Attending this game was a birthday gift from my lovely bride. This video features two cheers from the cadets and the mids on the field during their march on. It also includes includes one of the finest, and sadly least utilized traditions in college sport, the singing of both alma maters.
And it was a historical day.
This was the first time the classic game had been played inside the Washington D.C. beltway. It was also only the second time that both the president and vice president attended. Navy extended their series-long win streak over Army to 10 games. The Middies chanted “Ten more years!”
(H)ere come Army and Navy. In a restless sport of frequent doubt and tumultuous questions, they have more answers than anyone. They know what they want to do, they know why they’re there. And they know what’s ahead.
“Everybody on that field has chosen a very unique path in their young lives,” Army coach Rich Ellerson said last week at a news conference.
They will play Saturday with nothing on the line but pride and honor and a sense of achievement, and that will be quite enough. For these Cadets and Midshipmen, each and every day, that is enough.
[…]
It matters because how many other college football Saturday afternoons go untouched by money or excess or misplaced perspective?
It matters because, in an ego-driven sports world, the television screen is seldom so filled with men who understand selflessness.
Attending this game is a great experience. Go if you can.
Tons of pictures this week, so they are broken up into two posts. This one covering the Iron Bowl, the previous one touching on some of the Thanksgiving festivities.
First, the ever-popular panorama of Jordan-Hare Stadium. Click to embiggen:
Here’s a tilt shift of midfield, late in the game as Alabama prepared to kick off to Auburn:
I break this video out about once a year just because it offers a different perspective.
We’re in this video. Dressed in blue. We are tiny blue dots in one wide shot. Not for that, but for what you get out of the whole video, this is worth watching through to the end.
Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Honestly, this entire week on the site has been an excuse to work up to this picture. (Also published, and well-received, on dearphotograph.com.) Since Thanksgiving is a day of family and friends, I’m putting it here.
The photograph was taken in the spring of my freshman year at Auburn. My mother brought my grandmother, and her lifelong friend to campus to visit. They toured the campus, saw the arboretum, took photographs with Tiger VI and even got to “sneak” inside the stadium.
They played a little tackle football, with my mother tackling her mother while Ms. Lucy was the quarterback and referee.
I love that picture, and this year at homecoming I took it into Jordan-Hare Stadium to take the picture of the picture. That’s almost precisely from the same spot, looking to the south end zone.
And what makes it especially nice, this new photograph, is that the two teams playing at homecoming were my alma mater, Auburn, which I love, and my employer, Samford University, of which I am also fond.
This is a charmed life, and so precious little of that has to do with football, but it is a neat way to mention it.
At the big Thanksgiving lunch today I offered the blessing for those that were there and those that cooked this delicious meal. I asked for us to take all of our free minutes of the day to consider the things for which we are thankful and I asked for our friends and loves ones who couldn’t be with us to be watched over and cared for in their absence.
On this day of giving thanks, it is foolish and whimsy to consider something as silly as football, even in a place where it stains the culture as it does here. We have so many things for which to be thankful. I hope you find yourself in a similar situation. And I want you to know I’m thankful for you — be you an old friend or casual search engine visitor — have a lovely day.
Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Thought I’d throw in a few clips from memorable games during my years as an undergraduate. This space is nothing if it isn’t good for self-indulgent memories. So let’s take a stroll down that particular lane.
The first game I attended as a student was against Ole Miss. A fight broke out in the student body, probably over too many drinks or girls. Order was quickly restored by the people around them and Auburn won 46-13.
The biggest games of my freshman season were unavailable to me. Student tickets were sold on a seniority basis, which meant no Florida and no Alabama. I had to watch them both from my place just off campus.
Strange to now think that the 1995 Iron Bowl was just the third one on campus. I’d only missed history, the first time Alabama finally played a true road game in the series, by a few years. (This may sound silly to readers that aren’t involved. To you I recommend this column, this article, and also this piece and the CBS pre-game video below.)
That was all just before my time in undergrad. My freshman year was a mediocre one for football in the state. Both Alabama and Auburn came into the Iron Bowl with seven wins. Auburn would win 31-27 and Tide fans still complain about a referee’s call late in that game.
Later, in bowl season, a struggling Auburn played a solid Penn State.
Moving on, then.
In 1996 we watched The Barn burn down. That was one of the athletic buildings on campus. They used to play basketball in the facility, but in 1996 it housed the gymnastics team and was one of three wooden buildings on campus. A tailgater put their grill too near the structure and during the game the flames leapt higher than the football stadium directly across the street.
I asked Carl Stephens, the former public address announcer, about his most memorable games, and this one was in his top three. No one who was there will ever forget it, or Stephens’ deep voice announcing “Attention Auburn fans if you parked near the barn please exit the stadium and move your vehicle.”
A moment later he followed that up with “Attention fans. It is too late to move your vehicle.”
From most views in the stadium it looked like we were on fire. There’s no way you’re moving 85,000 people, so we were resigned: Well, if you have to go, go with friends.
The bigger problem at the moment, however, was why Auburn could not kick a field goal. Priorities: We have them.
Ironically, it was a building donated by LSU — my roommate said “Pistol Pete played in there!” — and it was destroyed during the LSU game. That there is no footage of this online is a glaring blind spot in mid 1990s video uploading. My friend Joe McAdory wrote about it, however.
That year there was also the famous four overtime game with Georgia. I was in Kansas City, but I could have flown home, driven from Montgomery to Auburn and caught the end. Georgia won, unfortunately, so I was glad to watch from my hotel room. Mostly, this is remember as the day Uga tried to bite Robert Baker:
The next week Auburn lost a narrow game to Alabama, 24-23 in Birmingham. But the days of going to Legion Field for that game were coming to an end.
Now to the story you will not believe. In 1997, I called this turnover. It wasn’t a wish or a hope. I was not being an irrational, desperate fan late in the game. I turned to the friend standing next to me and said “They are about to give the ball back to Auburn, just as if I’d looked into the sky and said “It is night.”
Ed Scissum, who fumbled the ball at the crucial moment, works at Evangeline Booth College, a theological school in Atlanta. Martavious Houston, who forced the fumble, had a nice career in the Canadian Football League and then had a moment in the NFL. Jaret Holmes, the placekicker who scored the winning points for Auburn, had three years in the NFL and is now back home in Mississippi.
Auburn earned their way into the SEC Championship that year, but we don’t speak of it much.
So 1998, then, featured the last ever Iron Bowl in Birmingham. I was there, and on a chill night watched the Tide close that chapter in a storied history with a 31-17 win over my Tigers.
Shaun Alexander was a good back.
To make matters worse, the next year Alabama came back to Auburn and for the first time won the Iron Bowl there. Not a pleasant experience:
On the other hand, it would be 2008 until Alabama won the Iron Bowl at their own stadium. Just took them three centuries to accomplish the feat.
Now. The purpose of this little entry was to talk about the Iron Bowls and a few other games from my time as a student. I was very fortunate, working as a journalist and in a few other capacities, to see some of these games and work with the people — like Pat Dye, Jim Fyffe, Rod Bramblett and others — that helped create these moments over the years. My experiences are a bit atypical.
For example, one of the best games I’ve ever watched at Auburn — and we’ll discuss the best game tomorrow — was the 2005 Iron Bowl. I was in grad school at UAB at the time, so it doesn’t fit the tidy theme here, but it bears mentioning. My future bride managed to land sideline passes, she worked at Fox at the time, and we shot the game. This was Carl Stephens last game behind the microphone. This was the last Iron Bowl flight for Tiger VI. They named the field in Pat Dye’s honor.
And this happened all night long:
We were on the sideline for that. It couldn’t get much better, I figured, on the way home. And until this last year’s championship run, I was right.
Tomorrow I’ll write about the best contest I’ve ever seen at Jordan-Hare Stadium in a special holiday use of bytes and bits.
