Rolling With the Tide
Reviewed by Derek Catsam, University of Texas of the Permian Basin
FEBRUARY 13, 2006 archive
Warren St. John is something of a madman, but he is my kind of madman. It takes a certain type of obsessive to follow a college football team around in a battered RV, as St. John did, or to write a daily diary about a professional baseball team, as I did. Such endeavors require an emotional involvement beyond all proportion to what is, after all, a bunch of strangers in a laundry to which we happen to have a tangential connection. Nonetheless, such obsessions seem to be pretty commonplace, as St. John's experiences with hundreds of like-minded souls throughout the 1999 Alabama Crimson Tide football season.
St. John realized he was different when he went to college at Columbia and received more than his fair share of ribbing when his dorm mates discovered that the picture of himself with an older gentleman when St. John was a kid was not a cherished family snapshot of a boy with his grandfather, but rather was a photo of St. John with his childhood idol and Alabama's de facto patron saint of football, Paul "Bear" Bryant. St. John was shocked that there were people who could not identify Bryant. He once spent three hours on the phone listening to an Alabama-Auburn game (his parents placed the receiver next to the radio) that was not televised in New York. Needless to say, this invited more ridicule from a Columbia student body that was in the midst of enduring - and in some cases celebrating - Columbia's growing record streak of football futility. Columbia and Alabama are both fine universities, but far from one another in temperament and intensity when it comes to matters sporting.
St. John tells a story of a husband and wife who chose to attend an Alabama-Tennessee football game on the day of their daughter's wedding. Some people saw this as a sign of the apocalypse. Others believed fully in their hearts that the daughter acted about as selfishly as a soul could act by scheduling her wedding on the day of a 'Bama football game, and the Alabama-Tennessee game at that. St. John discovers that a sizeable percentage of 'Bama fans fell in the latter camp. I suspect that there is a subsection of serious sports fans who, even if they do not much care about Alabama football, might agree with those who blame the daughter.
Thus, St. John's book can be read in two ways: as a celebration of or as an exploration into the character of a certain kind of sports fan. Either way, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer (named after a ubiquitous nonsensical cheer heard across Tuscaloosa on football Saturdays) provides a rollicking good read. St. John is a wonderful storyteller with a fine sense of both irony and drama. He realizes that his behavior might seem mad to some, while, at the same time, it is perfectly normal in the minds of others. It is this latter group into which St. John decided to immerse himself for the duration of the 1999 football season.
St. John decided to make his immersion complete. He did not just attend a season's worth of football games. He decided to enter the uber-subculture, the army of 'Bama fans who travel to every game, home and away, in RVs, many of which cost more (and are better equipped) than a suburban home. Soon, he became one of them (although his job as a reporter makes many of his fellow obsessives more than a bit skeptical of his true goals - like many subcultures, the Bama RV world is an insular one that looks upon outsiders with suspicion and distrust until the interlopers prove their worth) even going so far as to purchase his own RV, albeit a beat up, barely functioning one that hardly stacks up with the houses-on-wheels of his cohort.
Soon, St. John is dedicated to the weekly routine of driving to the game, dealing with the perils of university rules calling for restrictions on where and when the RVs can park (for fans of a university football team, most of the RV crowd do not seem to care much about the mission of the university) and if the game is away, developing a plan to deal with the hostile home crowds who inevitably set upon the ad hoc crimson-festooned community to mock, harass and sometimes vandalize and steal.
The community St. John discovers is fiercely loyal to both the football team and the RV mentality. It also is chock full of characters, and St. John evokes them colorfully. There is John Ed, the Tuscaloosa ticket broker who works the phones like an instrument and whose fortunes are almost wholly tied to Alabama football. He calls himself Tuscaloosa's oldest teenager and plays the part effectively. There are the Bices, the closest friends that St. John develops during the season, the folks who help him gain his foothold in the RV community, and who introduce him to "Bama Bombs," a booze-concoction that lubricates Saturday afternoons. The Bices, Chris and Paula, are also shockingly well-adjusted when it comes to their fandom. Yes, they are part of the RV crowd. Yes, they have spent a small fortune based wholly on their obsession with 'Bama football. But they also tend not to experience the crushing depths that come with the relatively infrequent losses that a team of Alabama's caliber experiences. And then there are the dozens of other bit players, many substantially more obsessed with 'Bama football than even St. John believes it possible to be.
The 1999 Alabama football team was good, nearly great, but it had some early troubles that gave 'Bama fans palpitations. (This is not insignificant, given that one of the RV crowd was a man on a heart-transplant waiting list who was not supposed to travel far from the hospital but did so every week anyhow, knowing that in so doing he risked sacrificing his shot at a transplant if a heart became available while he was gone.) The team's struggles also gave Paul Finebaum, an acerbic Alabama radio talk show host whose controversial coverage of Crimson Tide football makes him enemy number one among Tide fans to the point where he sometimes fears for his safety depending on the fever pitch of the season, a chance to bury the needle in the faithful. The early struggles may have almost cost the job of head Coach Mike Dubose, who had already been on the verge of losing his job as the result of the discovery of an extramarital affair. But the team steadies itself, DuBose and the fans benefit from the sterling play of star running back Shawn Alexander (this past season's NFL MVP, rushing leader, and star of the NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks) and the team goes on not only to defeat archrivals across the Southeastern Conference (SEC), including nemesis Auburn (where a riot almost ensues among the fans of both teams) but also to win the SEC title game, thrashing Florida 34-7 and sending St. John and the loyal legions of fans into paroxysms of joy.
It is at this stage of the book that St. John experiences his only misstep. From the SEC championship game, he goes immediately into wrapping up the season. He explores the sense of depression and loss that many sports fans feel when their team's season ends. St. John even gives a brief capsule of the next season, during which the Tide collapses and has an epically bad performance in which the team ends up 3-8. That performance costs DuBose his job despite the fact that a year earlier he had been voted SEC coach of the year. There is only one problem - to cap off the 1999 season, the Alabama Crimson Tide played Michigan in the Orange Bowl on January 1, 2000 and lost in a squeaker, 35-34, nonetheless finishing 8th in the nation. St. John talks about none of this. Presumably, he chooses not to join the RV community at the bowl game, but we get no sense of why, and most readers may never even know that Alabama played in one of the major bowl games of the year. It is a peculiar fumble in a book that otherwise scores only touchdowns.
Books about single seasons have become something of a tradition in sports literature, and this is not especially surprising. For fans and athletes alike, a season has a particular rhythm, with natural climaxes and potential sources for conflict, emotional release, low- and high-points. Teams develop personalities. Hearts are broken and mended. There are wins and losses. It would be a cliché to say that sports replicate life, but sports do bring out some of the themes of life's experiences. John Feinstein has established a cottage industry of such books, with none better than his chronicle of the 1985-1986 Indiana basketball season and its fascinating, volatile Coach, Bobby Knight in Season on the Brink. H. G. Bissinger explored the soul of Odessa, Texas through its passion for high school football in Friday Night Lights. Any sports fan who is also a reader can reel off several of their favorite books of this ilk. Warren St. John has clearly earned his place among this Pantheon.
St. John, Warren. _Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of
Fan Mania_ (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004) $24 Cloth, $12.95 Paper, ISBN:
0609607081 (Cloth) 0609807137 (Paper)
Copyright © 2006 by Derek Catsam.