We don’t need all of this moved inside,” I asserted, a bit wishfully. “At least, I don’t think so.” When I turned to seek my mother’s help in luggage triage, I saw my father standing against a support for the entranceway. He didn’t look great. He needed to get inside a nice air-conditioned room. “We just need a few things,” she said to her young helper, who looked highly doubtful. I suspect he’d heard this before.

  I left my mother to sort out the luggage and went inside the hotel. It was packed with Ole Miss fans, with check-in lines snaking around the lobby. Most seemed to know each other and had turned the registration into a tailgate party, drinks in hand. I spotted a thirtysomething fellow in a suit with a Marriott name tag who looked like a manager. “My dad’s ninety-five and is waiting outside, and we really need to get him into a room, if that’s possible?”

  He looked immediately horrified. “It’s awfully hot out there.” He looked at me as if suspecting elder abuse. “Ninety-five?” he asked. I nodded. “I will deal with this,” he said firmly, in the same voice airplane captains use to reassure passengers about severe turbulence. “Where’s your father?”

  I mumbled thanks and led him outside. In a few moments, he had my parents sitting on a lobby couch with large iced teas. Somewhere in the lobby, a voice rang out, “Are you ready?” It was met with a loud cheer, and perfectly reasonable-looking adults suddenly started chanting, “Hell yeah! Daaamn right! Hotty Toddy, God almighty! Who the hell are we? Flim Flam, Bim Bam, Ole Miss, by damn!”

  Through the cheers and laughter, I looked over at my dad. He was holding up his iced tea in salute. The Marriott manager appeared holding room keys. He handed them over with an efficient smile. “Hotty Toddy,” he said.

  And using the proper call signal, I responded, “Hotty Toddy.” Connection made. Over and out.

  —

  “There’s really no reason to go to the game,” my father announced.

  I had to admit he had a point. The hotel was built right next to the Vanderbilt stadium, and the view from our room looked directly down onto the field. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or imagined existed. This room was the ultimate skybox. “This has to be better than our seats,” he said.

  “We’ve got great seats,” I told him, which was true. “But…” I stared out the window onto the field.

  “But they’re there and we’re here and here is good.”

  “That sounds profound,” I admitted, which it did. “But they have hot dogs there, and we don’t here.”

  He thought about it for a moment and jumped up on his feet. My dad is a big guy, and there were still moments when his natural athleticism unexpectedly surfaced. I was startled. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The walk from the hotel to the stadium was no more than fifty yards. But as I was learning, these things took time. When I was in high school, I’d bought an old VW bus, and when I asked the guy who sold it to me how fast it would go, he thought about it for a moment and just said, “Son, I’d leave early.” It was that way with my dad. Better to leave early.

  We were swept along in a crowd of Vanderbilt students and Ole Miss fans, all headed for the stadium. I wasn’t sure we were going to the right gate and told my father, “Wait here. I’ll go check and come back.” He was looking around and didn’t seem to hear me. In front of us were the brilliant lights of the stadium. The Vanderbilt band was playing what I supposed was the Vandy fight song. People were laughing and hurrying to the game in the warm night air.

  I thought back to those times when I had first been initiated to the wonders of football by my father. Then I had been the one walking slowly while he patiently waited for me. But some things hadn’t changed. There was the stadium out there, glowing, the crowds, the expectation that anything could happen tonight and whatever did, we’d talk about it all week. He was still my father. I was still his son. And we still had this thing we loved to share.

  “This is football,” my dad finally said, smiling big. “Yes, sir, this is football.” I smiled at him and took his elbow. “Are we sitting on the Ole Miss or Vandy side?” he asked.

  “Vandy, I think. But I don’t know which side is visitors or home.”

  He nodded at the gate in front of us. “This is home. Straight ahead.”

  “It is?” I pulled out the tickets to look for a gate number.

  My father pointed. A stream of students poured into the gate. “Vandy side,” he said again, and I realized he was right. The students were in black Vandy shirts, and there were a lot of t
hem. It was like that with my father. There’d be these moments when I worried that he was confused, and then he’d say something that made it clear that he was more perceptive than I.

  We were making our way to our seats—slowly—up the stadium ramp when a surprised voice rang out, “Phineas?”

  Phineas is my father’s first name. A jovial middle-aged man in Ole Miss garb put his arm around my dad.

  “I can’t believe you made it to the game!” he said.

  “Well,” my father said slowly, catching his breath a bit from the hike up the ramp, “I haven’t yet.”

  “You look great! Rebels going to win tonight?”

  “Beat ’em like a borrowed mule,” my dad said.

  “You got it!” The man laughed and moved on in a stream of fans.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  My father thought for a second. “I have no idea.”

  —

  You had to love Vanderbilt. Before the game, the entire freshman class ran out of the stadium tunnel through the goalposts onto the field, just like the real-deal football team that would follow in a few minutes. The stadium announcer boomed their names, and the giddy kids waved to the crowd like SEC champions. It was a hot night with a light breeze, and all around us fans had the happy, expectant sounds of the first game. I tried to remember how long it had been since my dad and I were sitting together in the stands, but I couldn’t bring up the last time. I started to ask my father, but he slapped my thigh with one of his large hands, a gesture I remembered from our earliest days together at games, and said, “This is great. Just great.”

  And suddenly it didn’t matter how long it had been, just that it was happening now.

  The Rebels took the field led by Coach Hugh Freeze, a model for a new breed of coaches, the sort of anti–Bear Bryant. He smiled more than he scowled, hugged his players more than yelled at them, and generally seemed to give every impression that he considered himself the luckiest guy in the world. Born in Oxford, he had paid his dues as a high school coach and college assistant long enough to know he might never get a shot at the big time and wasn’t the least bit coy that he had landed his dream job. When asked if he might be using Ole Miss as a stepping-stone to a bigger job, he flatly announced, “I hope to retire right here.” Instead of scaring the players to death, Freeze’s approach was to love ’em to death. “We are a family” was his mantra, “and because we love each other, we will never let each other down.” If there had been a hint of mannered calculation to the sentiment, it might have tilted Freeze into the manipulative phoniness of a televangelist. But from him, it came across as a simple declaration of a worldview: this is who I am, this is how I feel and what I believe, and this is how we will win.

  In his first year, without the benefit of a recruiting class he could call his own, Freeze turned a 2-10 record into 7-6 and took Ole Miss to a victory over the Pittsburgh Panthers in the Compass Bowl. That year, they lost heartbreakingly close games to LSU, Vanderbilt, and Texas A&M, coming within just a few plays of a miracle season. Freeze spent the postseason in a recruiting frenzy, bringing in one of the nation’s top classes. His prize jewel was Robert Nkemdiche, a six-foot-five, 294-pound beast of a defensive player, considered by many the nation’s number one high school talent. His older brother, Denzel, was already a sophomore star at Ole Miss. There were others. From Crete, Illinois, Freeze had snagged the best high school receiver in the country, Laquon Treadwell. He’d been selected the top high school athlete in Illinois and already had a nickname—SuccessfulQuon—and a Twitter account with thousands of followers. Nkemdiche and Treadwell were joined by other potential superstar freshmen: Cody Prewitt, a defensive back; Evan Engram, a huge tight end with world-class speed; a pair of offensive tackles, Laremy Tunsil and Austin Golson. Now these freshman stars were taking the field for the first time.

  “Excuse me, but can I ask why you are wearing black?” The question came from an attractive woman in her thirties sitting next to my dad. “I heard you talking, and I know you are Rebel fans,” she said with a smile. “And that black shirt, I’m sorry, but that just won’t do.”

  My father looked over at me, nodding his head. He was wearing red, which was the designated Ole Miss color for the night. I was wearing a black polo shirt I’d thrown in my suitcase. It hadn’t occurred to me when I put it on that black and gold were Vandy colors. I was surrounded by a sea of black shirts.

  She held out her hand. “I’m Margaret Rawlings. I’m a Rebel, but my husband”—she nodded to the nice-looking guy next to her, deep in concentration studying the program as the starting lineups were announced—“he went to Vanderbilt. It’s a mixed marriage, you know.”

  We introduced ourselves. “I didn’t wear this because it was a Vandy shirt,” I said, feeling suddenly very guilty. “I just didn’t think about it.” It seemed like a lame excuse, like trying to explain why you were leaving the grocery store with a couple of steaks stuffed under your coat.

  “I knew it was a red night,” my father said.

  She laughed. “You are not helping him,” she said.

  “How’d you know?” I asked my dad.

  “Your mother told me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “You’re an age to dress yourself,” he said, smiling. “And I never thought it mattered.” He looked around and shrugged. “Guess I was wrong.”

  Our seatmate leaned in and said in a not so low voice, “This is always one of the worst nights of the year for me and my husband. Maybe this makes me a bad person or wife…” She nodded back at her husband. “But I hope he is goddamn miserable for the next couple of hours.” Then she leaned back and yelled, “Go, Rebels!” I caught a whiff of bourbon and saw her husband pouring from a small flask into a Coke. That sweet smell on a warm night combined with the sounds of the game brought back a rush of memories. It was night. There was football. And there was drinking.

  On the second pass of the night, one of the Ole Miss freshmen, Tony Conner, ripped the ball away from the Vanderbilt receiver for an interception. He was eighteen and on the fourth play of his first game in the toughest league in college sports and playing as if he owned the field. A couple of plays later and Ole Miss brought out its field goal kicker, Andrew Ritter. He was a fifth-year senior who had spent his career handling kickoffs. In his five years on the team, he’d never kicked a field goal. He had been scheduled to graduate the previous year, but Freeze had asked him to sit out a year, saving eligibility for the chance to return and compete for the job as the starting field goal kicker. It was a risk, but he had taken it and was now lining up for his first college kick. He made it easily.

  It is this sense of possibility that helps make college sports so appealing. These days, professional athletes mostly appear to be of a different species: so big, so fast, so agile that, while they dazzle, they seem separated from us mere mortals. But here at Vanderbilt, there were young kids on both teams who had been in high school a few months earlier, and while they were all superb athletes—the SEC draws the best of the country—they retained an aura of normalcy that made you cheer for them all the louder. They were regular kids, just better, more dedicated. It’s not just that you wanted your team to win; you wanted the players to succeed.

  Across the field in the Ole Miss student section, the inevitable cry went up, “Are you ready?” I watched my father smile as he followed along softly, “Hell yes. Hotty Toddy, God almighty! Who the hell are we? Flim Flam, Bim Bam, Ole Miss, by damn!” He looked out over the field, smiling, then repeated, with a silly grin, “By damn.”

  —

  The first quarter was all Ole Miss, sharply executed plays, moving almost at will. But then it turned. Vanderbilt put together a solid if unspectacular drive to score, making it 10–7. After Ole Miss stalled, Vandy got the ball back and hit their best player, the wide receiver Jordan Matthews, with a short screen that he took fifty-five yards into the end zone. One play, fifty-five yards. Ole Miss 10, Vandy 14.

&
nbsp; We were sitting in the first row, directly behind the Vanderbilt bench, where Matthews came running into his coach’s arms. Vanderbilt’s coach, James Franklin, was forty-one, the third African American head coach in SEC history. Charismatic, with high energy, he had brought Vanderbilt a new hope and interest in its football team. (At the end of the season, he’d leave Vandy for Penn State, taking top recruits with him and leaving massive ill will in his wake. But for now, he was the chosen one leading them to the promised land.) Matthews lifted Franklin up as if he were a kid. They were both laughing. I wanted Ole Miss to win in the worst way, but it was impossible not to enjoy the exuberance and sheer joy exploding a few feet away. It was like watching two loved ones meeting at an airport and jumping into each other’s arms.

  “He’s quick,” my father said, nodding at Matthews. At six feet three and 206 pounds, he was big, but it was his pure athletic grace that was so striking. He did a stutter-step dance, then leaped up for the classic chest bump with another player. It was ballet with a hint of violence.

  A couple of minutes later, Vanderbilt scored again. Now Ole Miss was down 21–10, and the twenty-one unanswered points by Vandy made it feel much worse.

  “I liked the first game better,” Dad said. For a moment, I thought he was confused. But then I saw him smiling, and I got it. First game, as in this had been not only two quarters but two different games, one dominated by Ole Miss, one by Vandy.

  As the teams jogged off at halftime, I asked my father how he was doing. It had occurred to me that he might only have the stamina or interest level for a single half, which would have been fine. It was stunningly hot. We could walk back across the street and watch the rest of the game from the hotel window. But he was completely transfixed, hanging on every play and feeding off the energy of the crowd. He flagged down a hot dog vendor, bringing out his ancient wallet, waving me off when I reached for my own. “On me,” he said, and I think we both enjoyed a scene from our past: a good game, Dad buying hot dogs. We always got three, to share the extra. One each just never seemed enough.