The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  At the half, the Ole Miss defense had somehow held Manziel to fourteen points, which seemed a small miracle given his talents. In a choppy give-and-take, the Ole Miss offense had scored one touchdown. It was 14–10.

  “I’ll take that,” my father said, standing up and stretching as the Ole Miss “million-dollar band” was heading onto the field. “You know I’m ninety-five and get these things mixed up, but I seem to remember there was ice cream here.”

  We had been invited to watch the game in one of the stadium’s new skyboxes by a friend of mine who also worked in my father’s law firm. Outside in the hallway, there was a freezer of ice cream that had caught my dad’s eye when we stepped off the elevator.

  The Rebel fans around seemed upbeat, despite being behind. “When it’s 14–10, everybody still thinks they can win,” Dad said.

  “It’s like being forty,” I said.

  He paused and thought about it for a moment. “I can’t really remember, but that sounds right.” We made our way over to the magic ice cream freezer. Half a dozen kids, seven or eight years old, were playing football in the wide hallway. Dad opened up the freezer and brought out a couple of different kinds of ice cream sandwiches, instantly bringing the kids’ game to a halt.

  “How much does the ice cream cost?” a blond girl who was a little taller than any of the boys asked.

  “Doesn’t cost a thing,” Dad said. “You want some?”

  So my dad became the Ice Cream Man, spreading out the various choices and handing them out to the football players.

  “You remember Seale-Lily ice cream?” I asked him. Seale-Lily was a local ice cream brand when I was growing up.

  “Of course.” He thought for a minute. “You eat it with a smile,” he said, conjuring up its long-ago slogan.

  “Yes! I can’t believe you remember that.”

  “Don’t know why not. I was eating a lot more Seale-Lily a lot longer than you.”

  That was true. “Do you remember that guy who used to do their ads on WJTV? He was a weatherman and the news guy.”

  My father thought for a while, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. What did he look like?”

  “That’s the best part! He was bald and used to go on television eating ice cream cones, talking about how great the ice cream was. When I was a kid, I thought he looked like an ice cream cone.”

  When I had been these kids’ age, WJTV and WLBT had dominated television in Mississippi. Those stations combined with The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News had largely defined the outside world. WLBT was famous for editing national newscasts whenever it disliked the coverage of civil rights. Back in the 1950s, when Thurgood Marshall appeared on an NBC news show, WLBT blocked it out with a sign that read CABLE DIFFICULTY. Later the station became the only one in the country to have its license revoked for overt racism. But now, not so much later, the stands were filled with blacks and whites cheering blacks and whites on the field.

  Nelson Mandela had shrewdly used rugby to unify South Africa. In many ways, football, high school and college, had played the same role in the South. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, blacks and whites had discovered what it felt like to be on the same side. Instead of trying to keep blacks out, universities waged fierce recruiting battles to attract black athletes. Now if violence was to break out over a black student entering a southern school, it’s most likely to be between two rival coaches fighting over a star athlete.

  The football field was a defined space and time in which it was proven over and over that to be successful, everyone must work together and care about each other. Sports had proven the clichés to be true: that only by uniting could we build something greater than ourselves. You could talk all you wanted about why a society should treat races equally, but sports—football—did make the theoretical very real. There was something powerful about the sense of loss and fear when your son’s teammate didn’t get up from a play or the joy shared with the stranger next to you in the stands after a big team win that made racial differences very small and trite.

  It was hard to imagine all the anger and the blood that had been shed over the years in the segregation battles in an effort to avoid…what? This? This stadium filled with raucous, happy fans? A student union where blacks and whites ate frozen yogurt together and complained about tests and teachers?

  “They have any more of those good hot dogs?” my dad asked, breaking me out of my meditations on race and the past.

  “That may be the most important question of the night,” I said.

  “Let’s grab some and get back,” Dad said. “Don’t want to miss the second-half kickoff.”

  Ninety-five and still not wanting to miss a single play of a big game. Not a bad life goal.

  —

  Ole Miss received the second-half kickoff and promptly went three and out. When the Ole Miss offense clicked, it was a thing of beauty to behold. But like a high-performance sports car, it could be tricky getting it started. They lacked the big power runners to grind downhill and depended on speed and finesse, maximizing the skills of their excellent receivers and small, speedy backs. To work, they needed to establish a rhythm of very quick plays, using shallow screen passes the way more traditional teams would use an off-tackle running dive. If a defense interrupted their rhythms by stopping them on first down or pressuring the quarterback, they seldom were able to adjust.

  Johnny Manziel was different. He had that rare ability to convert seeming disaster into shocking success, scrambling all over the field, never giving up. He embraced chaos and played the game with a sandlot improvisation, like a stock car racer who loved to take turns on two wheels. In nine quick plays, he scored, putting A&M up 21–10, and did it with an ease that made it seem he could score at will. My father and I just looked at each other and laughed. It was maddening, but he was so good, so magical, that if you had an ounce of love for the game of football, you had to celebrate Manziel.

  When Ole Miss got the ball back, my father leaned forward eagerly, as if he wanted to run out on the field. “We need this,” he said, banging his fist against my knee. “We need to score now.”

  In a methodical fourteen-play drive, alternating quarterbacks, Ole Miss drove down the field and did what they had to do: score. It was what sports announcers have taken to calling “grown-up football”: no trick plays, no lucky breaks, no third downs longer than three yards, just solid play.

  The problem with scoring against Texas A&M was the disturbing reality that you then had to give the ball back to Johnny Manziel. In nine successive pass plays, he took his team seventy yards to the Ole Miss ten-yard line. It felt like watching a college player thrust into a high school game; Manziel simply played the game at a higher level than anyone else. But then, at the ten-yard line, he unexpectedly made one bad pass, thrown over the middle into the end zone for an easy Ole Miss interception.

  My father leaped to his feet and thrust his hands over his head. Below us in the student section, a joyous “Hotty Toddy” broke out. “This is our chance,” my father said. “Now we go ahead.”

  But only three plays later, Ole Miss’s quarterback Bo Wallace threw an interception on the Ole Miss twenty-yard line. It was as if fate were just batting us about, a giant cat playing with a somewhat amusing toy.

  The last quarter was as brutal and desperately played as any fifteen minutes of football I’ve ever seen. On both teams, players were felled by injuries, hauled off the field, and replaced by another clean uniform sprinting onto the field.

  The intensity and violence on both sides came from playing for something more than numbers on a scoreboard. Battles had been fought all night between individual players, and now it was about proving who could endure pain longer, who could break the other player’s will.

  Neither team would collapse or give up. With three minutes left, it was tied, 38–38.

  Ole Miss got the ball at their twenty-five-yard line, with every Rebel fan in the stadium standing and screaming. This was when
the team had to prove they could win. After thirty-eight points, all they needed was one more drive for a score. Then horror unfolded with stunning quickness: one incomplete pass; a second incomplete pass; a third incomplete.

  “That’s it?” my father moaned. “Three passes? No runs?”

  The stadium was suddenly, shockingly quiet as the punting team came out on the field.

  The rest of the game felt like standing against the executioner’s wall watching the firing squad assemble. Manziel did what he had done all night: he threw for fourteen yards; he ran for twelve yards; he ran for thirteen yards. Then he handed it off to a couple of big backs to take the ball down to the Ole Miss fifteen-yard line with four seconds left. Then he trotted off the field for the field goal kicker, his work done.

  If you had told me it would cost ten years of my life for A&M to miss the kick, I would have gladly taken the deal. I think most of the stadium would have as well.

  Of course he made the kick.

  My father and I stood there sighing. It was a terribly painful way to end a game, but the seven plays it had taken A&M to get in position to kick the field goal had been sort of an emotional hospice care, offering time to prepare for the inevitable.

  While the A&M players were mobbed on the field by their fans, the Ole Miss players filed out through the stadium tunnel. A few of the students nearest the tunnel yelled support and began to clap, and then others did. In our box, we joined the students applauding.

  But it was a joyless applause. Dying may feel worse than losing a game like this, but at least with dying there’s the comfort of knowing it’s unlikely to happen again. In the hallway, Cooper Manning, the oldest of the Manning brothers, was consoling Rebel fans like a priest at a funeral. There seemed to be some comfort in being in the presence of a Manning, like a connection to a better time or a reminder that all pain was temporal. A tall, smiling figure with that shock of brown hair, he seemed to radiate the calmness of someone who had known disappointment before—his own career cut short by a near-tragic medical condition—and emerged stronger.

  No doubt any objective observers would consider the depression that seemed to afflict every Ole Miss fan shuffling out of the stadium as a gross overreaction. Had Ole Miss just had a bit of better luck and execution and been able to squeeze out those last three points, there would be delirious celebration and all life’s problems would suddenly seem far less significant. But that hadn’t happened, and now whatever was bothering anyone before the game surely loomed larger. It was difficult to escape that little voice inside shouting: Unlucky. I’m just unlucky. My whole life I’ve been unlucky. I will always be unlucky.

  Three points. It was staggering how three points could change a worldview. My father put his arm around my shoulders. “Next week,” he said.

  “Next week.”

  6

  My mother’s family was from Louisiana. Her mother had been born and raised outside Shreveport on the Rough and Ready Plantation. At eighteen, she ran away with the clarinet player from a band playing at a debutante party. It was not fated to be one of those happily ever after marriages, but it lasted long enough for my mother to be born. The clarinet player was mostly a stranger to my mother until later in life when they both ended up living in Jackson. He ran a music store, and I worked there off and on in high school and loved the time I got to spend with him. He was a Kelly, pure Irish, and a wonderful man.

  My grandmother seemed to like marrying, if not being married, and kept at it through five different marriages. She would note, always with a twinkling smile, that she never married the same man twice, though she did marry cousins with the same last name. This proved to be a boon with monograms. Her maiden name was Mary Land. She loved to fish, hunt, and cook and wrote about all three. She was the first female member of the Louisiana Sports Writers Association and wrote a classic of southern eating, Louisiana Cookery. As a kid, I wasn’t really aware of her writing, but I loved to go fishing with her and listen to her stories of living in Mexico. For a while, she had a lion cub as a pet; that ended predictably when it mauled some overly friendly visitor. She drove a Jaguar XK-E, until the afternoon she flipped it into a bayou during a Louisiana storm. A Good Samaritan dragged her half-drowned from under the ruined car. She had respiratory problems the rest of her life.

  My mother was a student at LSU when she transferred to Ole Miss to “colonize” a new chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It was both an adventure and a paying job. Her mother was between husbands and “none of them as rich as they should’ve been,” as my grandmother would joke.

  Before she got on a train to Oxford, my mother’s only knowledge of Mississippi was the Gulf Coast, which is like knowing Boston through Cape Cod. Compared with the sophistication of New Orleans, where she had gone to the McGehee School, it must have felt like an exotic Peace Corps posting.

  Growing up in a family with LSU and Ole Miss ties, I assumed that the intense rivalry between the schools was a peculiarity of ours, a family feud being acted out in Oxford, Baton Rouge, and Jackson for our benefit. It was only later that I realized that the Ole Miss–LSU football rivalry started in 1894.

  When I had first talked to my dad about spending a season going to games together, he had immediately homed in on the rivalry. “When’s the LSU game?” he asked. “That will be the biggest. That will be the biggest.” He was right. Now the LSU game was six days away, and as the campus began to recover from its A&M near-victory hangover, surely worse than a blowout-defeat hangover, that special “big game” feeling began to take over the university. We spent that week on campus staying at what my parents called the Alumni House, as it had been known for decades. It was the on-campus hotel that had been renovated a few years back and now officially bore the more sophisticated name The Inn at Ole Miss.

  “When I was in law school,” my father said as we were walking over to the student union for coffee and frozen yogurt, “we talked one of my professors into driving down to Baton Rouge for the LSU game.” Dad and I liked to walk over to the student union mid-morning. It wasn’t a long distance, but walking with my dad was never fast. For the first time this season, there was coolness in the air, the sort of weather that people mean when they talk about “football weather.” In the Northeast and places like Michigan, this can come on late August nights, but in the South, the land of brutal two-a-day practices in August with the temperature over a hundred degrees, football weather was October and November, just as the season started to come into sharp focus.

  “Erskine Wells and I talked a law professor of ours into driving down to Baton Rouge after class on Friday.” Erskine Wells had gone on to become a World War II hero in the Pacific and lived just down the street from us when I was growing up. “We didn’t have a car. The professor did. We told him we’d drive and help with gas if he’d go. Took us forever, but it was a hell of a game. Ole Miss won, and when we were leaving the game walking through the parking lot, there were all these LSU cars with tiger tails on their car antennas. We couldn’t believe it, but the professor tried to rip every tail off as we walked back to the car. We were lucky to get out of there alive.”

  Outside the student union, a fraternity was selling corn dogs with a sign that said LSU CORN DOGS: GAME SPECIAL.

  “Corn dogs?” my father asked, puzzled.

  “It’s a rap on LSU fans,” I explained. “Saying they smell like corn dogs.”

  “Why?”

  “It started with an Auburn fan writing something on the Internet about how all the LSU fans smell like corn dogs. It’s sort of caught on from there.”

  My father frowned. “Corn dogs? Not beer or shrimp, but corn dogs?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “But people seem to enjoy it.”

  He stepped up and pulled out his wallet. “We’ll take two,” he said.

  “Hotty Toddy,” the frat corn dog vendor said.

  “Hotty Toddy,” my father agreed. “Only a buck? That’s a bargain.”

  “We w
ant the corn dog experience to spread,” the seller explained quite earnestly, as if passing out religious material.

  The corn dogs were good. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten one, and at the moment that seemed to have been a grave mistake.

  “Smells like corn dogs?” my father asked, waving his corn dog like a baton. “LSU?”

  “That’s what they say,” I replied, laughing.

  —

  I suppose it’s reasonable to ask what in the world Mississippians were doing making fun of anyone, including the great state of Louisiana. But that, of course, was the point. It was done with the same note of slightly self-mocking pride that the revelers in the Grove are quick to proclaim: “We may not always win the game, but we never lose the party.” When you are the poorest state in the nation and seem to have been since Appomattox, when you have more of what everyone tries to have less of—illiteracy, diabetes, obesity, kidney disease, all the witches’ brew of poverty—it’s only natural to take some modest pleasures in graces and virtues that can’t be plotted on a spreadsheet or the actuary tables of life.

  The old saying is that the Mississippi delta begins at the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Below that invisible line is the Territory of New Orleans. If you grow up in Jackson or farther south, almost surely there is a secret part of your heart—and wallet—that belongs in New Orleans. Before “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” was a trademarked lure, it was a reality for generations of Mississippians visiting New Orleans. It was a place you could eat and drink and do all manner of things that you couldn’t do in Mississippi. This was where nearly naked women swung out from open bar windows on Bourbon Street to entice customers. The only outrage was to be boring. But to think of New Orleans as merely a free-fire zone for vices is to miss its true power and meaning. After all, you could eat and drink at hunting camps and towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast that always had a full cafeteria of the usual tasty corruptions from gambling to girls.