Billion-Dollar Ball by Gilbert M. Gaul

Author:Gilbert M. Gaul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

Five

• • •

WHY THE SOUTH LOST THE WAR BUT WINS AT FOOTBALL

PART ONE: MEDIA DAYS

It was now summer in the Deep South, a July day so washed out that the sky was the color of yellow wax beans. The receptionist at the hotel where I was staying in Hoover, Alabama, insisted I was lucky to have such good weather. It was very unusual, she said.

“You mean it gets hotter than this?” I couldn’t imagine how.

“Oh, yes, sir. This isn’t bad at all. We hardly have any humidity to speak of.”

The humidity level that morning was approaching 90 percent, which is basically the same as taking a shower.

Not that I had time to debate the finer points of humidity levels. I needed to find my way to a different hotel where more than one thousand members of the media, new and old, were gathering to dissect the upcoming season in the most powerful conference.

“You can’t miss it,” the receptionist said, drawing a map in the air with her finger. “Just take a left out of the parking lot.”

I’d decided months ago that if I was going to write about the financial madness that is college football, I needed to go to the center of that madness. I needed to go south.

I knew college football was different in the South. There are entire books on the subject, many of which concern the disproportionate pride that southerners take in their teams. A few even examined the unrivaled dedication of the base. For example, there were stories about devoted fathers abandoning their daughters on their wedding days to catch the last quarter of a game, widows sneaking onto the fifty-yard line with baggies containing their husbands’ ashes, and lately the practice of sending off the deceased with the rally cry of Alabama fans everywhere: Roll Tide!

Over the decades, history, culture, and college football had so thoroughly bled together in the South that they were now nearly indistinguishable, tangled up in the many strands of the southern genome—part mythology, part loyalty test, part obsession. Marino Casem, a former coach at several southern schools, possibly put it best when he once said: “On the East Coast, football is a cultural experience. In the Midwest, it’s a form of cannibalism. On the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction. And in the South, football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day.”

Then there was the craziest story of all: that of Harvey Updyke Jr., a sixty-two-year-old former Texas state trooper who loved Alabama football so much he poisoned two iconic oak trees belonging to Alabama’s archrival, Auburn. The thirty-foot-tall, century-old oaks were located at a place called Toomer’s Corner near Jordan-Hare Stadium. For decades, after victories Auburn fans liked to parade there and celebrate by rolling the trees in toilet paper. In 2010 Updyke got it into his head to douse the oaks with herbicide. He then phoned in to a wildly popular sports talk radio show in Birmingham to take a victory trot. The host of the show, Paul Finebaum, asked if the trees had died.

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