The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  My mother was good. She used the same skills that helped her launch the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Ole Miss: pure charm and a quick laugh that always put her at the center of any comedic misfortune. She was beautiful but seemed unaware of her beauty, which, of course, only made her more compelling. Watching her whip through the exotic slides of this faraway place in the mountains was like traveling a wormhole to another universe.

  At the end, when she talked about what the campers were expected to bring and said that a warm jacket was needed for the cold nights of July, the gathered would murmur in delight and disbelief. “But the camp provides all the blankets the boys will need. Can you imagine, sleeping under blankets in July with no air-conditioning? That’s about as close to heaven on earth as I imagine we’ll see,” she’d say with a laugh, and, man, let me tell you, every single person left thinking about the deadening heat of Mississippi in July.

  I can remember how excited she was when she came into my room one night to tell me that enough families had committed to sending their sons that I’d be able to go. Maybe it’s my imagination or maybe it’s what I think the truth was, but there seemed to be more than just a sense of happiness; there seemed to be a sense of relief. You can get out.

  That I had this chance was a pure accident of my birth, being lucky enough to have parents who gave me options. We say that in America anyone can become anything he desires, which is probably more true for us than most countries, but that still doesn’t make it true. And nowhere in America have circumstances of birth been more defining than Mississippi. With my parents, I won the lottery: loving parents, every possible advantage, and, yes, born white. All Mississippi stories are eventually about race, and mine is no exception. The path of my life wasn’t fully determined the day I was born, but the choices I might be afforded were certainly a gift of birth and nothing I had earned.

  Earlier that year at my father’s ninety-fifth birthday party given by his old law firm, I found myself trying to express this to someone I had known all my life: Alonzo Kent, the son of Elzoria Kent, who had worked for my family until well after I had left for college. Alonzo and his sister had nursed Elzoria through a long decline with great love. He had worked for the law firm for years in various office management and support areas.

  It had been years since we’d seen each other. We hugged. To my surprise, I found myself trying not to choke up. We grabbed a table in one of the law firm’s conference rooms, an oddly formal place for a conversation best had over beers on a back porch. “You know, you’re looking a lot like your mom,” I said.

  “That’s just what a guy likes to hear,” he said, laughing. “But I know it’s the truth.”

  And then we talked about his mom. “I don’t have any memories before Elzoria,” I told him. “She’s there, in my head, from the start.”

  “Me too,” Alonzo said, smiling.

  We talked about Elzoria and the special way she had of laughing and how positive she had been even when there was darkness in her life. I struggled to tell him what she meant to me. “I remember once, I came home and I was complaining about something. I can’t remember what. Something stupid, I’m sure. I was maybe eight years old. She got right in my face—”

  He laughed. “Oh yeah. I know that.”

  “And she told me, ‘Stuart Stevens, you are the luckiest boy in this whole wide world, and don’t you ever start feeling sorry for yourself.’ ” Alonzo smiled, trying not to notice that I was tearing up. “She said, ‘Your mama and daddy love you and Jesus loves you and Elzoria loves you and that’s all any boy in this world could need. You hear me now?’ ”

  Alonzo smiled. “That sounds like her. Yes, sir,” he said, both of us drifting back in memory.

  “I always wanted her to be proud of me,” I said.

  “You know she was,” Alonzo said, waving his hand, as if to brush off any notion otherwise.

  We sat there for a long moment. “She didn’t have an easy life, I know, Alonzo. But she touched so many people.”

  “We were blessed to have her,” he said, squeezing my hand. Christ, I thought, she’s his mother, and he’s comforting me. How selfish can I be?

  We talked some about football and Jackson-area players who were up at Ole Miss. It was time to go, but I kept vamping because there was something I wanted to say to him but wasn’t sure I knew the right words. Finally, when he said he had to get back, I couldn’t put it off.

  “Look, Alonzo, once, when I was a kid, I heard your mother say something to my mom that has kind of haunted me all these years. My mom, too, when we talk about it.”

  He looked at me with a questioning smile.

  “I don’t know what they had been talking about, but she said, ‘You know, Mrs. Stevens, I think if I had been born white, I could have really been something.’ ”

  Alonzo sighed. “My mom said that?”

  I nodded. He turned away for a moment, and we were both tearing up. He came back with a slight smile. “She was something.”

  —

  Like a lot of big-time college schools, Ole Miss had spent a fortune building posh athletic facilities, ostensibly for all the student athletes but focused on the moneymaking marquee football teams. The new Manning Center was next to the stadium and connected by an underground passage so the players could emerge into the stadium tunnel directly from the locker room. It had weight rooms, an indoor practice field, and team meeting rooms. I’d been dying to get a peek inside the place, and before the Texas A&M game I got the chance.

  It happened because Mitt Romney was visiting Ole Miss for the game. One of his closest aides during the campaign, Garrett Jackson, was a former student equipment manager while an undergrad at Ole Miss. After eighteen months of listening to Garrett and me talk about our passion for the Rebels, Mitt had decided he had to come to a game and see for himself.

  All through the campaign, even at the most stressful moments, Garrett had shown a preternatural calm. I finally asked him how he could be so steady, particularly in his first campaign at a young age. “I can promise you,” he said, “that nothing we’ve done can come close to what it’s like to be standing on the sidelines of an SEC football game having a coach scream at you because you brought the wrong kicking shoe. This running-for-president stuff is easy compared to the SEC.”

  Garrett had arranged for Mitt to visit the Manning Center, and my dad and I were able to tag along. As much as I wanted to see the new facilities, I still had a certain PTSD shiver at the thought of yet another locker room. We’d had more than twenty debates in the campaign, and it seemed as if most of them were on college campuses that used locker rooms for holding spaces before the debates. But the new Ole Miss facility was like nothing we had encountered on the debate circuit.

  “This,” my father announced, “is like a fancy country club, not a locker room.”

  He was absolutely right. It was high ceilinged, with wide wood-grained lockers. WIN THE DAY was emblazoned over and over on the lighting panels that hung between the rows of lockers. Larger-than-life action photographs depicted Rebel greats, past and present.

  One photograph was of early Ole Miss football great Bruiser Kinard. “We were good friends,” my dad said, pointing to Bruiser’s black-and-white photograph, which showed a stern, handsome young man in a white jersey. He had high cheekbones and carefully combed hair as if he was going out of his way to disavow his nickname, Bruiser.

  “You knew Bruiser Kinard?” Garrett asked. It was one of the few times I had heard him sound impressed.

  Bruiser was Ole Miss’s first all-American and had played professional football for the very baseball-sounding Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees. He was a running back, defensive lineman, and kicker and in the entire 1936 season missed only twelve minutes of playing time.

  “We played together when I was on the freshman team at Ole Miss,” my dad said, “and I saw him play in New York after we graduated.”

  “That is something,” Garrett said, nodding. He looked
at my father as if he were meeting the oldest Confederate widow, someone with a living tie to an unimaginable era.

  We walked out of the locker room into a training area where Mitt was meeting some of the athletic trainers and equipment managers. He gestured around the athletic fantasy world.

  “Was it like this when you were at Ole Miss?” Mitt asked my dad, laughing. They had met once before on the campaign trail when we had ended up in Asheville. My mother had driven my dad to the airport, and the idea was that I would drive their car in our little motorcade while we were in Asheville.

  In honor of the occasion, my mother had finally taken off her fading Obama bumper sticker from 2008. The local Asheville advance team had very kindly positioned my parents’ battered Toyota in the motorcade. When we arrived, to my horror, my mother informed me that she was very excited about driving in the motorcade.

  “You don’t really understand how they drive in these crazy motorcades,” I said. “They can go sort of fast, and if they close the road, they do this swerving thing sometimes.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” I said. “I’d feel safer if al-Qaeda were chasing us with RPGs than you driving this Toyota at eighty miles per hour.” Truth was, I’d never driven in a motorcade before either, and I was nervous about my driving. As it turned out, I did a miserable job, and the Secret Service crew gave me a hard time about it for the rest of the campaign.

  Later that day, before a rally in downtown Asheville, we had ended up in a holding room for more than an hour. My plan was for my parents to meet Mitt and then I’d take them into the rally. But the quick meeting had turned into a long conversation about the South, differences between North Carolina and Mississippi, and George Romney, whom my parents had much admired. I watched it all a little nervously, suggesting several times that we should go, but I was waved off.

  Afterward, Mitt said to me, “You’re so lucky to have them. So lucky.”

  That Saturday at Ole Miss was one of the designated days that potential recruits could visit the campus. The NCAA heavily regulates all contact between colleges and high school recruits in a byzantine system where good intentions seem often pushed to absurd levels. Each college is allowed only one official visit by a recruit, so the pressure to maximize each visit is huge. The recruits and their families had been invited to spend the afternoon touring the new athletic facilities before the game.

  At the end of one of the training rooms, there was a display of the various combinations of game-day uniforms for the 2013 season. As anyone who has watched college or professional football lately knows, there seems to be something of a competition among some teams as to who can have the most embarrassing uniforms. It’s as if a marketing study were done that concluded that the sport would undergo massive growth proportional to the regrettable color schemes and designs of uniforms.

  Fortunately, Ole Miss had the good sense or good fortune to stay with classic looks: red jersey and white pants; white pants and white jersey with blue trim; all blue pants and jersey with white trim (my favorite); blue pants and white jersey with blue trim; and blue pants with red jersey and white trim. They all had the benefit of making those who wore them look like football players and not failed fashion experiments. Along with these came an impressive shoe collection with different cleats for different conditions, various gloves, and color-coordinated pads of every variety: elbow and arm pads, shoulder pads, hip pads, knee pads, back pads.

  “So, every player gets all this stuff?” asked a tall high school recruit who had come up behind my father and joined us in marveling at the gear.

  “You have to be good when you wear this gear,” my father said, chuckling.

  “I feel fast just looking at it,” the recruit said, smiling. “Man, how much you think all that stuff cost?”

  “Nothing you have to worry about,” my father said.

  “At my high school, we have to pay for some of our gear,” the kid said. “I worked an extra job last summer so I could look good on the field.”

  “I bet you did look good,” my father said.

  The recruit smiled. “We haven’t lost a game yet.”

  “You gonna play for the Rebels?” I asked.

  He frowned. “I can’t commit now, you know. I’ve got to do this by the rules. That’s what everybody keeps telling us. I don’t want to screw anything up.”

  “We’re just fans and hope we get to see a play on Saturdays.”

  He relaxed, smiling. “I think if my mama saw me playing on television, she’d have a heart attack.”

  “Well, you know what that means,” my father said. “She’ll just have to come to every game.”

  The kid smiled as if he just signed a multimillion-dollar contract. “Man, wouldn’t that be something. I just want to be a Sunday player. Take care of her.”

  A “Sunday player” was slang for playing in the NFL. “I hope it all works out,” I said, shaking his hand but wondering if he had any idea of what lay ahead and the daunting odds for success. Even for the scholarship elite players, the odds of injury were great and the chance for NFL riches remote. Division One schools with major programs made vast sums off the football teams, and while the players were given scholarships, they had no chance to participate in any of the wealth they were helping generate. It was an inherently unfair, deeply flawed system, but a perfect solution was elusive. The notion of giving players some profit sharing of the revenue they generated or paying them large salaries would abandon any pretext of a dividing line between amateur and professional sports. At the very least, it seemed to me that players should be paid something for the forty hours a week during the season a big-time program demanded. Even if they made the same per hour as students working in the cafeteria or school store, it would help. Some of the kids had absolutely no money, and over and over players got into trouble for taking small gifts of what amounted to petty cash. And the concept that a university could charge for a player’s likeness on a jersey but a kid couldn’t sell his own autograph struck me as utterly insane and deeply unfair. It was an invitation for cheating.

  “You enjoy playing,” Dad told the recruit, “but get your degree. You’ll need that.”

  “Yes, sir. My mother says the same thing.”

  “You’ll make her real proud,” Dad said, and the kid beamed.

  We left him looking at the uniforms, probably dreaming of what it would be like to run through the tunnel to the screams of the crowd.

  “I hope he makes it,” Dad said. “I really do.”

  —

  To get to the game, we walked the same route the players took every day for practice: out of the Manning Center and up the surprisingly steep stairs to the beautifully groomed fields that lay in the shadow of the Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. It was dusk, the setting sun cast a soft glow on the green fields. Behind us, thousands streamed into the stadium with that expectant hope that comes with a new Saturday and a 0–0 scoreboard.

  Young kids played out fantasies on the practice field while their parents had one more drink and tried to conjure up the energy of past triumphs. From inside the stadium came the collage of sounds that preceded every game: the slick videos that pumped the crowd for the battle to come, the band playing its medley of songs that included an homage to Dixie, the cheers and outbreaks of loud “Hotty Toddy” chants.

  We stood there for a few minutes while my father caught his breath after the walk up the stairs, soaking in the scene. “You know,” I said, “I don’t think there’s anyplace I’d rather be right now.”

  My father nodded, and we watched the kids. On a night like this, with the stadium full and glory waiting to be seized, I wondered if anyone who ever played football didn’t wish he were still playing. It was the perfect dream of youth, to be young and strong and full of promise and on that field.

  The sky grew a little darker and the air just a touch cooler.

  “Hey,” I said, “let’s go. We don’t want to miss the kickoff.”<
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  —

  It took one play to make it clear why Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel had won the Heisman Trophy as a freshman. He took the snap from his usual position five feet back from the center, did a little pump fake, and then just juked and jived straight up the field. Watching it reminded me of when I used to box and got hit for the first time by an exceptional puncher. I wasn’t a very good boxer and got hit a lot. Most punchers were predictable in their power, but occasionally somebody came along who hit with a shot that immediately signaled this was not going to be fun. So it was with Manziel: one play, one player touching the ball, seventeen-yard gain. There was no huddle; this was speed football, the sort that Ole Miss’s coach, Hugh Freeze, loved to play. Strike fast. Don’t let the defense get settled. Keep them rattled.

  With the sort of ease that signaled “I could do this all night, folks,” Manziel kept the ball, swiveled his hips right and left in half spins, and was nine yards down the field before he was touched. The effortless grace of his play sucked the energy out of Ole Miss.

  My father and I sighed. Ole Miss had lost to Alabama at the game we’d attended and then lost the following week to Auburn, which we didn’t make. The weather report had been nasty for the game, and Dad had felt like resting up. So they were now 3-2 for the season, and this was looking like a very long night. My dad shrugged. “That Manziel, he’s like a big cat that can pass. If he has the ball last, we’ll lose.” Like all great fans, my father had strong opinions; certainty was an essential quality in a fan. There was no joy in liking a team; no bliss in not caring for an opponent. You had to love your team and hate your rivals to be a true fan, and, most important, you must always have the certainty, without a doubt, that you know what is best for your team. If the confidence in your convictions starts to slip, best to just admit that you were once a fan but are now only an observer, another window-shopper without either the money or the need to buy.