It’s worse than taking a Harley trip across America with Rob Zombie. It’s worse than being sentenced to a 20 year Samuel L. Jackson movie marathon. It’s worse than being the curator of Ashton Kutcher’s hat collection. It’s worse than being the creative director of advertising for the Golf Channel. It’s even worse than being Dave Navarro’s girlfriend. University of Alabama football is the single darkest, most sinister phenomenon we have the misfortune of observing as citizens of Earth. No other thing is so bereft of value and perspective, such a tangible pugnacious nemesis to levity and grace. No other thing is such a terrifyingly evolved, sophisticated manifestation of envy, fear, doubt, and ill will. University of Alabama football is a living testament to the spirit of evil amongst humankind. I know. This might all seem a bit hyperbolic and something of an obsessively strange topic to write about, but it’s really not. This isn’t really about Alabama football. This post is a Dostoevskian look into the heart of evil. It just so happens that evil’s most nakedly brazen manifestation is football at the University of Alabama.
I was born in Bountiful, Utah to a military officer and a schoolteacher in 1975. Until I was 2 years old I lived in Utah, which is an astoundingly beautiful, idyllic place, that even its disdainfully haughty Mormon populace can’t ruin. In 1977 my family moved to Germany and we stayed there until I was 6 years old, giving me an opportunity to grow up in an imaginatively stimulating, historically rich foreign culture–which isn’t to say that I was hot shit for living in nice places (because almost all Europeans and Utahns are retarded), just that my upbringing prior to 1981 was positively influenced and imaginatively nurtured. In 1981 my father was re-assigned by the military and my family moved to Fort Rucker in Enterprise, Alabama. Enterprise was a fine town to be a kid in. Most of the inhabitants were from military families so the makeup of the citizenry was fairly diverse, and to me it just seemed like a more wide open, hotter version of Germany–with a lot of gnats. People seemed interesting and hopeful. Life seemed to be bright for most everyone there. I thought Alabama was a great place to live.
My father was born and raised in McCalla, Alabama, a tiny town outside of Birmingham that is best known for being the town where iconic American athlete Bo Jackson was born–a fact the mostly white, mostly racist populace isn’t particularly proud of. Instead of being a small town’s legendary native son, he’s more of a footnote…and a commentary on just how little a black man is valued in Alabama. While living in Enterprise, my father took me to McCalla to meet my family in Alabama for the first time. I remember being instantaneously smitten with the bucolic, serene beauty of the place. It was like a Bob Ross painting come to life. I rode around in the back of pickup trucks as much as I possibly could and generally just awestruckly absorbed the seemingly infinite expanse of creeks, pastures, dirt roads and convenience stores that made up this incredible, fantastically pastoral world. After a few days I was able to comfortably settle into the ethereal sense of awe enveloping me enough to explore and establish closer relations with my family there. As with any family there are those you love, and those you’re connected to without connection. I had begun to sense even as a 6 year old that there was something that came along with the isolated beauty of McCalla, Alabama; a nefarious force I couldn’t then label insecurity. I began sensing some strangely negative sentiments from some of my newly met family members that didn’t quite make sense to me. Why, I wondered, could anyone have bad intentions in such a serenely perfect place? Then darkness revealed itself. It all became clear. The devil made his entrance. Jada Pinkett-Smith walked through the door.
“Are you for Alabama or Auburn?!”, blurted out one of my less than kindred spirit Alabama cousins. I can still remember the feeling that the discordant sentiment I’d been struggling to find the root of was being revealed to me as I wondered what on Earth I was being asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is Auburn a state?”, I asked, confused and morbidly interested.
“No stupid. It’s a football team.”
As a child growing up in Germany the only thing I really identified as being American was the NFL, so I had some interest in that and knew all of the teams. ”They’re not in the NFL are they? I only know about the NFL.”
“Pfft. You’re dumb. They’re college football.”
“I don’t understand. College is like where you go to school after high school, right? They have football teams in college?”
“Yeah, and in Alabama you root for Alabama or Auburn.”
“Do you have to?,” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Realizing that asking this person to weigh the philosophical value of attaching a vested interest in an academic institution’s football team was perhaps more of an issue than this person was willing to confront, I decided on an alternate plan. ”Who are the teams again, Alabama and Auburn? Alright, who are you for?”, I asked.
“Pfft. I’m for Alabama. Roll tide.”
“OK. You’re for Alabama…then I’m definitely for Auburn.” And so I was. Minutes later the word was being spread around Granny Stacy’s house that I was for Auburn. I didn’t know the rules of football, still wasn’t completely clear on what college had to do with football, and couldn’t identify the helmet of the team I was being ridiculed for being “for”, but nonetheless it seemed to be something of some importance to my family, and it became clear to me that most of the members of my family that seemed strangely at odds with the serene beauty of Alabama, were big Alabama fans, and seemed to delight in the ignominy they could now cast on me for something I didn’t care or know about. In short: it was their way to be assholes. Some of my family members came up to me and told me that it was OK, that they were for Auburn too. They were much nicer people, and I seemed to get the feeling that they were less for Auburn and more for not being a total fuckhead about some non-important bullshit. A year later Bo Jackson from a mile down the road was the best high school football player in the nation. He decided to go to Auburn. I felt like I knew why.
I spent the next 5 years moving around the South and gradually started to understand why college football was a big deal. Most Southern states don’t have pro sports teams, and even in those that do, most rural Southerners relate more strongly with something they can have a connection to (i.e. a university) than with something like a pro sports team, which is seen as more of a city folk thing. I found it a bit unfortunate that the region chose to identify itself through a rather artless, gaudily commercial sport, but by this point I’d learned that most people weren’t very comfortable with imaginative possibilities, and that if they could they’d articulate the value of imaginative possibilities as being ”for faggots”. So when I was 12 years old my father decided he wanted to get out of the military to move closer to his family in Alabama. Having been so smitten with Alabama before, I was very excited to move there. I knew about college football now and figured I understood the mentality of the University of Alabama fans in my family a bit better now and figured it wouldn’t be that much of an issue. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d made a pre-arranged wedding for my daughter to Chris Daughtry. In the rest of the South, people care about college football. It’s a tie that binds. I have become a University of Florida football fan over the years even though I find American football to be grotesque, crass, and socially and intellectually destructive. I guess it’s just because I’ve grown up in the South. At some point it just seemed like kind of a dick move to tell everyone around me that what they liked was stupid, and I got involved in it because I wasn’t ready to go goth in the 2nd grade. But people in the South have some perspective about college football. It’s the thing they’re into that they talk to strangers about. It’s what they do on Saturday. Fans of University of Alabama football don’t just watch the games on Saturday. Being an asshole Crimson Tide fan is the totality of their being. They buy crimson SUV’s and permanently adorn them with University of Alabama flags and McCain/Palin stickers. They dress like old dead coaches as a serious fashion statement. They dress their newborn children in “Bama” baby-gear the day they’re born. They keep University of Alabama flags on their porches 365 days a year, and make the decision to wear Alabama Crimson Tide clothes to the Birmingham mall (the center of Alabaman state culture) even though 80% of the people there are also doing so. If you haven’t lived in Alabama, you don’t understand. Check this shit out:
I mean seriously. Are you fucking kidding me? At what point do you stop pretending that you’re into a college football team and just start crying in the street asking strangers if they’ll tell you they love you. This is a grown fucking woman wearing an Alabama Rob Zombie hat (a frightening enough concept in its own right), the Roll Tide version of those slutty shorts disgusting 16 year old suburban chicks wear to the mall to prove to guys they could work at a Hooter’s if they wanted to, a pair of sunglasses that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr. blush, and a painting of a college football mascot wearing a Bear Bryant hat (more on him later) replacing the functionality and legality of a shirt–in a heavily populated public place. This woman is 50 years old. She more than likely has children. Let’s think about a few things here. Look at the crowd behind her. They’re not like freaked out or anything. She has stopped to have her picture taken to “save the moment”. She’s gonna go back and hang out with those people behind her in a minute. The novelty of what she’s done has already dissipated to those around her. She’s just gonna go and chat with her crowd behind her in a minute about, oh, I don’t know– what would she be talking about? Maybe she’s gonna tell the people behind her that she wishes Vin Diesel were white. The other sociological issue I find amazing is that she’s basically getting away with indecent exposure because she’s advertising a college football team on her breasts. This only happens in Alabama. I can’t go to Athens, Georgia, and write “UGA” on my wiener and “Go Dawgs” on my respective ass cheeks and not get arrested. But believe it or not, this is the endearing sect of Alabama football fans. These “I’m so rowdy and I get so fucked up, and I love the Tide and Budweiser and Kid Rock owes his entire career to my dumb ass ” are the Alabama fans that have just hopped onto the asshole parade. This chick’s just mind-blowingly dumb and lives in a society too fucked up to define itself in a way that’s not completely disgusting. The devil doesn’t live inside this woman, she just heard the devil had a keg, and this is the only way she’d get into the party. This woman is tragically funny, this shit is fucked up:
This is a grown Nickelback fan with a very, very large tattoo of Paul “Bear” Bryant on his back. As you can see he’s wearing a houndstooth hat, just like Bear Bryant used to wear. You can also see a sixty year old woman walking nonchalantly in front of him. She is wearing a crimson sweater. In a few moments she’ll tell him how much she likes his tattoo and hat. He will say thank you. Unlike any normal 60 year old woman, she won’t be afraid of a large idiotic shirtless redneck with a massive idolatry problem advertised all over his being, because the object of his idolatry is Bear Bryant, Alabama football’s version of God, which is to say, everyone else’s Satan. A mythological figure in the state of Alabama, Paul “Bear” Bryant is both a product of Southern insecurity desperately attempting to establish identity, and a shrewd manipulator of that sentiment–essentially using the groundswell of pride amongst insecure, distrustful Alabamans to establish himself as a demi-god. It’s difficult to find good information on Paul Bryant because most people that have taken it upon themselves to do research on him have less in common with historians and more in common with Jihadist Muslims. On his wikipedia entry there are unsubstantiated claims of him having saved hundreds of lives in the Navy in a ship accident, though it is a documented fact that his division never saw action in combat. He was dubbed “Bear” for his alleged exploits as a bear wrestler in fairs. His status in Alabama is essentially that of an ass-beating, shit-kicking alternative to Jesus. He was , in fact, a member of a fraternity at the University of Alabama, which means that whatever information about him may or may not be aggrandized fiction, it’s 100% certain that he was an unfathomable asshole. It’s well documented that his treatment of his players was abusive, with numerous instances of players being hospitalized due to malevolently inhumane practice conditions. The University of Alabama under Bryant’s stewardship was one of the last schools in the United States to give black players scholarships, and when following the trajectory of Bryant’s career, it’s very apparent that Bryant’s chief motivations were creating and propagating his own legacy and mythological status. For example, during Bryant’s most successful run as head coach at Alabama there were no rules regarding maximum number of football scholarships per program, so on any given Saturday the University of Alabama might be employing 10 times the money of their opponents (in a contest of purported amateurs) because of a lack of perspective by the University of Alabama’s fans and boosters, and a megalomaniacal opportunism ready to be seized upon by Bryant. So as other state institutions spent resources on their students and faculty, the University of Alabama spent money on football. Bryant’s influence in the state of Alabama is not limited to football. Bryant’s egotistically garish management of the football program has made the University of Alabama a lot of money and established itself as the dominant cultural force in the state, but at a frightening cost to the intellectual fabric of Alabama. In Alabama poets write poems about Alabama football, painters paint portraits of Bear Bryant, and musicians learn how to play “Sweet Home Alabama” and play it in pro-Tide bars for the rest of their lives. Most books in a given Alabama household are related to college football. It’s no coincidence that the same state that gave rise to a college football team defining its cultural identity is now perhaps the most heavily Republican state in America. The same insecure tendencies that cause a state to effectively lash out at the rest of America by stacking the deck of an amateur athletic contest are the same tendencies preyed upon by the Republican party’s attempt to brand itself as a party of maverick, swashbuckling, self-reliant heroes –from which they can then disenfranchise the rights of those citizens in the name of the bottom line of their corporate campaign contributors. The average Alabaman now grows up with three choices: 1) take advantage of the beautiful natural surroundings and live a life of stoic discommunication/detachment/self-motivated independence, 2) aspire to becoming a member of a fascist regime under the guise of college football fandom, or 3) get the fuck out of Alabama. This is something I know a lot about as an Atlanta resident. Atlanta is my home. Atlanta is a lot of things. One of those things is embarrassing…because we’ve basically become a refuge for all the citizens in the Southeast who know they’ve gotta get the fuck out of wherever they’re from, even if they don’t know anything else.
This is what I’m really talkin’ about. Look at this shit and tell me you’re not scared. No? Look closer. Notice that every male is wearing a collared shirt. Every single one–even the asshole Will Ferrell guy with the sunglasses rope and his tongue hanging out in the bottom left. This picture is presumably taken in the student section, which is where the most terrifying Tide fans hang out. These are college students at a state institution of learning that are all trying to look like the exact same asshole Titleist salesperson. These people represent the perceived apex of Alabaman social status; which is to say that Alabama football has successfully turned the high point in social achievement in the state of Alabama into being a bigger asshole than the bad guys in Caddyshack II. Note that nearly every person and every single girl has a pom-pom . Have any of you ever shaken a pom-pom? I did it once earnestly and a part of my soul is still crying because of it. And on a broader note, why would any woman give a shit about football? It’s boring, violent, completely unfluid and isn’t even fun to play. My daughter’s mother made the mistake of talking her into playing softball last year, and to be supportive I attended all the practices and games. During one of the practices some of the girls began chanting “Florida Gators rule!” Another group of the girls began chanting “UGA” and “Go Dawgs!” in response. At one point my daughter began to chant “UGA” because she was from Georgia and sensed it was necessary for her to pick a side. I instinctively admonished her, reflexively blurting out, ”Madison Stacy, you do not yell about things you don’t care about!” I was a bit embarrassed that I’d said that in front of a bunch of softball parents/Ron White fans, but even they all knew I was right. There is no intelligent reason for a healthy female to cultivate an interest in American college football. A girl forcing herself to get into college football is the same thing as a guy forcing himself to get into Cosmopolitan sex surveys: they’re both insulting enough to the intelligence of the gender they’re designed to appeal to, and adding stupid cross-gender interests to the list of dumb shit that dumb people do only makes people more stupid in more ridiculous ways. I’m not even going to say anything about trying to find a black person in this picture. Good luck with that. Evil is the absence of imagination succumbing to fear. The following is a video depiction of what exactly that means. Roll tide.
