Going Deep on Tackle Football, Basketball and Football divide, Baptists and all the Complications

       In my considerable reading over the last forty years I have come across many remarkable dedicatory quotes but two stand out.

   One from a book by Heyrman back in the nineties about circuit riding baptist and methodist preachers of the antebellum south who whatever conscience they had on the matter of slavery were browbeaten into the prevailing ideology of its Biblical mandate.  And then recently from a book about tackle football that explores its entanglements with southern regions from the ACC which emphasizes basketball to the Deep South, Alabama, Northern Florida and West eaten up by Football.

    The boundary lines weave and blur and this fellow second guesses himself with the line being the Gaffney peach south of Charlotte to about the fifth exit on I 20 before you get to Bama in Georgia or roughly twenty mile the other side of Six Flags

     Southern Cross quotes Isaiah 19:18 : There are five cities in Egypt who speak the language of Caanan and one of them is called the City of the Sun.

    My new Baptist friend Ed Southern, author of Fight Songs and the Complicated South has this little jewel:  “Societies live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”

   Ed set out to write a book about his devotion to ACC Basketball and then Clemson football got him thinking about the "progressive south and the Deep South" during his romance with his soon to be Bama Wife, but with onset of Covid in 2020 it took a serious turn. And as promotional material for the book advertises it became a book that "  explores the connections and contradictions between the teams we root for and the places we plant our roots; between the virtues that sports are supposed to teach and the cutthroat business they've become; between the hopes of fans and the demands of the past, present, and future." 

   Tommy Martin coulda written a chapter for this book, even Sparky Barry Sparks, Barty Sides, Joe Wren, Johnny or Ulysses Pic  Dawkins or you pick em. This review is something like a chapter I woulda written.

   Southern has a lot of stops in his life that mirror my experience on the earth. His Dad had a stay at Wake Forest college in the 50s during the transition of the campus in the town which became the seminary my Dad was a student in its early days, the College going to Winston Salem and becoming the top tier University it is today. Southern is a 95 grad of the school, but moved to Greenville SC in his 8th grad year where he got introduced to Clemson for a few years then to Wake Forest University where he has been ever since. 

    But about fifteen years ago he married a woman from NE Birmingham, Hewitt Trussville HS about 40 miles down the insterstate where I lived for the last 30 years up until Feb 2020 and the onset of Covid.

    Three years ago, Paul Bear Bryant great grandson, the Tyson kid was the star QB at Hewitt Trussville. I had plans to go see him play but didnt get there.

    Let me get to the point. I think Wayne Whiteside the football philosopher and student himself woulda devoured this book. And I think the dedicatory quote gets to the Lincolnesque version of what he was trying to convey one late summer afternoon circa 1976 when he stopped by the house and was talking to me and my Dad in the driveway. Momma had already gone in after their Update on the Garden.  Out of nowhere he was taken by a memory of a Spartanburg game in the early 50s. I was unclear but the legend is the point. He said with a minute fifty to go Gaffney from the five yard line on the Chandler Drive end of the field, five and ten yards at a clip went the distance of the field and scored to win the game. Whiteside said forgive me Preacher but I was knocking Sonsabitches left and right with every snap of the ball all the way down the field.    

   Thats how Whiteside was the existential definition of defining Gaffney in relation to Spartanburg  by refusal to borrow, rather than accept.

     And Southern makes several paragraph references to Gaffney's WJ Cash and his 40s views on the Southern Male penchant for gentility punctuated by sudden bursts of Outrage, even violence. and as I said, the aformentioned Peach as a dividing line.

   One Thing Southern talks about and helps redeem is the doubts of all us males who werent good enough to make the team, werent strong enough to take a hit, how do we maintain a sense of masculinity in a region where Football is the ultimate test. One version for me was the 76 Peach Festival Tennis Tournament where all 130 pounds of Rajesh Mehra and myself, face HS All American Billy Ray Rice and Coach McRee in the finals. About the second game I figured out these were nice guys, couldnt hurt me on the tennis court though tennis was about the only contest where I could be on the same field with those two great athletes, (maybe ping pong or Rook). Rajesh and I were merciless. I knew that if we started playing nice they could run down dink shots all day cause they were that much quicker, so we ended it pretty early. They were very gracious in defeat and I always appreciated it. I guess it didnt hurt my Dad performed Billy Ray's Wedding to Becky Kiser.

    And there is my story from Collinsville Alabama where I was almost in the backfield with the legend Cornelius Bennett, one of the Bear's greatest. Well that's a reach but there was this local legend Rollo who was in the 83 All Star game in Bama. Scott Roberts had great hands and speed and many think coulda played SEC. They made it to the semis his senior year and his Coach, Raymond Weaver, himself a 65 HS all American who was in line to be an Auburn QB before opting to Viet Nam, wanted to spotlight his 2a Talent. First play from Scrimmage sends his hometown boy on a pass route with Bennett looking on from the backfield for a touchdown.

    By 95 the Glory days boys of CHS a decade earlier had taken up tennis. I had to show em who was master of the court. Check the Nov. 2019 archive here at this blog site for that story.

     And then there is that haunting scene in the Sequel to The Last Picture Show. Where the star of the losing home team just six months earlier, the fall after he graduates from small town Texas High school, is working the chain line and nobody remembers his name. Poor fellow in one scene is in the stands, very troubled with no prospects just a few months after celebrity and he's telling his friend I just keep replaying it all over and over in my head and It won't let me be.

   Ed walks on eggshells talking about race and class.  His thoughts not only reminded me of the now classic Race and Class in Texas politics by a Rice Proff Chandler Davidson thirty years ago but also Reminded me of a prescient conversation I had with Roger Milliken, Jr the summer of 1970 both of us working at the Peach Shed. We got to be pretty good friends that summer. His observation of Gaffney kids that summer was:  You know Fox, I think the rich got it made, and the poor got it made, it's the pretentious middle class that's all messed up

    Southern investigates the meaning of the BLM marches during the Covid year. He beatifies an early Statement of Trevor Lawrence after the George Floyd murder, elevates it to Lincolnesque expression. On June 13 I attended the BLM march at Clemson and talked to Lawrence a couple minutes. I asked him about the Recent twitter dustup between Drew Brees and Donald Trump on the matter of the Flag and patriotism and where he came down. Trevor said he sided with Brees against Trump saying people have the right to express themselves without fear of bullying from even a popular President among the fans of college Football. And it has become clear with Tim Tebow's latest Tryout with the Jags, Trevor  and his brother and sister in law are in different world of Christendom from Tim Tebows Eagle Forum Mother on matters of patriotism.

     Southern quotes Betram Wyatt Brown and Faulkner throughout the book but it is clear is taken with Allen Barra's 2005 book on Paul Bear Bryant, The Last Coach

   September 25, 2012 I called the Paul Finebaum show and asked to speak to the QB McCarron. Finebaum said we got Greg McElroy. I said ok, fine: Greg as one Rhodes scholar to another....Finebaum interrupted and said this oughta be good...But I mentioned Pulitzer prize winner Howell Raines piece in 1984 New Republic, Farewell to the Bear. Finebaum took notice and said it was one of the best things written to date about the Bryant era big picture at University of Alabama. Roughly it asks the question if Bryant coulda leveraged his power stronger to get George Wallace to concede he was on the wrong side of history and bring Alabama into the best vision of JFK, ML King and LBJ would things now be any different in Alabama.

    My Mother's family goes back to the 1840s in NE Alabama where my grandfather a Lincoln Republican, ran for school board supe in the second decade of the 20th Century and was soundly defeated. Whatever my failures, I think my Mother woulda been proud of me for that phone call.

     You will have to read the book to see how Southern comes down on that question.

    After Covid, BLM marches, Name Image and Likeness and the transfer portal, not to mention consussions, the future is uncertain for tackle football; but I leave it to Ed to have the final thought, He takes his daughter fishing .   Quoting:

       

 

I told her she needed a hat to shield her face from the sun, and handed her a Wake Forest ball cap. “No,” she said, “I want this one,” and reached her Bama hat from her closet. “This is my good thinking cap.” I stood, struck dumb, feeling the Deacon Blues again, fumbling for words I couldn’t quite gather: Come on, hon. Mama’s team has seventeen national championships and counting. You’ve got to let Daddy’s team be the ‘good thinking’ one. Truth be told, I’m happy for her to holler “Roll Tide” as much and as loud as she does “Go Deacs,” or even to holler something else entirely, just as long as she gets to holler. I’d be as happy for her to go to Alabama as Wake Forest, and would be even if tuition weren’t an issue. I’d even be happy for her to go to Carolina or Clemson. (Duke, on the other hand . . .) I’d be happy for her to choose not to go to college at all, so long as she’s happy and healthy and productive, self-sufficient and satisfied with her life. How she’ll navigate all these deep and intersecting lines, how she’ll draw her own borders, what she’ll take from her roots in North Carolina and Alabama—that’s all up to her, and I can’t wait to see what she chooses. Let her sing whatever fight song she wants, just as long as she gets to sing.