But I’d never be that young boy again, and while the tall man in the hat and the sport coat who would pick me up after every touchdown was still here, now he had his hand on my shoulder to keep a little steady. I knew the Rebel flags wouldn’t wave again, and I’d never be swung through the air while rebel yells exploded all around us and the band broke into “Dixie.” But listening to even that ersatz “Dixie” brought those moments back, how it felt jumping up on the wooden bleacher to be a little taller and hug my father and know then, without a doubt, that I was the luckiest kid on earth.
We stood watching the band work through the medley, moving smartly in formation now, as if the music demanded respect. They came to the “Dixie” section, and it wasn’t quite the same as the old “Dixie,” but by God it was awfully good. It was a song of loss, and that made it more real and stirring than an ode to victory. When I had heard the song as a child, I always assumed, probably like every other white southern son, that it was an ode to the southern way of life, that while we might have lost the battle called the Civil War, we had won that other war, that our values and our way of life had proven superior to the crasser, mercantile ways of the North.
But now I understood it wasn’t about some hidden victory; it was just about loss. We lost. They won. It sounded sad because it was sad. It made you want to cry because loss was sad and defeat painful. The South was part of that brotherhood of cultures which learn to erect such beautiful homages to loss that it was easy to forget that they were still about loss and suffering. Surely this was their purpose. To be who I was when I was a boy was to be raised in a world that taught you it was right and essential that your people had been defeated but it was also right and essential to respect and mourn the loss. This, perhaps more than anything, defined what it was to be southern: to know the world celebrated your defeat, and to join in that celebration was required to be accepted into the company of civilized men and women. It is still living with the Civil War that separates the South from the North, more than victory or defeat. No one in the North thinks about the Civil War, which is the ultimate humiliation for the South. To win a war is to be free to move on. To be conquered is to live with the consequences forever. The descendants of Joshua Chamberlain are no doubt rightly proud of his actions turning back the charge that desperate day on Little Round Top, but are they haunted by it?
It was here at Ole Miss that the University Greys mustered up so they could meet their fate at Gettysburg, so eager and honored to lead Pickett’s Charge into the slaughterhouse, attacking up the hill in daylight against fixed positions, dying and dying and dying until there were none left to die. It is in their honor the statue stands in the Grove.
The music faded, and the band director barked new instructions. Next to me, my father sighed. “You know, I’m tired,” he said, and he looked it. Now that the rush of the music was passing, we were facing a long walk back.
“Should we call Mother to come get us?”
“Nope. Let’s walk. Too nice outside.”
It was a beautiful, warm afternoon, one of those days you want to frame and keep to pull out on the gray days to remember. We headed off as the band kicked into “Rebel March,” the classic beats of a fight song. We both smiled. He put his arm around me, and we walked back through the campus.
—
Some might argue that it is a fluke of history that American homecoming is connected to football. Such people, of course, would be philistines and doubters and most likely Yankees.
Few Mississippians would think basketball or baseball worthy endeavors to organize an emotional reunion. And it’s difficult to imagine anyone suggesting an American homecoming game would be the same if celebrated over soccer. Yes, of course, soccer is the world’s most popular sport, “the beautiful game” that transcends cultures and languages. This is precisely why it is so unsuited to the unique rituals of American homecoming. Soccer is the UN of sports; a game that belongs to the world doesn’t belong to anyone. You can’t come “home” to a sport that isn’t your home.
Like it or not, America has always been a violent country, and football is a domesticated form of our love of violence. To grow up in the South and other pockets of football love across America is as close to being raised in athletic Sparta as an American youth can experience. You are raised to play football, and no teenager ever played on a winning football team who did not consider himself one of life’s chosen winners. Homecoming rituals are an affirmation of those values and the culture that honors the most American of sports.
When I was in high school and college, I’d imagined myself far too cool to enjoy the simple pleasures of homecoming rituals. This strikes me now not as hip or enlightened but as a reflection of some deeper insecurity. I wasn’t confident enough in who I was or might become, so I was afraid of being limited by embracing the traditional. It was like a self-impressed atheist who steers away from churches for fear of being converted. But now none of that mattered, and maybe coming back to it at this stage in my life made it better.
The night before homecoming game, Ole Miss has a parade that starts on campus and ends up at the square of Oxford, a little over a mile away. The proximity of town to campus is one of the special pleasures of Oxford, a connection grown stronger with the explosion of clubs and bars.
“If Oxford had been like this,” my father said as students jammed the square, “I’m not sure I would have graduated.”
“If I had known Oxford was like this,” I said, “I would have come here and never left.”
Earlier there had been student elections for homecoming: Miss Ole Miss, Mr. Ole Miss, homecoming maids who now rolled by in convertibles, waving. From the bars and balconies of clubs, cheers rang out. The whole scene had just enough self-awareness to laugh a bit at itself. Yes, all this is old-fashioned and retro, but it’s fun and nobody is taking it that seriously. We were in front of Square Books, where my mother had disappeared for most of the afternoon. Earlier I’d found a book in its extensive civil rights/southern collection detailing the history of race murders in Mississippi, Devil’s Sanctuary. It was full of photographs of lynching and detailed accounts of young black men killed for the supposed crime of looking at white women, or whistling, as with the Emmett Till horror.
The year before, an African American woman had been homecoming queen, and this crowd was black and white, spilling out of the clubs together. Those segregationists who had railed against “Negro music” and the dangers of allowing black athletes onto the playing field with white boys had lost the day more than their worst nightmares might have conjured.
From a balcony bar, a pack of sorority girls cheered, “Mash those Idaho potatoes!”
My father winced. “It’s just…”
“Lame,” I said.
“Lame,” he agreed.
My mother came out of Square Books with a load of books so large they seemed to be pulling her down to the sidewalk.
“What’s lame?” she asked.
“Drunk sorority girls yelling, ‘Mash those Idaho potatoes.’ ”
“I know they weren’t Kappas,” she said, handing me the stack of books. “But if Ole Miss can’t beat Idaho, it will be sad.”
—
For Ole Miss, playing Idaho was about picking an opponent they were likely to beat on homecoming. For Idaho, it was about the experience of playing in the SEC. And money. A lot of money.
Idaho made $850,000 playing Ole Miss that Saturday evening. The yearly revenue for Idaho’s entire football season was a little over $5 million, including television fees and ticket sales. So the one trip down south made up almost 20 percent of the year’s budget and twice what would be made from a year’s worth of tickets.
Why was it worth it to Ole Miss to pay just under $1 million? A single home game for an SEC team generates an average of around $4 million in total revenue, from ticket sales, concessions, and broadcast revenues. Even sharing $850,000 with an opponent, Ole Miss made money playing the Idaho game.
S
maller “programs,” as they are invariably called, like Idaho are known in football parlance as cupcakes. They are on the schedule to increase the odds the team will win enough games to qualify for a bowl game and to give a respite from the grueling intensity of SEC play. In 2013, the Ole Miss schedule had been ranked one of the most difficult in the nation, so it seemed fair that the team should have a bite or two of a cupcake.
Of course sometimes it just doesn’t work out. A month after the Ole Miss–Idaho game, the University of Florida, one of the great SEC programs going through a rough stretch, lost to small Georgia Southern at home in the infamous “Swamp.” This prompted the cruel and perfect headline GATORS CHOKE ON A CUPCAKE.
But against the Idaho Vandals, Ole Miss didn’t choke. About halfway through the first half, the head football writer for the Clarion Ledger, Hugh Kellenberger, tweeted, “Idaho is not a very good football team.” It was a bit of an understatement. Ole Miss led 17–0 at the end of the first quarter, but it wasn’t really the score that was so telling. It was the way they did it, like a cat playing with a mouse. They didn’t seem to be trying that hard. When Ole Miss scored twenty-one points in the third quarter to lead 45–7, we thought it was safe to leave. “I think we got this one in the bag,” Dad said. “What do you say we go back to your mother?”
In the elevator down, Dad grinned broadly. “I’m ready for Arkansas next week.” He tilted his head back slightly toward the ceiling of the elevator. “Pig Sooie!” he cried, letting go the Arkansas battle cry.
“The Hogs are tough,” I said.
“The Hogs are tough.”
9
The first Ole Miss–Arkansas football game was in 1908. They hadn’t played every year since, but this was the fifty-ninth game, which wasn’t bad as far as American sports rivalries went. A sociologist or political scientist would most likely posit that the game had taken on an unusual intensity given the sad economic conditions of both states. Mississippi was usually at the bottom when it came to the standard measurements of just how many different ways a society could fail economically. But Arkansas was right there next to us to offer comfort and occasionally, in good years, would dip below Mississippi.
But when I was a kid, none of that had mattered. Then it was just about hogs. To be surrounded by the lurid spectacle of grown men and women wearing plastic pigs on their heads and howling “Woo Pig Sooie!” must have been what it was like to be young and Roman and witness normally staid adults at the Colosseum howling for blood. There is a picture of Bill Clinton in his twenties with one of those big hog hats on his head at a game, grinning madly. He looks ecstatic. Can anyone doubt for a second that had he been given the gifts and the chance, Bill Clinton would have much preferred to be a starting all-American football player at the University of Arkansas than a Rhodes scholar? What better way for a young male desperate for glory with a love of women and a deep need to impress his mother to prove he was more than the fat kid in the Bubba jeans (as Bill Clinton once described his childhood) than running through the tunnel as a Razorback to the roar of tens of thousands of hog-hat-wearing maniacs? Woo Pig Sooie!
Arkansas football had been going through a rough time ever since a spring day in 2012 when their star coach, Bobby Petrino, slid his motorcycle off a country road not far from the university in Fayetteville. He’d broken four ribs, cracked a vertebra, and appeared at a press conference the next day in a neck brace looking as if he had been dragged behind a truck down one of those rough Arkansas roads politicians are always promising to improve. The sympathy his condition generated evaporated like a heat mirage when it soon came out that a beautiful former volleyball player who was now on the athletic department payroll had been on the back of his motorcycle. It wasn’t just that the married Petrino was having an affair with a blonde as tall as he was. It wasn’t just that he first lied about her being in the wreck to the police and university officials. It wasn’t just that he had recently “lent” her $20,000. It wasn’t just that he had hired her in the athletic department, so he was now having an affair with an employee. Any one or two of these for a coach with Petrino’s record—he had taken the Razorbacks from losers to an 11-2 record the year before and the promise of an SEC or national championship on the horizon—might have been survivable. It was the combination that killed the guy. The Arkansas athletic director cried when he announced Petrino’s firing a few days after the accident. Not a football fan in Arkansas thought those were tears for Petrino. Those were tears for the games this entire mess might have cost the Hogs.
The drama of big-name and big-dollar coaches has become a standard trope in college football, and it only seems natural that the biggest dramas would be on college football’s brightest stage, the SEC. Before Bobby Petrino, Arkansas had gone through a boom-and-bust cycle with another coach, Houston Nutt. He was an Arkansas boy whose parents had taught at the Arkansas School for the Deaf in Little Rock, where his dad was athletic director and head basketball coach. Growing up with a burning dream to play quarterback for the Razorbacks, Nutt had been the last player recruited by Arkansas’s legendary coach, Frank Broyles. Broyles was the Bear Bryant of Arkansas. Nutt was a classic drop-back quarterback and so talented he started four games as a freshman, but Broyles’s replacement, Lou Holtz, favored an option-style offense and moved him to second string. He ended up transferring from Arkansas to Oklahoma State, as bitter a parting as breaking up with your first real girlfriend.
Houston Nutt played basketball and football at Oklahoma State but never became a star. He went into coaching and turned a series of lesser programs at Murray State and Boise State into winners. That brought him back to Arkansas in 1997 as head coach, riding into Fayetteville the returning prodigal son. In his first press conference, he predicted the Hogs would win a national championship. The Razorbacks, including one of their greatest fans in the White House, went crazy.
It proved to be a tortured, high-intensity love affair. A fanatical Arkansas fan who thought that Nutt wasn’t doing enough for the Hogs filed a Freedom of Information request for the phone records of his university-issued cell phone. Amazingly, he got them. Then he released them to the press. That let the Arkansas fan base know that their beloved coach had placed more than a thousand calls and text messages to an attractive female sports announcer at a small Arkansas television station. There was also a problem that a family friend of Nutt’s sent an e-mail to Arkansas’s star quarterback, who sometimes seemed not to be too excited about playing at Arkansas, urging the kid to quit. Which he promptly did, transferring to another school, leaving Nutt to explain what in the world was a friend of his doing running off one of the team’s star players. All of this made for high drama that became operatic in 2007 when Nutt announced that he was resigning from Arkansas and then a few hours later announced he was taking the head coaching job at Ole Miss. In college football, this was like the president of the United States announcing he was resigning and then turning up a Canadian premier a few hours later. Ole Miss fans were ecstatic, and part of the joy was stealing him from Arkansas. At Ole Miss, he had a few good years, then a couple of disastrous seasons that led to his firing in 2011 and Hugh Freeze. In his last season at Ole Miss, Nutt did not win a single SEC game and hasn’t coached since.
—
Arkansas fans loved and valued football, and that was important. For the rivalry to have a truly desperate quality, it needed to be valued equally by both sides. The Sharks and the Jets must hate each other with matching passion. Football was important enough to Arkansans and Mississippians to make the intensity around the games seem the proper natural order.
The rituals of the Ole Miss–Arkansas game energized my father. There had been something unsettling about playing a team like Idaho. What possible glory was there in defeating a team that played in a conference that no one could name? All SEC football fans believe that non-SEC teams are suspect and played a version of the game that, even if played well, could not satisfy a true football fan. The University of Oregon may turn out
superb football teams, but they have a fondness for Nike-sponsored garish uniforms that resemble synchronized swimming outfits, and, really, how serious can you get about a stadium full of fans screaming for the…Ducks? In Idaho, Boise State had produced some terrific teams, but they were most famous for playing on a blue field. Blue. My God. A partial dispensation could be granted to members of the Southwest Conference, of which Arkansas, Texas, and Texas A&M had been members. But in recent years, Texas A&M and Arkansas had seen the light and come over to the true faith, joining the SEC.
“The Hogs take their football seriously,” my father said over breakfast after the Idaho game, and I joined in with what I knew would be next. “The Hogs are tough.” He looked at me, smiling.
“That’s just what you used to say before the Arkansas games back when,” I said to my dad: “The Hogs are tough.”
We were eating at Alumni House, with a mix of hungover fans and young recruits with their families who had come in for the game. Across the way, Coach Hugh Freeze was eating with two young players, one white, one black, and their families. He was wearing his Ole Miss warm-up suit, and the players had the nervous pleasure of being in the presence of a celebrity.
The Last Season Page 15
