On warm afternoons, and there were still plenty of those left in Oxford, Dad and I would take a slow walk over to the football practice field next to the stadium. The high walls of the stadium loomed over the field, a dominant, brooding presence, reminding all of the urgency of the endeavor. In the fading light of the late afternoons, it seemed impossibly quiet, as if the intensity of the previous Saturday had forced the structure into exhausted silence. Standing just a few feet from the practice field, I found it easier to grasp the sheer athleticism of the players. Out of some routine moment, running pass routes or working in a new blitz, a player would suddenly explode in some minor miracle of grace and power. Sometimes it went unnoticed, even by coaches focused elsewhere, but at least a few times each practice a one-handed catch or a burst of speed as a back shot through an impossibly small hole untouched would be rewarded by shouts and laughing applause from players and coaches. “You see that…Man!…That was a Sunday play, sure thing.”
Sunday play: NFL-level play—the ultimate compliment. Ole Miss had produced nearly three hundred NFL draft picks in its history, but it was nowhere near the top of the list; USC and Notre Dame had almost five hundred each. All schools liked to boast of their “athletic traditions,” promising a unique experience for an athlete at the college. Alabama under Coach Nick Saban had elevated that to a straight monetary transaction: “$51,810,000.00,” read the pitch Alabama sent to high school recruits. That was the amount of the contracts signed by the recent crop of Alabama NFL draftees. There were future NFL players on the Ole Miss practice field, but most would play their last game of big-time football in college.
“I hope they enjoy it,” my father said one afternoon as we watched the players gather around Coach Hugh Freeze at the end of a practice. “It goes fast.”
And it did. In that soft light of the late afternoon, I was once again a young boy on his way to the big game with his dad. It did go fast. But maybe for a moment or two, you could lean against life’s spinning wheel and slow it just enough to savor the true pleasures of a fall afternoon, when young men who felt normal doing extraordinary things could be appreciated.
“Let’s go find your mother,” Dad said. “She’ll be wondering where we are.”
I nodded, shivering a little in the sudden cold of the setting sun.
—
That Saturday, Ole Miss set a team record of 751 offensive yards, beating Troy 51–21. It was a noon game on a day that was warm but would chill as soon as the sun dropped. It was one of those games when you could believe that all things were possible on a football field—until you stopped to think that it was Troy that Ole Miss was beating. They were a small university that hadn’t started to play Division One football until 2001. Not that they couldn’t be dangerous: they had defeated Mississippi State in their first Division One game and been to five bowl games over the last decade. But they were in a slump the past couple of years, and earlier in the season Mississippi State had crushed them 62–7. If you were looking for glory, there was little in defeating Troy this year.
But Missouri, the last home game of the season, would be a real test. The team was on a roll, playing with the confidence of a team who believed they had been sprinkled with fortune’s gold dust. Game day was cold. Oxford was flooded with good-natured Missouri fans dressed in unfortunate combinations of gold and black, like so many bumblebees. “Something bothers me about these Missouri folks,” I said to my dad as we walked through the Grove, stopping to see friends and eat along the way.
My father looked at me over a drumstick of delicious fried chicken that we had looted from a cousin’s tent. “Come on,” he said, “nice as can be.” He gestured around. The Missouri fans in their black and gold stood out in a sea of Ole Miss red. Troy had been a blue day. They usually alternated. That I knew these things now pleased me greatly.
“That’s what worries me,” I said glumly.
He thought about it, then got it. “Yep. They’re in too good a mood. They aren’t nervous.” We had seen this before at the Alabama game. It was not a good omen.
“We could just stay here and watch it on television,” I said. There was a television in the tent. There were a lot of televisions around the Grove.
Dad looked horrified at the suggestion. “What would they do without us?” he asked.
I nodded. He was right.
“We can’t miss the game,” he said, waving his drumstick emphatically.
It was one of those games that are meant for drinking. Only my dad and I weren’t drinking. It was freezing cold, and Missouri scored on their first possession. The Ole Miss team looked uncomfortable in the chill, sluggish and out of sync. There was little of the grace and explosive spontaneity we’d seen at the practices. My father and I huddled under a blanket and looked at each other. He shrugged. I shrugged. We didn’t move through the first half, when Missouri had methodically rolled to a 17–3 lead. “Hot dogs,” Dad said. “Only hot dogs can make me feel better.” I agreed and struggled up from under our blanket to return with a handful.
For a moment at the opening of the second half, it looked as if Ole Miss might rebound. They scored on four plays, making it 17–10. But it was false hope. Missouri quickly scored again, and then both teams seemed to just go through the motions, too cold to do much more than endure. The game ended with Missouri slowly moving down the field. Games that end when the winning team has the ball always feel unsatisfying. There’s none of the frantic urgency of one team trying desperately to come back. It just ends.
We stood and stretched in a strangely quiet stadium. The Missouri fans had politely applauded, then fled the cold. The Ole Miss fans just headed for home, the Grove, and Oxford bars. We walked slowly back as I thought about how this was the final home game of the season and wished it had ended in some dazzling and joyful brilliance. “It’s important to remember,” Dad said, “particularly after a game like this: it’s never too early to beat State.”
That, of course, picked me up. “You’re right, we have to focus on the positive. Beating State.” He nodded.
“Go to hell, State,” I said, like a catechism. “I feel better now.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Focus on the positive.”
—
The Egg Bowl between Ole Miss and Mississippi State had nothing to do with eggs, and it wasn’t, of course, really a bowl game. The name came from the trophy, which was basically a massive gold football that looked like, well, a big egg. It was created after a fight broke out in 1926 when Ole Miss students tried to tear down the goalposts in Starkville, home of Mississippi State, after Ole Miss won for the first time in thirteen years. An Ole Miss fraternity came up with the idea that fans might be less likely to attack each other with cane-bottom chairs—the weapon of choice in the 1926 brawl because they lined the field—if there was a formal exchange of a trophy. It seems a charmingly dated gesture of formality, like something from the British Raj, but it seemed to mostly work. In 1997, a fight broke out between the two teams before the game, but at least the fans didn’t join in.
Mississippi State, originally called the Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi, was one of America’s land-grant colleges. It was founded in 1878, so it wasn’t haunted by a generation of students who died in a lost war. Like most of the land-grant versus state university rivalries around the country—Texas A&M versus University of Texas and Oklahoma State versus University of Oklahoma were classics—the working motif was that Ole Miss was full of entitled snobs and State was a cow college. Some time before World War II, State students embraced that image by bringing cowbells to the football games. I remembered vividly their obnoxious clanging from my first Ole Miss–State game.
In those days, it was just assumed that Ole Miss would win, and mostly they did. Starting in 1973, they played the game at Memorial Stadium in Jackson for fifteen straight years. The stadium was convenient neutral turf and would hold more fans than either Oxford or Starkville. Then both universities expanded their
stadiums and returned to alternating venues.
This was a Starkville year.
We’d been invited to go to the game with a friend of my sister’s. “She’s a big Mississippi State fan,” my sister, who was not a football fan, told me. “Her father loved the place, and they have season tickets.”
This sounded great.
We were staying at a depressing little motel that was the last room we could find in town. The game was on Thanksgiving Day, which was more or less standard for the Egg Bowl, though sometimes they played it a day or two after, which seemed to make more sense to me. While my parents took a nap, I walked across the street to a grocery store. There is something particularly sad and forlorn about stores open on holidays like Thanksgiving. A few people ran around buying frozen turkey dinners, while others shopped as if it weren’t a holiday. There was a huge display of Mississippi State swag, including the largest collection of cowbells I’d ever seen.
“You going to the game?” asked the smiling woman working the checkout. She was in her forties, and I could see an open copy of The Lord of the Rings tucked away behind the counter.
“You bet,” I said.
She focused on my Ole Miss shirt and said, in a perfectly pleasant voice, “Go to hell, Ole Miss.”
I laughed.
“You want a cowbell, don’t you?” She leaned toward me and lightly thumped the Ole Miss logo on my shirt. “I know you do.” For a moment, I thought about it. It might be sort of fun to have a big Mississippi State cowbell. I could picture it on my desk. I’d ring it when I was on conference calls that went too long and claim it was a fire alarm.
“Well,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t even think about it. I wouldn’t sell it to you.”
I smiled and laughed, but I don’t think she was kidding.
Back at the hotel, we ate Chinese food my mother had ordered. The next day, we’d drive back to North Carolina and have a “real” Thanksgiving dinner with my sister’s family over the weekend. While we ate off paper plates I’d been instructed to buy at the grocery—my mother would never consider eating out of a Chinese food container—we talked about the first Thanksgiving my parents had on their own, at a Manhattan Automat, where food was served from vending machines, a novelty in 1949. They had been married a week earlier and taken the train to New York to catch the SS Queen of Bermuda for a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda. The Automat story was a family staple I’d heard for years, but sitting in that chipped motel room in Starkville, I found its familiarity comforting. We had been through variations of the story for decades at Thanksgiving; now I appreciated there were Thanksgivings ahead when my parents wouldn’t be here to share the story. There is a photograph of them on the deck of the Queen of Bermuda that my mother has displayed at every place they had ever lived. She had it in their room where we’d been staying at Ole Miss: she and my father, beautiful and handsome, leaning into a stiff wind, hair blowing, arm in arm, a lifetime stretching ahead of them with no horizons. Now, sixty-four years later, they were still together, once again eating a quirky Thanksgiving dinner, and if those horizons were much closer now and the shore within sight, their voyage had been, all in all, a good one. They had created a life together and brought my sister and me into their world.
Mom and Dad on their honeymoon, Queen of Bermuda, 1949
“You know,” I said, reaching for more of the bad egg rolls, “we’re lucky. Susan and I are the luckiest kids in the world.”
My mother smiled and came over and kissed my father and me lightly on the head. “We are lucky,” she said. “All of us.”
—
Nell Wade, my sister’s friend, picked my dad and me up before the game. She was tall, wearing jeans, and she looked like somebody who loved to ride horses, which is how she and my sister became friends.
“You know all my crowd is die-hard State,” she said, laughing. “I’m just warning you.” She seemed to take her football with the proper seriousness, going through the lament of a fan after a difficult season as we drove to the stadium. By beating Arkansas in overtime the weekend before, State had eked out five of the mandatory six wins that is now established as the minimum for a team to be bowl eligible. But there had been close losses and blowouts, with enough flashes of talent to tantalize fans like Nell with the cruelest question in sports, if not life: What if?
“You know we almost beat Auburn,” she said. “Just four points.” That was the third game of the season, when no one realized Auburn would go undefeated and play in the national championship game. “And we did better against Alabama than you guys.”
The game started at 7:30, but we had left early. “I don’t want to rush your dad,” Nell had said when we had talked earlier.
“We don’t rush,” I said, and it was true. “We’re late sometimes, but we don’t rush.”
We weren’t far from the campus, and in a couple of minutes the stadium was looming in the distance.
“Bigger than I remembered,” Dad said.
“Oh, we expanded quite a bit. And still expanding. You know it’s one of the oldest fields in the country,” she said. “Not the stadium as it is, but they have been playing football here on this field since 1914.”
Nell had a pass that let her drive almost all the way to the stadium. I assumed she wanted to drop off my dad and then go park. But to my astonishment, she pulled in to a parking space right next to the stadium.
“Like it,” Dad said, never a fan of long walks from the car to the stadium.
We got out. If we had been any closer to the stadium, we would have been in one of the tunnels leading to the locker room. It was a small parking lot and had only a few cars.
“This is okay?” I asked.
She looked at me, puzzled.
“I mean, we can park here? This close?”
She nodded. “All good. Let’s go watch my Dawgs crush the Rebels.” She said it with the bloodlust of a true fan. It was one of those sunny days that would turn cold very fast when the sun went down, a repeat of the previous Saturday against Missouri. Ole Miss had played terribly in the cold, and a sudden pang of dread hit me.
“I’m worried about the cold,” I announced, as if it were a profundity worth considering. “Ole Miss has played terribly when it’s cold.”
“I think,” my father said, “the weather will be the same for both teams.”
We followed Nell into the stadium, where everyone seemed to know her. “We’re up there,” she said, pointing skyward. There was a ramp that wound around the outside leading to the upper decks. “But let’s take the elevator. I can’t walk that far,” she said with a laugh.
“If you insist,” Dad said.
We got off on the top level, arranged much like the Ole Miss stadium, a hallway lined with the doors to skyboxes.
My father raised his eyebrows. “Fancy,” he said.
Nell opened the door to the largest skybox I’d ever seen. It was on two levels, with windows that opened out on the field. We were precisely on the fifty-yard line.
My father did a double take. The design of the box gave the sensation of being unusually close to the field. We both looked over at Nell. She shrugged.
“It was what my dad wanted,” she said, looking almost embarrassed by the gargantuan box.
“Your dad?” I asked.
Nell then told us how her father had loved Mississippi State, even though he had never attended. He had grown up on a farm, never graduated from college, and appreciated the agricultural roots of Mississippi State and its heritage as a land-grant university. He had gone on to make a fortune in insurance, turning a Georgia-based company into what became Aflac insurance.
“He loved State and decided to give it a lot of money,” she said matter-of-factly. “His last big donation was for the stadium. So the family has this.” She gestured around the vast skybox.
“Well,” I said, not really knowing what to say.
“I just love the Dawgs, got that from my dad, and was happy to sit
in the old stadium freezing on a night like this. But it made my dad happy to do this, and,” she said, smiling, “it’s not so bad.”
Nell’s family and friends, all rabid State fans, filtered into the box before kickoff, arriving with their dreaded cowbells. They regarded my father and me with a touch of benevolent regret, as if saddened that we had strayed from the true way of being a State fan.
“I am so sorry,” one friend of Nell’s announced, as if learning we had suffered some grievous wrong, “that you have to go through life with that Ole Miss burden.”
The game never felt right from the start. Ole Miss had that sluggish, chilled look of the Missouri game. Position by position, they were a much better team and should have dominated. But they played tentatively, as if unsure of their own prowess. They didn’t need to play over their heads to win, but they were definitely playing under their heads. At the half, it was tied 7–7, and though Ole Miss was the better team, Mississippi State had played better football. “One of my rules,” Dad said, “is that it’s always dangerous to let a team you should beat think they can win. It’s like a court case. If you have the better case and don’t take control early, it can be a disaster.”
“Y’all don’t look so happy,” Nell teased. “Eat something.” An elaborate spread had appeared in the back of the box: steamed shrimp, sliced steak, hot dogs, and hamburgers. I filled two plates full, and my father and I both attacked the plates as if they held the secret to winning the game.
At the start of the third quarter, Ole Miss came out with more intensity and focus, moving eighty-seven yards in a long seventeen-play drive. But they were stopped close to the goal and had to settle for a field goal that felt like a failure. Seventeen plays for three points? I looked at my dad, who was shaking his head.
Both teams continued to play oddly lackluster football, as if the cold and the long season had sapped their spark. In the fourth quarter, with the score tied 10–10, Mississippi State replaced their quarterback with Dak Prescott, their star, who had sat out the last few games with an injury. It was one of those moments that have a predictably scripted feel to them: wounded player comes off bench to be a hero. I instantly felt a sense of dread and deep unfairness. “That kid is hurt,” I said to Dad, trying my best to sound concerned. “It’s really wrong for him to be playing.”
The Last Season Page 17
