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The Iron Bowl

Words will never work. Photographs are pale, onion skin-thin layers of the event, so transparent that only the perceptible will see them. Video, with all of its attendant sights and sounds and cuts and edits, will never convey it.

We saw a little slice of the rapture. It was orange and blue.

“The moment before the chaos began,” I thought to myself when I took the shot of the opening kickoff. Oh, little did we know what the fates had in store:

Two good teams. Alabama, after this game, sits 62nd in the country in passing, 23rd in rushing, 14th in scoring and 36th in total offense. Auburn concluded their season 38th in third down defense, 44th in fourth down defense, 56th against the rush, 59th against the pass, 31st in scoring defense and 75th in total defense.

Auburn is now 105th in the nation in passing, fifth in rushing, 15th in scoring and 17th in total offense. Alabama wraps up their regular season 18th in third down defense, first in fourth down defense, 10th against the rush, 15th against the pass, second in scoring defense and fifth in total defense.

Add all of that up and you get the top-ranked team, the number four team, owners of three straight conference titles and the crystal clear memories of the last four national champions between them. Oh, and also maybe one of the greatest games ever played and the best finish ever witnessed in the history of sport. And we were there to see it.

They ruled this a touchdown, but instant replay changed the call. Nick Marshall did not score.

On the next play Marshall turned and gave the ball to Tre Mason, who scored his 19th touchdown of the season. He’s only two away from the school record. (Know who holds that? Some guy named Cam Newton.)

I said to my wife, on the second drive, that if Auburn was going to win Nick Marshall was going to win it with his arm. We were watching the Alabama defenders completely forget their responsibilities when he ran. He missed a big play early trying to take advantage of that, but the next opportunity came along and Bama showed their hand. They were terrified of Nick Marshall on the edges and getting to the open field.

Rightly so. He gained 127 yards, netting 99, while escaping the likes of Denzel Devall and his teammates:

When the fourth quarter began the box score looked like this:

Bama 0 21 0
Auburn 7 7 7

Auburn had struck first in the game, but Alabama overcame their own struggles to mount an impressive second quarter. The way the Tide finished the first half seemed frantic though, which felt like a good sign for the boys in blue. The Tigers marched out and struck early to start the second half, and it stayed at 21-21 until the final frame began:

Fourteen more points would be scored as the home field clock began its last countdown of the season. Alabama put one score on the board in the fourth, despite playing even stiffer than they had the entire game, as their play calling even more quixotic.

Then in the final moments, with Alabama perhaps finally feeling almost comfortable, they lined up to kick the field goal that would put the score out of reach. A 10-point lead would have been too much to ask. Auburn knew it. Alabama knew it. Everyone in the stands and watching at home realized it too. So Auburn blocked the field goal. Alabama’s kicker, already playing the game a kicker would have nightmares about, missed his third opportunity of the game. The Tigers fell on the ball. Alabama committed a senseless penalty that moved Auburn up to their own 35. But still, that vaunted Alabama defense. Surely the Tigers couldn’t overcome the circumstance.

Overcome they did. Nick Marshall guided the team the length of the field, covering the green expanse and turning white-clad defenders into dust on a two minute, seven-play march.

The first six plays looked like this:

Tre Mason rush up middle for 7 yards to the AU42.
Tre Mason rush up middle for 1 yard to the AU43.
Timeout Alabama, clock 01:43.
Tre Mason rush up middle for 5 yards to the AU48, 1ST DOWN AU.
Tre Mason rush over left guard for 5 yards to the UA47.
Tre Mason rush up middle for 3 yards to the UA44.
Tre Mason rush up middle for 5 yards to the UA39, 1ST DOWN AU.

And on that play Auburn saw what they’d been waiting for the entire game. The Alabama defenders were finally getting too antsy. So Auburn ran the same zone read, the same play they’d just called, the same play they’d used all night and all year.

This is what they did: Nick Marshall showed the ball to Tre Mason. Mason is now destined to break the school record for single season total yardage (currently held by some fellow named Bo Jackson) after rolling up 233 yards against one of the best defenses in the universe and after having the nerve to appear, as a Birmingham professional polemicist wrote, “totally convinced that the Tigers can do to the Tide what they did to Georgia, Texas A&M, etc., etc., etc..” He was confident, yes, and he played like it, yes. And he put up those same kinds of numbers, most emphatically yes, and all night long. But Mason had done enough with the ball. His last job was to throw his body into the line one more time, this time as a decoy.

The previous six plays it had been Mason-Mason-Mason-Mason-Mason-Mason. But now it would be Marshall, who would roll to his left and look for the corner. Then, with a magician’s sleight-of-hand, he swapped the ball from his left hand back to his right. With the world watching this running quarterback flicked the ball to Sammie Coates, now completely forgotten by the Alabama defenders. Coates waltzed in for a 39 yard score. An extra point tied the game.

Now Alabama returns the ball to their offense, full of a star running back, a road-grading offensive line and a two-time national champion, sudden Heisman Trophy-darling quarterback. They had 32 seconds on the clock.

In retrospect, they should have had 31. In three plays they moved from their 29 to Auburn’s 38. The clock, now famous, expired. But Nick Saban, more famous and more furious, demanded time be put back on. The officials reviewed the play and found he was correct. (He was correct.)

Alabama would have one second. They could throw it into the end zone. Or they could try for a field goal. They chose the latter. They chose … poorly. Alabama opted to put in a freshman kicker who hadn’t seen the field all day. His teammate had missed three, so in came the younger guy. He lined up, gave it his best and it tailed away from the goal post, just short of giving the freshman kicker football glory.

In the back of the end zone stood a lone Tiger. He caught the ball and bolted up the middle of the field. He threw his entire body weight into his left foot and bent to the sideline. A wall was formed. The guys in white were cleared:

Chris Davis wasn’t heavily recruited out of high school. He was barely recruited at all. He has an amazing degree of talent and he’s been a team player for his entire career. Also, our friend — who runs the best tailgate on campus — claims him as her own. People in her section of the stadium think she is actually Chris Davis’ mother.

And so as the stars exploded and heaven opened and the horns blared their triumph. I looked at my wife and said “Do you know who that was? That was Chris!”

And I could only imagine a fraction of the pride or our friend, Kim, felt for Davis, which meant I could not conceive of the pride his mother, Ms. Janice, must have felt at that same moment as her son sprinted into immortality, nothing short of immortality:

The official scoring report reads like this:

Adam Griffith field goal attempt from 57 MISSED, kick to AU0, clock 00:00, Chris Davis return 100 yards to the UA0, TOUCHDOWN, clock 00:00.

Chris Davis has played four seasons. Yeah, he had a big punt return for a touchdown earlier this year. He absolutely is leading the team in tackles. None of that matters anymore. You ask anyone, any child or adult, who has ever played the Iron Bowl in their yard or living room, and they will tell you that Chris Davis is going to live forever:

They did not keep them off the field tonight:

People that were at the first Iron Bowl in Auburn remember the sky covered in an orange and blue haze. The old shakers were paper and that day, in 1989, they’d been thrust so vigorously into the sky that they were being obliterated by the forces of physics, distorted and compressed and expanded by the angst and joy and verve of thousands of people realizing an age-old dream.

There was none of that tonight. There was a crescendo. There was a lightning bolt and a thunder crack and the simultaneous explosion of a third of the planet’s fireworks. There was a big bang. There was a roar to move sensitive earth-measuring needles. The earth opened up and swallowed Alabama’s championship hopes and right along side that fissure ran War Damn Chris Davis.

Whether he knows it yet or not, he will never be the same.

Few of us ever will be.

That’s a lot to say about a football game. But it was that kind of game.

We saw a little slice of the rapture. It was orange and blue.

Auburn / football / iPhone / overwriting / video / weekend — Comments Off
19
Oct 13

Auburn at Texas A&M

I said, on Thursday night while watching Central Florida upset Louisville, that football is in some ways even more fun when you are watching the emotions of a game in which you aren’t invested.

Sometimes. Because when you are wrapped up in it, this stuff can be anxious.

Four years ago, when Arkansas visited Auburn, was the last time I watched an emotionally wrought football game. I didn’t feel like that in the BCS championship game or in the 2010 Iron Bowl comeback or the SEC Championship game that year. But the back and forth, punch-counterpunch of the Arkansas game that season felt a lot like tonight’s game. Anything was possible, nothing was too absurd, no one was stoppable. The heart races even in a seated position.

Tonight was like that. We got to watch a bunch of young men we don’t know stick with something and stick together. We saw them play against perhaps the best player in the game, just months removed from some of the worst athletic experiences they’ve every encountered.

We watched them claw and fight. We witnessed them realize their goals were before them. We saw them pull off something pretty spectacular. We watched young men with tears of happiness in their eyes and joy in their heart.

Fans gathered just before midnight to welcome the team home:

This is a special place with some special people and they all felt like it tonight.

How can you not be emotional about football?

cycling / family / iPhone / overwriting / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Aug 13

Not the best day ever

I slept in, because I stayed up late, because I had a cup of tea and was wide awake for the next seven hours last night and early this morning.

So when I woke up the story was fully developed. A UPS plane had crashed on final approach into Birmingham. The pictures are horrific. The two pilots were dead. And, thankfully, for a change, I knew precisely where my step-dad was.

He flies out of the same hub as those two pilots. The co-pilot has been named, someone he doesn’t know. We’re still waiting to hear the identify of the pilot. The reporters at al.com have done an incredible job on the story if you’re interested in the latest.

I’m ready to turn away from it. I’ve covered stories about neighbors, became friends with people I covered over time. I’ve reported and written and read about some horrible things people to do to one another and have a healthy detachment.

But I’m invested a bit here, enough to set the whole day off. There were emails and Facebook and a few “That’s not him, is it?” questions.

It was not, but what could have been. I couldn’t tamp down the anxious feelings until the late evening.

So I went out for a little bike ride in the rain, down through the neighborhood, around the roundabout and out the back. I planned to turn left, but as so often happens in the saddle I changed my mind almost mid-turn and went right.

The rain picked up and I smelled the river. The stagnant water at the boat launch. The still and mild decay of a fish. The synthetic carpet of a boat. The funky tinge of artificial bait that has been too long in the tackle box and couldn’t catch anything but weeds. There is no water there, but those were the smells. It made me think of my grandfather, and so I pedaled on.

I started having a tough time seeing through my sunglasses on the rainy, graying road. I enjoy a rainy ride, but this wasn’t quite the same. I hit a sprint stretch, wheeled to the right and realized I was cheating on all the turns. I blamed the new front tire. We don’t know each other yet. It doesn’t trust me to dive into turns yet. If I listen close the hum is saying what could have been?

I was dying on everything. But my socks were getting wet, so my feet were getting heavier and, thus, faster. That’s my theory, anyway. Doesn’t always work. I found myself shifting toward my easiest gears and climbing up the biggest hill of the day, which is no big hill. It is already a forgotten blur. So was most of the rest of the ride. Raindrops and panting. Chickening out in curves, full of unease about them, feeling my bike get lighter the few times I put in some speed.

Somewhere I picked up the smell of an old grandmother’s hairspray, baked in by decades of cigarettes. I don’t know why I smelled these things today, since I usually can’t smell anything. But I love being on my bike because it gives me time to think about things like that, the sensations, analogies and forgetting the whompwhompwhomp of my legs.

I took that picture above just before getting home, dawdling in the sprinkling rain and the purple and orange sky. I lingered to get the right fuzzy shot because a crisp one didn’t fit the mood. I took my time because getting home means going inside means cleaning my bike — the no-fun part of riding in the rain.

And there was still UPS plane talk. What could have been is such a bizarrely odd sensation. I got so distracted I almost gnarled two knuckles of my left hand in the spokes of my bike’s back wheel.

Here’s the last story I’m reading about it tonight:

More than 13,000 bags made by Freeset USA, a local nonprofit that provides jobs to women in Calcutta, India, were among the cargo lost when a UPS cargo plane crashed Wednesday morning near Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.

The company, which lost what amounted to its entire fall inventory of bags, has decided to begin selling a T-shirt to raise money for the families of the two pilots killed in the crash, according to a news release from the company.

[…]

The company is also worried about its 200 employees, mostly women freed from Calcutta’s sex trade.

People are donating via Twitter. Freeset’s Facebook page says they are working on the design. I know this company through Samford connections. They do incredible work and I’m glad they are involved here. Can’t wait to brag on them. That will be the best thing for a perfectly sad and strange day.

Monday / overwriting / video — Comments Off
15
Apr 13

“We’ve had an attack”

I was in the car when my phone buzzed. I had a few minutes in the office to read some of the early summaries, sketchy things that were trying to make sense of the senseless.

We took about a half hour and talked about this in class — How would you feel? How would you cover it? What is the public relations approach just now? — and so on.

At the end of class, and after a brief conversation here and a meeting there, the folks in Boston had more to go on, more to share with us.

I don’t know what you see in this video …

… but I see the best of humanity running to the sound of danger, running into the worst of settings, death and the unknown. Police officers, fire, EMTs, civilians and troopers in full utilities destroying a barricade that was intended to keep people safe, but was now preventing the safe care of people.

The smoke hadn’t cleared, all of the glass hadn’t fallen, but people rushed in, did their jobs, did beyond their jobs and maybe helped preserve the world of many others just a little bit, like Carlos Arredondo, who became a peace activist after losing his son in Iraq, who perhaps saved a life today.

You don’t see it in this video, because it focuses on that scene at the blast site, but you can envision the race’s health tent, which turned into trauma triage. And you don’t see, but you can’t not see in your mind’s eye, the marathoners who just never stopped running and went straight to a nearby hospital to donate blood.

And may those things never cease to move you.

At its center the random variables are too chaotic to understand or to interpret in any way beyond divine providence or the absurd. Beyond the spectators, and among the runners, there were many there from Alabama. This is the most comprehensive list of Alabama runners in the marathon. There was a Samford student and her father, who had just finished the race moments before. So far I’ve not found a report of any of them being hurt.

Today could all change some things domestically, I’m afraid. But one thing is certain: the honor and strength and courage of those who rushed to the sound of danger.

iPhone / journalism / memories / overwriting / photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
23
Feb 13

Travel day

It was off the main road, and off the road that became the main road when your sense adjusted. It was down off that, vertically down. Under a bridge, beneath an overpass. It was by the railroad. Not too far away from the Church of the Deliverance, if I recall, that I pulled into a dusty, unkempt yard and walked on to an ancient porch filled with the wrecked memories and peeling dreams of some long ago time. I knocked on the screen of this house and a small, frail old woman answered, still mostly in her curlers and wrapped up in her robe.

At first I was sure I’d disturbed her, but I came to realize over time that this was her general appearance these days. On this day, the first day, however, I was there to ask her about the worst thing in her world. Here was this skinny white kid standing on her porch and in the back room was her even skinnier son, and would she mind if I sat with him.

I was there, mostly, to watch him die.

Which is terribly dramatic, but that was the story I was writing for a terrific features class I took in undergrad. The professor wanted descriptive narrative, and I’ve thought a lot about that story today and yesterday. I’ve been at the SEJC conference in Tennessee with some of the Samford students, where the theme this year was “the power of narrative in a digital age.” We heard incredible speakers talk about the words that reshape everything, the images that set the story and they’d walked the students through exercises on how to build a narrative in a really easy, straightforward way. No need to be intimidated, take these four things — characters, moving through time, encountering an obstacle and acting until resolution — and you’re halfway to writing the story.

It is a great list. It works. You can tell masterful stories that way. For my personal narrative formula I would add two tangential things: smells and textures. Smells are so common and so active in our memory. Even if you aren’t at the scene of that school we learned about yesterday, the suggestion of mildew or cheap spaghetti sauce or sweaty students has a way of transporting you into the scene.

Textures can be that way too, and that was one of those things I learned by sitting with the guy who was struggling in the last days of his life. I spent time with him over the course of several weeks that term. He wasn’t much older than me, in his mid-late 20s, but he had the kind of cancer you can’t fight without a presidential insurance plan. To see where he was raised, where his mother brought him home to, it was obvious what would happen here. It was only a question of when and how badly.

But I’d found this family through Hospice. I met the local director and convinced her of my project and she found this old woman who was really not prepared to endure the process of burying her son, but had a great, weary strength about her, and a sad cheer that offset your earliest need to empathize with her. She had spirit and she had the Lord and she had her son. And, for some reason, she agreed when the Hospice director asked if I could come meet her son. He still had his smile, and Hospice was helping to make him comfortable and his entire world didn’t involve much beyond this crappy hospital bed and the four walls of the front room of his mother’s home. He was happy to have some different company for a while, I think.

I was so proud to know that guy. He was facing it head on by then, but that suggests a lot about what he’d probably already endured. He’d be perfectly still, talking with you, eyes open, smile on his face, eyes closed, still talking, and then asleep. He’d snore softly and wake up 15 minutes later and keep answering the same question, usually without a reminder.

I always thought it was very brave of his mother to leave her son alone with a stranger like that. I can’t imagine how the protective instinct, already so frazzled, must have felt about this kid, a student, asking to spend so much of her precious time with her boy. But then she used that time to nap, or get some things done around the house. She came to trust that at least he had someone to sit with him for a while. I was proud of that.

And I wrote this story, which was probably not nearly as good as I thought, and twice as bad as I remember. But I remember that I was very happy with it. I’d gone to talk to the guy a time or two without writing anything, just being friendly. I’d rush out and jot notes afterward. And one day I visited and did the real serious interview part, notebook, pen, cramping hands and all of that. And I went back another time to hang out with him, just intent on getting every detail about the place committed to memory. I paid the most fastidious attention to every crack in the ceiling and creak his bed made. I wrote in the story about the color of the walls and the softness of the guy’s hands and tried to describe his gentle, whistling snore. I didn’t know anything about writing about smells yet, but I described his mother and the way she looked around the room when we talked. I wrote about the guy’s hopes and his life and what he still wanted to do. I probably got some of his music into the story. I wrote about the angel sculptures that were hanging on the wall above him.

My professor asked me “What were they made of?”

Texture. That’s part of the narrative too.

On Google Maps, today, that house looks a lot different than it did almost 15 years ago. I should stop by sometime and see if they know what happened to that nice lady after her son passed away. I sent her a card, a note of sympathy and thanks. Never did ask her about those angels though.

Some things, I felt at the time, you should just be able to keep for yourself.

Anyway. We are all back home today. There was a big two hour faculty meeting I attended this morning, so I missed most of the day’s sessions at the conference, one on videography and another on snake handling. Hate that I missed it, as it was a long talk by the reporter of this magazine-style piece. I would have liked to been able to hear the entire presentation because Julia Duin, is on the faculty at Union and a three-time Pulitzer nominee. But I can rest easy knowing I have read perhaps both her story and the best book ever written about the topic, Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain.

The conference gave the students another awards luncheon, this one for the on-site competition. The Crimson’s sports editor won the top spot for sports writing. He was so excited he knocked over his chair standing to go get his certificate.

After that we made a quick stop at the bookstore and then spent far, far too long in the van. Party animals that these students are, they were all asleep before we’d gotten out of Tennessee. I don’t think I heard a word out of any of them until we got back into Jefferson County.

I made it home just after dark. It was nice to sit on the couch again, pet the cat and stare at nothing. Think I did that for most of the night.

Finally decided that I think they were plain white plaster angels. They’d been given a bit of discoloration by a little too much dust and a yellowing light bulb overhead. But they were with him all the same.