The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  Outside my mother looked over her shoulder. “Is she coming after us?”

  “I think we’re safe,” Dad said. He stopped and pointed down the road. “I wonder if they do this every weekend?” he asked.

  All along the two-lane highway, cars were parked, transforming the roadside into a giant yard sale. I walked over to a pickup where a young couple sat in the back waiting for customers while watching the Alabama coach Nick Saban’s TV show on an iPad. It was a gorgeous day, warm and sunny, and they were both wearing shorts. He had on a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt, and she was wearing an Obama tank top. She looked strong. I asked them if this happened every weekend.

  “Nope,” she answered, “just two days every year, along Highway 46. You can get some pretty cool stuff.”

  I looked over their offerings: a few Xboxes, an old lever-action 30-30, a P90X DVD collection, and a shiny gold trombone.

  “We already sold some of the good stuff,” the woman explained.

  “That 30-30 is just like the gun that won the West. Totally cool,” the guy said.

  “How come you’re selling it?” I asked.

  She looked over at him, grinning slightly.

  “I’m selling it for my dad,” he explained, then added, “I was gonna ask him if I could keep it, but I’ve got plenty of guns, and he said he’d split the money with us.”

  I nodded at his shirt. “You a Springsteen fan?”

  “Yeah, sort of am. I’m into that retro stuff.” It’s difficult to express how old that made me feel. I nodded toward the girl’s Obama tank top.

  “Lot of Obama support around here?” I asked. There was something pleasant about the idea of a casual political conversation. I never talked about politics with anyone who didn’t work in campaigns.

  “Uh-huh,” the girl said, completely unimpressed. “I don’t really vote,” she said, “but I like the shirt.”

  The guy laughed. “She likes it when people give her a hard time. That’s why she wears it.”

  The girl shrugged and took a drink of the Heineken beer she had been holding to her side. Heineken? “Do they give you a hard time?” I asked. “About the shirt?”

  “Nobody around here gives me a hard time about anything. They know I’ll bop ’em.” She grinned and flexed her sizable biceps.

  “Those your folks?” the guy asked, pointing to my mom and dad who were leaning against the Avalon, enjoying the sun.

  “Yep. We’re Ole Miss fans. Going to the game tonight. My dad and I, anyway.”

  “He drives?” the girl asked, shading her face to get a better look at my father.

  “He does, but I’m driving now.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Ninety-five.”

  She whistled. “That’s awesome.”

  “He really drives?” the guy asked.

  “He does.” I started to say more but stopped.

  “That’s old. Ninety-five. I’ve got a great-uncle who’s ninety-four. But I’d rather lie down in the middle of the interstate at night than let him drive. He drinks a lot. Your dad drink?”

  “It’s not a big problem.” I saw my mother wave to me; time to go. “I should head out. Good luck with selling this stuff.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “If we don’t sell the gun, we’ll just have to go shoot the crap out of some stuff. That lever action is the coolest thing.”

  When I got back to the car, my mother asked what we were talking about.

  “Guns,” I said.

  “No surprise,” she said.

  “This,” my father announced, “is excellent fried chicken.”

  —

  Tuscaloosa is a town of slightly more than 93,000 residents with a stadium that seats over 103,000. The only hotel I could find was about thirty miles outside town, a fancy Marriott built around a golf course. I hoped it would be the sort of place my mother would enjoy while dad and I were at the game.

  Traveling with my parents, I’d come to realize the small and larger strains that my mother constantly faced helping my father. He had come to rely on her for almost everything, from suggesting what and where to eat to handling finances. She did it all with grace, but it was unrelenting. For the first time, I found myself thinking I should spend at least part of the year near them so that I could help my mother, if nothing else. I’d been so consumed with my own life that I’d lost focus on what my parents needed. I promised myself that after this football season, I’d rearrange my life to help my parents more, but in the back of my mind I wondered if I was just like an alcoholic telling himself that the next drink would be the last.

  At least now I could take comfort in being able to help my mother in little ways, like finding a hotel she might enjoy and giving her time alone when Dad and I went to the games. “I like this,” she said as we walked in. The hotel was quiet and had none of the game-day frenzy that we’d found at the Vanderbilt game. The hard-core fans would have planned ahead and stayed closer to the stadium.

  We were expecting terrible traffic but easily drove within a couple of blocks of the stadium. Tuscaloosa seemed to have figured out how to get people in and out of town using a combination of one-way streets and an overwhelming presence of city police. Almost every lawn was packed with cars, and the sidewalks were filled with fans dressed in Crimson Tide regalia, tickets in one hand, a beer in the other. The sea of ’Bama fans started about three miles from the stadium and thickened as we drew nearer. We took a right turn, and suddenly the stadium loomed in front of us, huge and extraterrestrial, like a massive spaceship landed in this chipped neighborhood.

  Alongside us, fathers and sons walked to the game. “Just like we used to walk to the game,” I said, nodding toward a dad who was wearing a sport coat, unusual in a flood of jeans and Alabama T-shirts. “You always wore a sport coat.”

  Dad smiled. He nodded to a pair of kids who were holding up a cardboard sign that read GAME PARKING, $40. FREE COKE. “Free Coke is a nice touch,” he said. We crept along in the slow traffic, and I caught a glimpse of him staring at the stadium, but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere, a look I’d learned to recognize. “I loved playing football,” he said, looking out at the scene. “You know why I had to stop at Ole Miss? The training table was eighteen bucks a month. No way I could justify that just to play football.” He laughed. “Eighteen bucks. How much did it cost to fill up the car?”

  “Sixty-eight.”

  “And parking is forty bucks. I wasn’t great, but I was pretty good,” he said.

  “If I had it to do over, I’d have kept playing,” I said to Dad. Then I asked him something I’ve always wondered. “When I quit, you never questioned me about it. But would you have liked me to keep playing?”

  He looked at me, surprised. “If you had kept playing when you didn’t want to and I thought it was because of me, that would have bothered me. You wanted to do other things. You made good grades; you went to college where you wanted to. Those were the things that seemed important, not playing a sport.”

  It was what I would have expected him to say, and I loved him for it. But I still had regrets, if only because it was something we could have shared. “Me playing, you and Mom coming to games, it would have been fun,” I said. “More than fun, special.”

  He shrugged. “You never know. You might have hated it, you might have gotten hurt, you might have done that instead of thinking about college and be sitting here today regretting that playing football didn’t make it possible for you to do what you really wanted to do.”

  “That’s bleak,” I said, laughing, but I knew he was right. “You know, sometimes I think I quit playing because I was afraid I wouldn’t be good enough to make you really proud. Like I might have let you down.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s crazy,” he said, and we both sort of laughed, trying to lighten the moment. “You know it’s crazy.”

  We were just a block from the stadium but barely moving in the traffic. My plan was to use the car’s handicap sticker—that seeme
d to have been granted when my dad hit ninety—to snag a spot near the stadium. I rolled down the windows to talk to one of the many police officers in the street. Despite the traffic, everyone seemed in a good mood. This was Saturday, the stadium was within sight, and Alabama was surely about to administer one of its routine ass kickings.

  “We’re looking for the handicap parking,” I said. “The map showed that there was some ahead and to the left?” I waved a printout of the stadium parking scheme from the university’s Web site.

  The cop was in her thirties, dark-haired and attractive. She stared at me as if I had asked her if Crimson Tide was a laundry detergent.

  “You need handicapped?”

  “My dad’s ninety-five and—”

  “Bless your heart,” she said to my dad, who waved. “Y’all pull on over.”

  “Ask her if we park here, if she’ll take us the rest of the way,” my dad suggested. I’d noticed that he was not shy about asking for help.

  The police officer leaned in. She was sweating, and I wondered how long she had been out here. “I got to tell you, these handicap lots fill up fast. You can reserve a place online. You didn’t do that, did you?”

  “No.” I shook my head, feeling like an idiot. Of course. Why did I think that parking at an Alabama–Ole Miss game didn’t take advance planning?

  “You might find some places if you go up here to the left, go two blocks, then turn right at the first light.” She shrugged. “I know that isn’t great.”

  I thanked her, and she waved us back into the slow-moving traffic. I could feel my game excitement start to fade, replaced with a low-grade anxiety. I really should have figured this out better. I knew I had fallen back into a childhood pattern of assuming if it was football, my dad would take care of all the arrangements. He had always planned for the games, bought the tickets, made any arrangements, even years after I was living on my own. We had taken other trips together, like fishing in Alaska, when I handled everything and just sent him the tickets, but he always took charge of any football plans. I’d wanted to spend the fall with my dad to reassure myself that nothing had changed, but of course our time together was doing just the opposite, offering proof that things between us would never be the same. I’d assumed we could recapture those moments of years ago, but on the way to Saturday’s stadiums I’d realized just how much time had passed since our first games together. This just made me want to grab each moment a little tighter; after spending so many years in a hurry, I was now pulling hard on time to slow down.

  We were directly in front of Bryant-Denny Stadium now. “How many does it seat?” Dad asked as we took in the monstrosity.

  “Over a hundred thousand,” I said. “One hundred and one thousand and change, actually.”

  “Superdome is only seventy-five thousand,” he said.

  “Really? How do you know that?”

  He looked at me. “It’s a secret?”

  I laughed but felt bad because I knew I had fallen into a trap of assuming that he wouldn’t know something just because he was ninety-five. I could remember how much I hated that kind of condescension when I was a kid, particularly because I was convinced that I knew everything. Then I’d known that eventually it would end; I could see into the future and imagine being as old as, say, twenty-one. But my father, or anyone past a certain age, could only look ahead and imagine it getting worse. Suddenly it struck me that must be one of the most terrible realities of aging, knowing it changed how you were viewed by the world and with few options to change that perception. Maybe that’s what plastic surgery or even younger girlfriends or boyfriends was about, not so much vanity or lust as a deep desire to change how you were viewed by the world. Like when I couldn’t remember where the car was parked after the game with Southeast Missouri; if I were my dad’s age, anyone would have assumed it was age fogging my memory. There was a line out there just waiting to be crossed when it was no longer vaguely charming to be absentminded but a sign of declining ability, the beginning of a slow walk into senility. For someone like me, who was perfectly capable of losing my keys, wallet, or car or some combination at any given moment and had been that way all my life, the prospects for early senility typecasting seemed particularly bleak.

  We tried several parking lots with signs for handicapped spaces. All were full. A block from the stadium in what the locals called the Strip, fans spilled out of bars and restaurants while we watched, stuck in traffic. Two couples in their thirties walked by in Ole Miss garb. This was a “blue” day. “Hotty Toddy!” Dad yelled, waving through the open window.

  “Why don’t we just get out here and watch it on television,” my father said. He nodded toward a restaurant that had multiple televisions tuned to the game. He suddenly sounded tired. “All this traffic.”

  We were drowning in cars and people, and he seemed overwhelmed. I’d felt that way years ago on Halloween night at Tiger Stadium, the first time my father took me to an out-of-town game: the people, the costumes, the noise, not knowing how it all made sense. Then he had pulled me closer and told me that it was “just football,” and everything made sense. But what could I do now to comfort him as he had done for me?

  “Do you remember,” I asked, “when you went to the Ole Miss–Alabama game in Birmingham? When Archie was playing. When was that…?”

  “Nineteen sixty-nine.” He thought for a moment, starting to relax as he slipped into memory’s river and began to float downstream. “It was October. First weekend, I think.”

  I quickly pulled up the date on my phone. No reason not to; we weren’t moving. Damned if he wasn’t right. “October 4, 1969. Why didn’t I go?”

  “That I can’t remember. School, I guess.”

  “Totally unfair.”

  “Or maybe a girlfriend.” He looked over at me with a smile. That was more likely the truth. From the time I’d hit high school, girls had become more important than football. I wish it hadn’t been the case, but it was, and there was no denying it. I’d discovered that while certain girls would like you only if you were a football star, there was this other, larger group that couldn’t have cared less; the ones I found most appealing thought it all too typical to go out with a jock. Being a really good football player was hard and involved considerable pain and sacrifice. If there were beautiful girls who preferred you didn’t go through all that, well, that made it all the easier to walk away from the sport.

  “You know, that might have been the best game I ever saw,” Dad said.

  We had moved a couple of blocks and were stuck again. In the distance, I could see the iconic statue of Bear Bryant. He seemed to be smiling at my stupidity. I turned out of the traffic, away from the stadium, and toward the campus.

  “Good move,” my dad said. I didn’t tell him I had no idea what I was doing. “Archie was incredible that day. I think he set a record for total yardage.”

  I pulled behind a redbrick campus building and parked in an empty handicapped space. We weren’t very close to the stadium, but I’d given up trying to find anything closer.

  “You ought to look it up,” Dad said. “How many yards Archie got.”

  I nodded, wondering how we were going to get over to the stadium. It wasn’t that far but a long way for my dad to walk.

  “Hey!”

  Across the parking lot, a campus security guard was headed our way. My dad looked at me, shaking his head. “Let’s just watch this on television.”

  “Hold on,” I told him and got out.

  “You can’t park here without a specific parking pass,” the guard said evenly.

  I explained how we had been looking for a handicapped space and that I’d screwed up by not reserving one in advance and my dad was ninety-five and, well, I laid it on pretty thick.

  “You guys Ole Miss fans?” he said. “Drove all the way over here?” I nodded. “And you say your dad’s ninety-five?”

  “Ninety-six in December. We’re trying to go to all of the Ole Miss games this season.”
/>   He stepped away and spoke into a radio. My dad was out of the car and stretching. Now that we weren’t stuck in traffic, it was easier to appreciate that it was a gorgeous day, hot and clear. Dad walked slowly over.

  “Hotty Toddy,” he said, smiling. “We came to see ’Bama get beat.”

  The guard laughed. “You came a long way for nothin’ then. My boys don’t lose much playing in our house.”

  “Well, that A&M game last year,” Dad said.

  I looked at him, amazed. “Are you trying to get us arrested?”

  The security guard winced. “I have nightmares about that game. Manziel was just unbelievable.”

  “You should have seen Archie against the Bear in ’69,” Dad said.

  The guard’s face lit up. “You go to that game? I’ve read all about it. I’m going to law school, and then I want to be a sports agent. That game’s a legend.”

  “He didn’t take me to that game,” I said flatly. That was starting to really bother me.

  A double-cab pickup with the University of Alabama logo on the side pulled up. A fellow large enough to have played defensive tackle for Alabama stuck his head out.

  “I heard somebody wants to see a little football?”

  “Y’all get in,” the guard said. “He’ll take you over to the game.”

  I held out my hand, surprised at how much relief I felt. “That’s really good of you. Particularly after my dad was giving you a hard time.”

  “You know,” he said as we were getting into the pickup, “Ole Miss lost that game even with Archie Manning.”

  My father nodded. “One point,” he said, wincing, as if it had happened the day before. “One point.”

  “Roll Tide,” the large driver said with a smile.

  “Hotty Toddy,” Dad answered.

  —

  The original Alabama stadium was built in 1929, and various renovations have since transformed it into one of the most intimidating stadiums for visiting teams in the nation. The noise of a crowd of more than 100,000 was shocking, like falling into a cold lake, a deafening wall of sound that started at the very top seats and gained in power and force until it crested on the field. Everywhere there were reminders that Alabama was one of the great powerhouses in the history of college football, and whoever you were, your destiny of defeat was assured. It started with the Bryant statue in the front of the stadium and continued with relentless videos of past moments in Alabama’s football history: twenty-seven conference championships, fifteen national championships, sixty-one bowl games. On this field, the Bear had coached Joe Namath. The message was clear: Alabama is a giant, you are small, submit to your fate.