My parents spent half the year in a funny old apartment building on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. The apartment was on the edge of the Garden District, across the street from the Pontchartrain hotel, where childhood visits for its famous “mile-high pie” were a big deal. It was a stacked combination of vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and peppermint ice cream topped with meringue. I would look forward to that for days. My mother liked the apartment building because it was familiar, a place where parents of her friends had gravitated when they moved out of their family homes. It had history and context that help stave off the chaos of a changing world. It wasn’t a fancy building, but the comfort they sought wasn’t in the gimmicks real estate agents now love to market, the granite countertops or bathrooms big enough for a party. They found the building had a soothing continuity. There were people who had worked there for decades, even some second-generation employees. Within a couple of weeks of moving in, my parents were best friends with everyone who worked in the building. This was their way.
It was the idea that things didn’t change much in New Orleans that was its greatest appeal to so many but also its greatest curse. Once New Orleans had been the South’s most dynamic, innovative, evolving urban center, but somewhere that had stopped, and it had become a theme park. A couple of centuries of focus on creativity and vivacity had shifted to an obsession with “preservation.” Everybody talked about the problems of New Orleans, if only because they were impossible to ignore—the institutionalized corruption, the crime, the poverty—but always the solutions were about “restoring” New Orleans, the assumption that the answers lay in a greater appreciation of the past than an embrace of the future. It was as if New Orleans had chosen Miss Havisham’s room as the model home of the future.
Like almost everyone who encounters New Orleans, I had gone through a period of enchantment, had roamed through the clubs, greeted many dawns over beignets at the French Market, read A Confederacy of Dunces like it was some sacred text. I’d gone along with the glib assumptions about the city—the food was great, the culture rich—and my only defense can be that I never really believed it.
It was as if New Orleans had conducted an experiment of what the outcome would be if a society placed the greatest value on eating and drinking and made hard work a social negative. It wasn’t the poor African Americans of the Ninth Ward who didn’t like to work; it was the rich white people. At uptown New Orleans dinner parties, it was more socially acceptable to admit to loving McDonald’s than confessing how much you enjoyed working. Before Katrina, New Orleans had faced a catastrophic disaster for over a century. In Holland, they built locks and dams. In New Orleans, they got drunk and threw beads at each other. My mother never liked it when I went off on New Orleans, and truth was, I still had a soft spot for it, maybe the way the French loved Jerry Lewis; it didn’t make sense, but there was still a little pleasurable tingle.
But mostly the point of living in New Orleans was to escape being exposed to the need to do anything new and to still feel good about that, even superior. That’s why I almost fell out of my chair when my father said, “I want us to do something we’ve never done before.” We were having breakfast in their apartment. Across Canal Street, just down from the Pontchartrain hotel, a couple of bars had stayed open late into the night, and I’d slept poorly, waking up to shouts of the drunken hilarity. Rampaging crowds of drunks were to New Orleans what rain was to Seattle, more noticeable in the absence.
“Never done before?” I asked. “In New Orleans?” I’d been coming to New Orleans since that first Sugar Bowl a whole bunch of years earlier. There wasn’t anything new to do. At least I didn’t think so.
“The World War II museum,” my father said. “You haven’t been yet, have you?”
“No.” I liked the way he included “yet,” as if it were inevitable, just a matter of time.
“We’ll fix that,” he said.
“Thank you for your service,” the forty-something man said, shaking my father’s hand.
My father nodded, the way he did when he was slightly embarrassed. Then the man hugged him. My father looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. Off to the side, a British couple in their twenties with a young son stood by with an iPhone, waiting to take a photograph with my dad.
This was happening because my dad was a World War II vet and the museum gives vets a large hangtag to wear, like a credential. It was done up nicely in red, white, and blue and said in large, block letters, simply, WORLD WAR II VETERAN. My dad slipped it around his neck as his entry pass into the museum. He wasn’t expecting it to attract a lot of attention.
“You were in the South Pacific?” the Englishwoman asked, after I took a photograph of her and her husband and young son posing by my father. In the background was a Pearl Harbor exhibit.
“Yes,” he said, still a little taken aback by the attention.
“Were you over there very long?” her husband asked.
“I spent twenty-eight months on ship without a night ashore,” he said. “But a lot of others had it much worse. They had to stay onshore.” It was sort of a joke, but the couple seemed too startled to get it.
“Where were you?” the man asked.
A small group had gathered around my dad. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’ll show you.” He turned and took a few steps to a map of the South Pacific island.
“I had orders to report to LST Flotilla 7 somewhere in the South Pacific. No one knew exactly where it was. I started in San Francisco. An aircraft carrier dumped me on the northern shore of Australia, and then I got a ride on a passenger ship the Australian navy had commandeered over to New Guinea. They let me out on a beach, and I was greeted by fierce-looking New Guinea natives whose only English was the worst kind of profanity imaginable that the Australians had taught them. I’d come halfway around the world to hear curses I’d never imagined.”
He traced the journey on the map, smiling slightly at the memory. “They took me to some Australians and Americans there, and nobody had heard of Flotilla 7, but they told me to keep going up the coast. So I got another ride and eventually found LST Flotilla 7.” He was doing what so many veterans did when they talked about the war, focusing on the absurdity of it and grabbing the bits of humor.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Englishwoman asked, “but what is an LST?”
This had taken on the feel of an impromptu lecture, and the volunteer guides of the museum drew closer. This entire wing was dedicated to the South Pacific, arranged in chronological order. “We called them Large, Slow Targets,” my father said. “But their real names were Landing Ships, Tanks. They were longer than the length of a football field and used to land troops ashore. That’s what we did. We went from island to island.”
“How many landings did you participate in?” I asked quietly.
He paused for a minute, pulling the number up. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight different invasions.”
There was a long silence while the number sank in. Finally, the Englishwoman hugged him.
Later we ate in the museum café that had a 1940s theme. We were both tired. I think I was more emotionally exhausted. “Did you see that display with the estimates of the American casualties of a Japanese invasion?” I asked. “Half a million to over a million U.S. dead or wounded. The army had produced over half a million Purple Hearts.”
“We were headed to Okinawa to prepare for the invasion. That’s when they dropped the first of those awful bombs.” He looked away, but I could see him tear up. “Then they dropped the second awful bomb.” “Awful bomb”: it was a description I’d never heard him use before. In its very ordinariness, it suddenly made the reality of massive death more personal and specific.
“When we got to Okinawa, instead of loading combat troops, which had been our original mission, after the surrender we loaded with equipment for a weather station,” Dad said. “We sailed off the northern tip of Japan. We were about a hundred yards offshore, and a boat paddled out with old Japanese men. We didn’t have anybody who spoke Japanese, and they didn’t speak a word of English. But we knew they had been suffering. They were skin and bones. So we gave them a boat filled with food for their village.”
He smiled. “They were so grateful.” We sat quietly and ate our sandwiches. When we were finished, Dad looked around as if noticing the café for the first time. “They did a really nice job with this. Yes, sir, they did.” Then, as we started to get up, he said, “I often thought about how if the war had gone on, those Japanese who came out to our ship for help would have been terrified of us. And heaven knows what might have happened to them.”
Back at the apartment, I asked him if he remembered much about the different landings or if they all blurred together. My mother was out running errands, and it was just the two of us in the smallish apartment. It was good for her to get out without having to worry about him.
“I don’t think about it much,” he said. “But that fellow from the museum asked me the same question when he came.” The World War II museum had an extensive oral history project, and a young historian had traveled to Asheville to interview him a few years earlier.
“So I got to thinking about it and made a list.”
“A list?”
“Of the landings.” He went into the bedroom and came back with two pages. “I think this was everything.”
I read through it. It was a list of twenty-eight landings he had participated in, with some brief notes on each: “frequent air attacks,” “heavy air (kamikaze), mortar, artillery fire, severe casualties, ships and personnel,” “four LST’s severely damaged,” “midget sub, air and mortar fire.”
I sat back and tried to imagine what it was like: the kamikaze planes coming in waves, the screams of the wounded and dying, seeing other ships go down and wondering if you were next. I remembered him telling me about a kamikaze pilot barely missing the ship and being so close that for an instant he could lock eyes with the pilot in his death spiral.
“Which was the worst?” I asked and was immediately sorry I had. I was trying to bring order to the unimaginable. Rank the horrors, like an Internet listicle, and that would make it seem less terrifying. He looked at the list, lost in thought. Then he shook his head. He put the list down. “Let’s talk about football. Who are we playing next weekend? Arkansas?”
“That’s in two weeks. We’ve got Idaho this weekend. It’s homecoming.”
“Idaho?” He made it sound totally impossible, as if it were the University of Mars. I pretty much felt the same way.
“Yep. Idaho. Then Arkansas. Then Troy.”
“Troy? Where is Troy?”
“Alabama. They can be good. Tough school. Not big, but tough.”
“I hate games like that. We don’t get any credit if we win, and it scares me to death.”
“Yep. Then Missouri.”
“Missouri? They’re good this year.”
“Really good. If we can beat them, we can get back in the top twenty, I bet.”
“Where is it this year?”
“Starkville.”
He grimaced. “That’s a shame.”
I nodded. It was comforting to walk through the rest of the year, a reassuring rosary of familiarity. The football schedule was everything that list of island landings was not. The twenty-eight landings were a chronicle of chaos and pain, but a season of weekends built around the rituals of football was dependable in its pleasures and the predictability and scale of its disappointments. Many people loved to point to the game as a metaphor for life, spinning out the lessons learned on the field to the landscape of life. There was surely truth in that, but it had never interested me much. The football that my father and I loved was too good to try to look for some usefulness in it any more than you’d go to church really expecting a limp to be healed. It was good because it was good, and that was enough.
This love of college football and its importance in life’s scheme are natural for a southerner but difficult for the uninitiated to grasp. When I first moved to New York City in the 1980s, it was not a happy time in the city’s fortunes. Subways resembled filthy, graffiti-covered prison cells. Everyone talked about crime the way Alaskans talk about bears or ski patrollers discuss avalanches. But I loved it. Like generations of expats in a foreign land, I fell into a crowd of fellow countrymen: southerners and mostly Mississippians. They were everywhere; it was years before I had any close friends in the city who weren’t southern. In retrospect, that seems depressing, but it troubled me not at all in the moment. The crime, the postapocalyptic subways, the never-ending hunt for decent apartments that had perplexed every wave of New Yorkers since the Dutch, that all seemed part of the assumed rigors of big-city life. It was to be expected, and complaining would have been like paying lots of money for a trip to the rain forest and grousing it was wet. That was New York. It was how the city worked and people lived.
But every fall weekend, we would slide into a deep, predictable funk. We wanted to watch football—real football. At some point before each weekend, a depressing series of phone calls would commence among southern expats over the scarcity and quality of the football options on New York City television. “Holy Cross versus Harvard? Can you believe it? My high school played better football.”
It was much as I imagine growing up in a culture with wonderful, distinctive food—India or the Szechuan Province of China—and moving to a drab place where the only options were awful strip mall restaurants that were all the more insulting for their claims to authenticity: “Real Indian” or “Genuine Chinese.” They called these sad northeastern college efforts “football,” but it was hardly a creature of the same species. Once a few of us dragged up to see Columbia play, and we left before the half. It wasn’t just what was happening on the field; it was the entire experience. The few students who condescended to come seemed more interested in the mocking hipness of playing at being football fans. Some actually read books during the game. This was like bringing a six-pack to church to get through the sermon. “Like Communion served to atheists at the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike,” a friend described it as we rode back on the subway. Another friend was so depressed he flew home the next weekend for the Ole Miss–LSU game and never came back to New York. I didn’t blame him a bit.
When there was a good game on television—and good meant that it had to involve a top southern, preferably SEC, team—we’d gather at one of our small apartments and stare at the screen, each of us homesick in a different way. It wasn’t just that we missed going to the games; we missed being fans who could find comfort in the presence of other fans. When you showed up at an Ole Miss–Alabama game or an Auburn-Alabama game, life’s complicated choices were reduced to a binary definition: you were for one team or the other, and whom you were for was pretty much all anyone needed to know. It was an identity that superseded all others.
Most of us had come to New York because we believed, on some level, that we had no choice. It was both a test of who we were and a way to define who we might become. It wasn’t a fear of failure at home that drove us to New York but a fear that success at home might be all too satisfying. The expats in my crowd had no illusions about the South. We were scornful of those we deemed “professional southerners,” those living in New York who tried to define themselves by some pretense that they came from a more genteel and cultured world.
But all of that changed on fall Saturdays, when we would gather in a self-congratulatory orgy of southern boosterism and shared loathing of the northeast brand of football. It gave us an opportunity to be smug, a joyful rarity for us in New York, but most of all it was an affirmation that though we may come from a not-so-perfect spot, we believed in something larger than ourselves that made us better than ourselves. In a confusing world, this festival of southern football was a constant that rarely disappointed.
One of the great virtures of the South is the assumption that football is important. When my parents and I were in New Orleans and saw old friends of theirs, no one thought it was odd that we were spending months going to Ole Miss games. It was hard to imagine a like reaction in Connecticut if you announced plans of taking three months off and going to every, say, Brown game. It would be seen, at best, as quirky, sort of like closely following jai alai or having strong opinions on who should play for the United States in the Croquet World Championship. But in the South, even in New Orleans, organizing a life around college football games seemed like a perfectly reasonable endeavor.
By Thursday before the next game, we all were eager to get back to Oxford. That was the rhythm of a fan’s life, and I loved that it was now the focus of our lives. We drove to Oxford and settled back in the hotel on campus. My father and I immediately headed to the student union for the frozen yogurt we’d come to love. The union was filled with spirit signs of homecoming.
MASH THOSE IDAHO POTATOES! read a huge sign. My father shook his head with a pained expression. “Ole Miss is playing Idaho? Idaho?”
“It’s strange,” I agreed.
“If you coach for Idaho,” my father asked, “what do you tell your players at halftime? Go play like potatoes?”
I laughed. “Their mascot is the Vandals.”
“The Vandals?” He thought for a minute, then said, “I don’t believe it.”
I pulled up the University of Idaho Web site on my iPhone and read it to him: “Don’t use your dictionary to find Idaho’s definition of a Vandal. No, Idaho’s student-athletes go by a name earned nearly a century ago by a basketball team coached by Hec Edmundson, whose teams played defense with such intensity and ferocity that sports writers said they ‘vandalized’ their opponents.”
“They’re named after a basketball team?” My father frowned. He and I both found basketball to be a slightly suspect sport.
“Apparently.”
He looked pained. “What’s their record this year?”
I pulled it up. “This is encouraging,” I said. “They lost to the University of North Texas 6–40.”
“Six to forty?” my father marveled. “Is University of North Texas any good?”
“Not that good. Then they lost to University of Wyoming 10–42.”
“Good Lord.”
“And Washington State 0–42.”
“They have a good team. Washington State,” my father said.
“Yep. And hey, they beat Temple 26–24. In Idaho. It was their homecoming.”
“Nobody wants to lose homecoming. But Temple? From Philadelphia? I didn’t know they played football. I thought it was a basketball school. So that’s it? They win any other games this year?” my father asked.
I reviewed the results. “Nope. Lost to Fresno and Arkansas State too.”
“This is definitely encouraging,” he agreed. “Looks like a good homecoming match.”
“Come on,” I said to my dad. “I want to show you something.”
We walked out of the student union and toward downtown. “Hear that?” I asked.
It was warm, more like August than November, one of those perfect days that are a reminder of how much summer will be missed. In the distance, a familiar song carried through the soft air. My father perked up, like a bird dog on a scent.
“Band practice,” I explained.
We had walked to the edge of the campus and were in front of the band building. THE PRIDE OF THE SOUTH: OLE MISS BAND, the sign read. It was redbrick and formidable. Around the side was the practice field for the band. “This used to be the high school,” my father said, “University High School. They had football games around back.” I didn’t know that, but it made sense. It looked like a high school, one of those imposing structures they built for schools when the formality of the buildings seemed connected to the seriousness of the educational task.
Behind the band building on the old high school’s football field, the Ole Miss band, dressed in shorts and jeans, was practicing for homecoming. The band director conducted from a stepladder. He’d shout instructions to move this section here or that section over there, and a seemingly random group of students would transform into order. It resembled some large-scale game of chess with human pieces. They were practicing the “Ole Miss Alma Mater,” a favorite at the games. It was lyrical and elegiac, a song from my youth. It was an odd song to play at a football game, sad and haunting, but this was Mississippi, and anything that could evoke a sense of loss was powerful medicine. I looked over at my dad, and he was smiling.
“Do you know what the lyrics are to it?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “There are words? No one sings it. I don’t have a clue.”
I pulled up the words on my iPhone.
“Is everything in there?” he asked, nodding to my phone.
“All human knowledge,” I assured him. “Found it. Here are the lyrics: ‘Way down south in Mississippi, there’s a spot that ever calls. Where amongst the hills enfolded, stand old Alma Mater’s Halls.
“ ‘Where the trees lift high their branches, to the whispering Southern breeze. There Ole Miss is calling, calling, to our hearts fond memories.’ ”
I looked up to find Dad frowning. “I think there’s a reason nobody ever sings it,” he said.
We watched as the student musicians joked around, looking bored, like a random collection of students who had been handed these odd things called instruments. But then, when the director’s baton went up and they poised to play, something quite miraculous happened. They were transformed from just kids into some force transcendent. They became magicians conjuring miracles from the air.
In Geronimo Rex, Barry Hannah’s brilliant first book, he described the powerful effect of a southern marching band: “The band was the best music I’d ever heard, bar none. They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere.” So it was with the scruffy bunch who would form up on Saturdays in brilliant uniforms and transform themselves into the “Pride of the South” band. They tore into a medley that was a standard of every game. At the heart of it was the revised version of “Dixie” that the band now played.
Like every Ole Miss fan, I’d grown up with the Ole Miss band playing “Dixie,” an assumed ritual like the singing of the national anthem. It was the Ole Miss football anthem. It was our anthem. Today it is popular for sports fans to call themselves “nation”: “Red Sox Nation” or “Who Dat Nation” for the New Orleans Saints. But when “Dixie” played at Ole Miss games, it represented the lost glory of an actual nation. No one ever died for the right to form Red Sox Nation. Tens of thousands died for the brief existence of the Dixie nation.
In those days, the band would play “Dixie,” Colonel Reb waved his sword, the Confederate flags would fly, and for that moment it could recapture a past as glorious as the last dance at Tara, when victory was assured and soon the Yankees would be taught a lesson. At the finale, the crowd would rise and join as one, shouting, “The South shall rise again!”
Inevitably, the irony, if nothing else, of having a team that was more than half African American charging to battle behind Colonel Reb and the Confederate battle flag became difficult to ignore. The school dropped Colonel Reb in 2003 and banned Confederate flags. That left “Dixie,” which was a tougher call to ban. Though frequently assumed to have been a Confederate anthem, the song was actually a favorite of Abraham Lincoln, who had it played at the announcement of Robert E. Lee’s surrender. But its fate as an Ole Miss regular was probably sealed with the crowd chant of “The South shall rise again” that rose up with the finale. It didn’t help that the Ole Miss band wore uniforms modeled after Confederate battle dress. But the idea of Ole Miss football with no “Dixie,” no Colonel Reb, and no Rebel flags was hard for many to grasp. As one Mississippi friend of mine, a former McGovern worker who now gave large sums to the Democratic Party, put it scornfully, “We might as well be the Syracuse of the South.”
Instead of a complete ban on “Dixie,” a compromise was reached. A modified version of “Dixie” would be allowed as part of a longer medley. Like the approaching death of a loved one, the final days of the original “Dixie”—“From Dixie with Love” was the full title—were marked with solemn ceremonies: the last playing at a special performance at the Grove in 2010. For the true believers, it was like the killing of the Latin Mass for a cheaper, junk-food variety more digestible to a broader audience.
Before my dad and I went to the season’s first game at Vanderbilt, I realized that a part of me would want the games to be as they had always been. I remembered too well that simple joy when the cheerleaders would throw bundles of Confederate flags into the stands to be passed around like muskets at dawn reveille. Had somebody handed me a Confederate flag when the Rebels took the field, I’d have waved it out of pure muscle memory and maybe more. Or if that sweaty hot night in Nashville, Colonel Reb had made one more fateful, doomed charge through the goalpost chased by the band in their old-style Confederate uniforms playing the unrepentant “From Dixie with Love,” I’d have stood and shouted, “The South shall rise again!” at the end with a clean heart. It would have been a piece of frozen time handed to me by a benevolent God, and I’d have licked it like an ice cream cone, joyous and grateful.
But I’d never be that young boy again, and while the tall man in the hat and the sport coat who would pick me up after every touchdown was still here, now he had his hand on my shoulder to keep a little steady. I knew the Rebel flags wouldn’t wave again, and I’d never be swung through the air while rebel yells exploded all around us and the band broke into “Dixie.” But listening to even that ersatz “Dixie” brought those moments back, how it felt jumping up on the wooden bleacher to be a little taller and hug my father and know then, without a doubt, that I was the luckiest kid on earth.
We stood watching the band work through the medley, moving smartly in formation now, as if the music demanded respect. They came to the “Dixie” section, and it wasn’t quite the same as the old “Dixie,” but by God it was awfully good. It was a song of loss, and that made it more real and stirring than an ode to victory. When I had heard the song as a child, I always assumed, probably like every other white southern son, that it was an ode to the southern way of life, that while we might have lost the battle called the Civil War, we had won that other war, that our values and our way of life had proven superior to the crasser, mercantile ways of the North.
But now I understood it wasn’t about some hidden victory; it was just about loss. We lost. They won. It sounded sad because it was sad. It made you want to cry because loss was sad and defeat painful. The South was part of that brotherhood of cultures which learn to erect such beautiful homages to loss that it was easy to forget that they were still about loss and suffering. Surely this was their purpose. To be who I was when I was a boy was to be raised in a world that taught you it was right and essential that your people had been defeated but it was also right and essential to respect and mourn the loss. This, perhaps more than anything, defined what it was to be southern: to know the world celebrated your defeat, and to join in that celebration was required to be accepted into the company of civilized men and women. It is still living with the Civil War that separates the South from the North, more than victory or defeat. No one in the North thinks about the Civil War, which is the ultimate humiliation for the South. To win a war is to be free to move on. To be conquered is to live with the consequences forever. The descendants of Joshua Chamberlain are no doubt rightly proud of his actions turning back the charge that desperate day on Little Round Top, but are they haunted by it?
It was here at Ole Miss that the University Greys mustered up so they could meet their fate at Gettysburg, so eager and honored to lead Pickett’s Charge into the slaughterhouse, attacking up the hill in daylight against fixed positions, dying and dying and dying until there were none left to die. It is in their honor the statue stands in the Grove.
The music faded, and the band director barked new instructions. Next to me, my father sighed. “You know, I’m tired,” he said, and he looked it. Now that the rush of the music was passing, we were facing a long walk back.
“Should we call Mother to come get us?”
“Nope. Let’s walk. Too nice outside.”
It was a beautiful, warm afternoon, one of those days you want to frame and keep to pull out on the gray days to remember. We headed off as the band kicked into “Rebel March,” the classic beats of a fight song. We both smiled. He put his arm around me, and we walked back through the campus.
Some might argue that it is a fluke of history that American homecoming is connected to football. Such people, of course, would be philistines and doubters and most likely Yankees.
Few Mississippians would think basketball or baseball worthy endeavors to organize an emotional reunion. And it’s difficult to imagine anyone suggesting an American homecoming game would be the same if celebrated over soccer. Yes, of course, soccer is the world’s most popular sport, “the beautiful game” that transcends cultures and languages. This is precisely why it is so unsuited to the unique rituals of American homecoming. Soccer is the UN of sports; a game that belongs to the world doesn’t belong to anyone. You can’t come “home” to a sport that isn’t your home.
Like it or not, America has always been a violent country, and football is a domesticated form of our love of violence. To grow up in the South and other pockets of football love across America is as close to being raised in athletic Sparta as an American youth can experience. You are raised to play football, and no teenager ever played on a winning football team who did not consider himself one of life’s chosen winners. Homecoming rituals are an affirmation of those values and the culture that honors the most American of sports.
When I was in high school and college, I’d imagined myself far too cool to enjoy the simple pleasures of homecoming rituals. This strikes me now not as hip or enlightened but as a reflection of some deeper insecurity. I wasn’t confident enough in who I was or might become, so I was afraid of being limited by embracing the traditional. It was like a self-impressed atheist who steers away from churches for fear of being converted. But now none of that mattered, and maybe coming back to it at this stage in my life made it better.
The night before homecoming game, Ole Miss has a parade that starts on campus and ends up at the square of Oxford, a little over a mile away. The proximity of town to campus is one of the special pleasures of Oxford, a connection grown stronger with the explosion of clubs and bars.
“If Oxford had been like this,” my father said as students jammed the square, “I’m not sure I would have graduated.”
“If I had known Oxford was like this,” I said, “I would have come here and never left.”
Earlier there had been student elections for homecoming: Miss Ole Miss, Mr. Ole Miss, homecoming maids who now rolled by in convertibles, waving. From the bars and balconies of clubs, cheers rang out. The whole scene had just enough self-awareness to laugh a bit at itself. Yes, all this is old-fashioned and retro, but it’s fun and nobody is taking it that seriously. We were in front of Square Books, where my mother had disappeared for most of the afternoon. Earlier I’d found a book in its extensive civil rights/southern collection detailing the history of race murders in Mississippi, Devil’s Sanctuary. It was full of photographs of lynching and detailed accounts of young black men killed for the supposed crime of looking at white women, or whistling, as with the Emmett Till horror.
The year before, an African American woman had been homecoming queen, and this crowd was black and white, spilling out of the clubs together. Those segregationists who had railed against “Negro music” and the dangers of allowing black athletes onto the playing field with white boys had lost the day more than their worst nightmares might have conjured.
From a balcony bar, a pack of sorority girls cheered, “Mash those Idaho potatoes!”
My father winced. “It’s just…”
“Lame,” I said.
“Lame,” he agreed.
My mother came out of Square Books with a load of books so large they seemed to be pulling her down to the sidewalk.
“What’s lame?” she asked.
“Drunk sorority girls yelling, ‘Mash those Idaho potatoes.’ ”
“I know they weren’t Kappas,” she said, handing me the stack of books. “But if Ole Miss can’t beat Idaho, it will be sad.”
For Ole Miss, playing Idaho was about picking an opponent they were likely to beat on homecoming. For Idaho, it was about the experience of playing in the SEC. And money. A lot of money.
Idaho made $850,000 playing Ole Miss that Saturday evening. The yearly revenue for Idaho’s entire football season was a little over $5 million, including television fees and ticket sales. So the one trip down south made up almost 20 percent of the year’s budget and twice what would be made from a year’s worth of tickets.
Why was it worth it to Ole Miss to pay just under $1 million? A single home game for an SEC team generates an average of around $4 million in total revenue, from ticket sales, concessions, and broadcast revenues. Even sharing $850,000 with an opponent, Ole Miss made money playing the Idaho game.
Smaller “programs,” as they are invariably called, like Idaho are known in football parlance as cupcakes. They are on the schedule to increase the odds the team will win enough games to qualify for a bowl game and to give a respite from the grueling intensity of SEC play. In 2013, the Ole Miss schedule had been ranked one of the most difficult in the nation, so it seemed fair that the team should have a bite or two of a cupcake.
Of course sometimes it just doesn’t work out. A month after the Ole Miss–Idaho game, the University of Florida, one of the great SEC programs going through a rough stretch, lost to small Georgia Southern at home in the infamous “Swamp.” This prompted the cruel and perfect headline GATORS CHOKE ON A CUPCAKE.
But against the Idaho Vandals, Ole Miss didn’t choke. About halfway through the first half, the head football writer for the Clarion Ledger, Hugh Kellenberger, tweeted, “Idaho is not a very good football team.” It was a bit of an understatement. Ole Miss led 17–0 at the end of the first quarter, but it wasn’t really the score that was so telling. It was the way they did it, like a cat playing with a mouse. They didn’t seem to be trying that hard. When Ole Miss scored twenty-one points in the third quarter to lead 45–7, we thought it was safe to leave. “I think we got this one in the bag,” Dad said. “What do you say we go back to your mother?”
In the elevator down, Dad grinned broadly. “I’m ready for Arkansas next week.” He tilted his head back slightly toward the ceiling of the elevator. “Pig Sooie!” he cried, letting go the Arkansas battle cry.
“The Hogs are tough,” I said.
“The Hogs are tough.”