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Seeing the light

Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

Yesterday we briefly examined a youth “misspent” as an Alabama fan. Today we’ll discuss sorting out the brain washed allegiances and finding what your heart tells you is true and right and just.

This will read like my college decision was centered too much on football. That’s an important part of the culture, but only a side note for me. Education is and has always been an important consideration for me. The program I was interested in at Auburn was great and … well … you’ll see …

The first time I visited Auburn was in the summer of my eighth grade year. It was part of a school trip and the teacher, an Auburn graduate, decided to visit one of the bookstores. This was awkward for me because I was wearing an Alabama shirt at the time.

The visit was brief, though. We got to where we needed to go, participated in the contest we were there to take part in and traveled to Montgomery.

The next visit was a few years later. More school organizations led me to campus for meetings. Being involved in the FFA meant spending more time with ag kids, and that was an important contribution to the exposure. There was also game experiences like this:

I watched Nix-to-Sanders in a hotel room in Montgomery, and — this makes no sense — there was an embodiment of attitude in that team and that game that seemed admirable.

Perhaps most importantly, when I was a high school senior the girl I was dating was a freshman at Auburn. I went to visit early in her freshman year, spent a weekend with friends and had a blast. Everyone was nice and the place was beautiful. And I knew people and all of that was very important to a high school kid.

[She and I dated off and on for the next few years. But being at Auburn never seemed a bad decision. (Except for chemistry classes. Yeesh.)]

I made it home, announced I was going to Auburn and went to my room.

My mother was … less than pleased. “If you’d told me you’d robbed a bank, I would have said ‘That’s OK, son, I still love you.’ But I never, ever, thought you would tell me you were going to Auburn.”

The only thing we’d ever really disagreed about was how to pay for this. There would be a way, said the wide eyed child. The pragmatic parent wasn’t so sure.

That same fall, this happened:

I missed the great comeback because of a flat tire. A flat tire! It would be six or seven years before I actually saw the game. Why LSU was throwing the ball still boggles the mind. But I digress.

I got one scholarship, was able to qualify for good grants and tried to figure out how to live cheaply. And then, just three days after my high school graduation, I was called in for a scholarship interview. I sat in a small room with two older gentlemen and discussed college, life, ambition and study habits. After the meeting I drove to my mother’s business.

“What if I told you they offered me a one-year scholarship?”

“That would be good,” she said.

“What if I told you they offered me a two-year scholarship?”

“That would be good,” she said.

“What if I told you they gave me a three-year scholarship?”

“That would be even better.”

“What if I told you they gave me a four-year scholarship?”

“I would say ‘War Eagle!'”

And so everything was fine.

She still gave me a hard time about all things Auburn, even beyond football. So did the family. I’m the one Auburn person in the bunch in the whole family — both sides! I catch a lot of grief, but it is, usually, all in jest.

And then after a few wonderful years I graduated (in spite of chemistry).

In 2004 I started graduate school at UAB. They all took great pride in pointing out what the A stood for in that acronym.

But no matter. The boy had long since become an Auburn man.

Tomorrow, we’ll dig up some memorable games from my time as an undergrad, as we try to pad out the holiday week. May all your turkeys be delicious, and all your football teams win. Unless that team is Alabama.

Happy Thanksgiving. War Eagle forever.

Alabama / Auburn / family / football / history / Monday / video — Comments Off
21
Nov 11

Growing up an Alabama fan

Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

I was raised in an Alabama family. There’s a lot of this, people associating with that school or, more specifically, the University of Alabama’s football team because they enjoyed a great deal of success in the middle of the 20th century. People like winners, and so all other things being equal, they side with the winner. Happens all the time.

So I had the room decorated in Alabama stuff. I remember watching the funeral procession go by as they drove Paul Bryant’s body from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery. I remember the sign hanging from the overpass: God needs a head coach.

Joey Jones was a brilliant wide receiver — he’s now the head coach at South Alabama. Mike Shula was a heroic quarterback — he coached Alabama and is now back in the NFL. Cornelius Bennett was a terror. The Goodes, “From Town Creek, Alllll-a-bama!” Derrick Thomas, Lee Ozmint and more, they were all legends on the radio and heroes when they appeared on television.

They didn’t always play on television back then, even in the 1980s. But they were there often. And when they weren’t, there was radio, with the call by Eli Gold (I’ve always liked him a bit more than most as a play-by-play man). The big games were always on television though. And they don’t come bigger than the Iron Bowl.

The 1984 Iron Bowl was a big game. Shula was Alabama’s quarterback on a bad 4-6 team. Auburn was 8-3 and one win shy of their second straight SEC title and Sugar Bowl bid. But Bo Jackson went the wrong way as a blocking back on fourth-and-goal:

The next year there was The Kick*:

Football was a big deal, but not the biggest deal. During part of that game I was outside tossing a ball around in the yard. My neighbor was an older kid. He would stand on one end of his yard and throw huge, deep bombs to me on the other end of my yard. It had to be three-tenths of a mile. He’d hurl it high and I’d catch the ball in my arms and it hurt, but he was clearly athletic. I remember my mother would come outside and tell me what this Bo Jackson guy was doing, and how Alabama was stopping him, or struggling to do so.

My neighbor would go on to break many of Bo Jackson’s high school football records, at the same school. He would play a little college football in Tennessee before his career was over. On the other side of my house was another neighbor who was a state champion high school quarterback. Talented neighborhood.

And that was the world I grew up in, in a world where the joke is you declare your allegiance when you move in or you’re assigned from birth. With no real earned allegiances elsewhere, the University of Alabama was the first choice.

It was not to last, and I think it started right here, in 1992, watching Pat Dye’s last game at Auburn. I was at my step-grandparents house. Alabama won, but this was a somber moment, the circumstances that precipitated his resignation notwithstanding:

Tomorrow, we’ll briefly discuss becoming an Auburn man through the football lens.

* Here’s a fun anecdote stemming from that game, a few decades later and from a living piece of Auburn history:

history / journalism / links / Thursday — Comments Off
10
Nov 11

Historic news day

Don’t see this every day. Click on the paper for complete coverage.

history / journalism / links / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Oct 11

… You make Tuesdays

Breakfast this morning at Barbecue House and then to campus. Well, first I had to stop for plaques.

Next weekend is homecoming at Samford and one of the many festivities is our department’s Wall of Fame. Two individuals are being inducted this year, one an alumnus from the 1930s that I mentioned here last week and another gentleman who was a longtime public relations pro here in town. Part of the honor is a very handsome plaque (there are also speeches, bios, headshots and so on), which required the trip today to the awards and engraving store. It is helpfully named Awards and Engraving.

I’ve been in charge of this particular task for three years now. The guy is starting to recognize me. He also trusts me to leave with the efforts of his hard work without paying him. He seems convinced we won’t be packing up the university this weekend.

There is a tempting vacant Bruno’s parking lot nearby for any schools looking to move, though.

Samford has been here since the 1950s, though, I doubt the facilities people will uproot the joint after the game Saturday. Before that, Samford (or Howard College as it was then known) was in East Lake. Apparently that campus was never going to be suitable, something the university officials realized about 15 minutes after moving up from Marion. So, they spent 36 years in Marion in the 19th Century, 70 years in East Lake and 54 right here. The building holding my office has been around since the beginning.

I wonder what my office space was originally intended for.

“For now, we’re just going to hold chemicals and files up here. But in five or six decades, well. Everything will be different.”

So there was class. A few groans over the current events quiz and then the joys of discussing infographics. I showed off the work of Megan Jaegerman and an assorted collection from the always excellent infographics The New York Times puts out.

And then the bad. This PDF is so overdone as to be laughable, but it is a soap opera timeline, so maybe that was their point. Even still.

No paper tonight. The Crimson is publishing on Friday this week because of homecoming. So they’ll put that to bed on Thursday night. I’ll be hard at work on other projects between now and then.

Auburn / football / history / weekend — Comments Off
22
Oct 11

Syrup Sop

One fine fall day each year, usually in October, and always when Auburn is playing on the road, nearby Loachapoka holds their annual Syrup Sopping. The town of less than 200 grows by something like 15,000 percent for crafts, music, visiting and, of course, the local syrup.

Amazing how much this has grown in the last decade or so. Syrup Sopping started in 1972 and it is nothing like I remember from undergrad, at least in terms of the size. It takes an hour just to get down there now.

But, then, Loachapoka has always been a town of extremes. It was a boomtown that became a small town. At one point in the mid-19th century this was the largest town in this part of the state, because of the railroad.

The town gets its name from the Creek Indian, and means either land where turtles live or are killed. The first white settler came in 1836, and the natives moved west, mostly to Oklahoma, some willingly, some by force of treaty or arms.

Jefferson Davis ate in the town, Stephen Douglas campaigned there against Abraham Lincoln. They mustered more than three regiments during the Civil War.

After the depression of 1873, a massive fire that same decade and alternate railways coming online the place all but dried up.

They saw their first airplane in 1917. Imagine how that must have felt to a bunch of farmers.

You just can’t get better syrup from sorghum and ribbon cane, which is the basis of the festival and what brings you back for more. There’s crafts and food and even a little music, but the syrup and the honey, that’s the point.

Over at one of the antebellum homes they set up a gooseneck trailer as a stage. Someone’s 10-year-old son’s band was playing in the afternoon. They were a rock band. Didn’t get to see them, but here is their Facebook page, where you’ll learn they’ve played three gigs. So, they are young, but they have the terminology down.

We did see a bluegrass band, Volume 5 that was quite good. The vocalist could do a fair impression of Dan Tyminski, as the man standing next to me observed “He sounds just like them Soggy Bottom Boys. What was it, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ That was the name of that song!”

Well, no, that was the movie, which also had a song Tyminski reprised. While he was a little short on details, he had a good ear.

And then Volume 5 thought they’d lighten the mood by covering “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”

It was about as inspiring as the Auburn game. LSU is good, Auburn is young, can’t block, was on the road with a new starting quarterback in Clint Moseley who noted that “Sulligent’s defense was fast too.” Sulligent being the last team he played in high school. After the game he said he thought Sweet Water was fast, but the top college football team in the nation was in a different league than the traditional 2A high school powerhouse.

Woof.

Auburn will have better days. No one expected anything but a visit to the woodshed this week at Baton Rouge, but still. If not for a garbage-time touchdown this would have been the biggest blowout since 1948. The Truman administration! That’s pre-Shug Jordan.

As it was, the 45-10 loss is merely the biggest since the second George W. Bush administration and the 2008 finale against Alabama. Things got better after that pretty quickly, and they’ll turn around for these guys too.

They’ve survived their stout October schedule, winning two more games in that stretch than many thought they would. There’s talent for the future, but they’re still growing up today. Next week Auburn hosts Ole Miss, who’ve lost 10 conference games in a row. With a win over the Rebels Auburn would be eligible for a bowl game already.

Even still, it was a hard one to watch. LSU is good. And so now I’m looking forward to the inevitable disappointment of the 1 vs. 2 LSU-Alabama game in a few weeks.