In the beginning, I almost never wrote about killing, about misery. I wrote about violence, yes, about huge men trying to pound each other into mush and scattered teeth. What I wrote was football, which was short of killing, usually, even in the South. People have said it is what we do now instead of dueling. That is untrue. It is not so refined a violence as that. It is what we do instead of rioting.
I miss it, when I am away. Before the hot, wet air even begins to give way to the odd cool breeze, before the oaks and maples have begun to turn even the slightest bit red and gold, football banishes summer and announces, with crashing cymbals and an earth-quaking “Roll Tide,” that it is now, officially, fall.
In that hurried season, on rectangles of ragged grass and wild onions and on the unnatural welcome mat of Astroturf, I have seen some things.
In Birmingham, I saw Charles White run for what seemed like a thousand yards against the Crimson Tide, helping USC beat Alabama like an ugly redheaded stepchild on a lovely fall Saturday in 1978. ABC telegraphed our shame to the entire nation, and grown men and women cried. To this day, I blame Charlie White for edging Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant a little closer to the grave.
In Athens, I watched Herschel Walker hammer the Auburn defense between the historic hedges, and then soar like some great red bird on third-and-short, the big men down below reaching for him like fat children leaping for a fist full of Sugar Daddies. Georgia fans, obnoxious in the first place, were unbearable for a long, long time because of Herschel.
In Auburn, the Loveliest Village on the Plain, I watched Bo Jackson run over pretty much everybody. He didn’t do Bear much good either, I suspect.
But the greatest running back I ever saw was Boyce Callahan, number 33, listed at 160 pounds in the program at Jacksonville State University. He may have gone 145, with a pound of butterbeans in each pocket. He ran like a worm and got the mortal hell beat out of him almost every game, but he made Little All-American. My uncle John would take me to the home games once or twice a year, to see him put on a show. He would sweep the corner and get murdered. He would sweep the other corner and someone would knock his helmet off his head. Then they would run him up the middle and he would be stopped dead, and you would think it was time to call the ambulance. Then, all of a sudden you would see a single red jersey squirt out of the pile, free and clear. He would cock his head back, and everyone in the crowd would shout “It’s Boyce!” and he was gone. He couldn’t keep his socks pulled up and he had the scraggliest set of sideburns I have ever seen outside of prison, but he was a runnin’ son of a gun. We would even go to see him in the rain. People in front of us would raise their umbrellas and blot out the field, and Uncle John would grumble disgustedly that “we would see some football, if wasn’t for all these doggone parasols.”
My whole life I have wanted to believe that what I wrote about was important. I was not smart enough, as I drove from game to game in my native South, to recognize that I was doing precisely that. I sat in a thousand press boxes, ate a million bad hot dogs. On Fridays, it was high school football, under the lights. A poor boy was just as good as a rich one out there, as long as he could knock the tailback’s front teeth out, and in the stands deacons shared space with men with beer on their breath. Men came straight from work in shirts that had their first name over the breast pocket. Women and men held their breath on every play, waiting for their sons to get up when bodies collided with a sound like banging two-by-fours.
I watched it all, night after night, on fields named for town doctors and dead coaches and benefactors, where parking cost a dollar and benefited the March of Dimes. “Press,” I told the ol’ boys at the ticket gate, and they let me in as if I had intoned, “Opennnnn Sesssaaaaammmmeeee.” I watched it all from the press box, mostly, but that did not mean I had a seat. The press box was really reserved for the announcer, always a homer, and the announcer’s buddy, and the buddy’s feeble uncle, and the band director, whom they all secretly regarded as a sissy, and the band director’s buddy, who was, the ol’ boys believed, most definitely so. Either way, it was hard to find any room for the press in the press box. At Ranburne, I sat on a plastic bucket. At Vincent, I sat on a two-by-four. I shivered in warped plywood boxes and plugged my ears as fat boys with tubas wedged around the middle labored through a rendition of, well, something. I think it might have been “Saturday in the Park.” I quoted coaches whose only comments were, week after week, “We gave 110 percent,” and I never thought to ask how that was possible. I kept terrible statistics, causing coaches the next morning to shake their heads and go, “125 yards rushing, my ass.” In the rush of deadline I misspelled the names of linemen who recovered fumbles, boys who would never, ever get their name in the paper again, unless they got married or died.
On Saturdays, after a few hours sleep, it was college game day. I flew a million miles in single-engine planes with pilots who learned to soar in Vietnam but were prone to doze at the controls in the boredom of a Mississippi sky. I got food poisoning from a box lunch in Starkville, got run over on the sideline on an end-around in Tuscaloosa. I stood like a jackass and waited for some nineteen-year-old to speak a truth that I could include in my story, which would have been unbearable if I had been much older than nineteen myself. I was deafened by that damn cannon they shot off after every touchdown in Mississippi, and strained to hear Bryant mumble out of his post-game press conferences to a small army of reporters who would cut their wrists before they would ever write one negative word about that old man or the institution he represented. We worked eighteen-hour days, got paid twenty-one cents a mile to drive our cars to Martin, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and stayed in hotels where you found palmetto bugs belly-up in the bathtub and Cheetos on the bedspread.
God, I would love to do it all over again.
Football is a cliché, down here. I do not believe that sport is the very essence of Southern life—I know God and work and family precede football, except perhaps on Alabama-Auburn game day—but what it really is, is the grandest of escapes from that life. For me, that escape took on a whole other meaning.
I would never have been a writer if not for it. I never, ever would have gotten into a journalism school, what with me having a C average and all. I am sure I would never have gotten a job. Some newspapers see sports as the toy factory, not serious journalism, so it can be trusted to those who did not go to Harvard, or even to the dentist regularly. All I know is, it was my way in, and looking back I realize that I never realized how lucky and blessed I was.
I wrote of heroes. The most popular man in Alabama most of my young life was not George Wallace but Bear Bryant (or, if you lived in the flatland to the south, Shug Jordan of Auburn). Even now, if you go to a bar or restaurant in Birmingham, you will eventually hear the water joke:
Saint Peter welcomes a man into heaven. The new arrival spots an old man in a houndstooth hat walking on water. “Is that Bear Bryant?” he reverently asks.
“No, that’s God,” Saint Peter says. “He only thinks He’s Bear Bryant.”
He had his own television show, sponsored by Coke and Golden Flake potato chips. You knew that because at the beginning of every show he opened up a bag of potato chips and set an open bottle of Coke on the table in front of him. He would mumble about how proud he was of this boy or that boy and what fine parents his momma and daddy were down there in Opp or Enterprise or Sylacauga as the game highlight film played across the screen. Then, in mid-mumble, one of his linebackers would separate some ball carrier from his spine and Bryant would shout out “Bingo!” like someone had jabbed him with a fork.
He was one of our legacies that we could be proud of, in a state hurting for them. What he died, my newspaper sent me to interview the man who dug his grave.
Until I was twenty-three, at progressively larger papers that never reached more than 30,000 in circulation, I wrote of sports. I dropped out of college because I had accomplished what I wanted from it—a coat-and-tie job—and lent my meager talents to the Talladega Daily Home and then the Anniston Star. They did not care that I did not have a college degree. I could spell, sort of. I worked cheap. I needed the work and loved the work too much to ask for overtime.
At nineteen, working for the Talladega Daily Home, I went on a road-trip to Atlanta to cover a stock car race with the immortal Tommy Hornsby, who was the sports editor and a drummer in a country rock band. He took me to my first topless bar. The dancer—there were only two and one was drunk—had long, pink scars on her wrists, and her breath smelled like Marlboros. I learned a lot from Tommy.
At twenty, I was working full-time for the best small newspaper in Alabama and one of the best in the country, the Anniston Star. The sports editor was a talented writer named Wayne Hester, who told me once that I could write some, and let me. I came to work the first day in a white pair of pants, a white shirt and a white slip-on tie. I looked like I was selling ice cream.
I wrote about everything from high school wrestling to country club golf, but what I loved was racing. Our newspaper office was a twenty-minute drive from Talladega International Motor Speedway, the world’s fastest enclosed speedway, but the spirit of the sport then was strictly backwoods. Most of the drivers had learned it running likker in the mountains of the Carolinas, or had learned it from people who did. I wrote about Fireball Roberts, Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Junior Johnson. Even the names were grand. Coo Coo Marlin. Lake Speed. And, of course, my all-time favorite, Jimmy “Smut” Means, the one who was prone to hit the wall at Talladega, and live.
They ran bumper to bumper and door to door at two hundred miles an hour, and now and then one of them would die. Usually, but not always, it would be some no-name driver in second-rate equipment who just could not handle the speed, that fantastic speed. He would wobble a little on the turns that were banked so steep it was hard to even walk up them, and spin out, and meet Jesus on the wall, or on the bumper of a car that hit him broadside, what they called “gettin’ T-boned.”
They would be, unless they were famous, only a footnote in the story, because the race was what was important, and the winning of it. We always wrote them the same way, those stories. In the third or fourth paragraph would be: “The race was overshadowed by the death of (insert name here).” I didn’t know any better. I should have done better. I should have written, in the first paragraph: “A man died here today, and a race was run.”
But Lord, it was thrilling. The sound alone would rock you, like a billion angry hornets in a giant bucket, and every time the cars flashed around the track, death was just a twitch away.
I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the trembling membrane in between. I have never been a ghoul. I have been so sickened by killing and dying that sleep was just one more dream in bed at 4 A.M. But even then, I was drawn to those stories. There was something about the rich darkness of it, of that struggle by people at risk, people in trouble, that made all other stories seem trivial. They were the most important stories in the newspaper. I wanted to write them, only them.
The managing editor of the Anniston Star let me move to the state desk when I was still in my early twenties, into a newsroom dominated by Harvard, Yale, Columbia and assorted other pointy heads who came South for the invaluable experience they would glean from writing about people that some of them held largely in contempt. The Star drew them down here because of its reputation as a great place to learn. The paper’s owner and editor, H. Brandt Ayers, got some good stories out of them before they moved on, because while some of them treated the South as if they were on safari, some of them did great work. They caught people doing bad things. When some grinning crook on the county commission tried to abuse his power and line his pockets, they wrote about it. They did about two years on their tour of duty in the heart of darkness, living in the pool houses and basement apartments of the well-off people on the East Side, and then moved on to the bigger but not always better newspapers. People like me, without any academic credentials on us, would stay behind. It was the system, or at least it always had been, and I did not even try not to be bitter. I had long talks with the sage senior editor, Cody Hall, who made it plain that I should be proud of who I was. “Life is too short to dance with an ugly woman,” and my ugly woman was my own envy.
But the fact is, on hindsight, the Yankees were mostly okay. I ate barbecue and coconut pie with them, and beneath their Yankeeness, I found genuine concern for people who were poorer and weaker. The Star’s founder, Colonel Ayers, had believed it was a newspaper’s responsibility to be an attorney for the least influential, the weakest, of its readership, and there were many, many people who passed through the doors of that place who read those words on the editorial page and took them to heart. I worked for the state editor, a young man named Randy Henderson who had the patience not to fire me, a smart and decent man with ethics you couldn’t dent with a wrecking ball. But mostly, like I said, he was patient. It is a great virtue, where I am concerned.
The first story I wrote as a news reporter, I wrote about deer hunters who were killing themselves in the woods by accident, at a record rate. I described a man’s attempt to drag his friend out of the woods, bleeding to death, after he shot him. It was hard, harder than anything I had ever done. The managing editor, Chris Waddle, told me it was a fine newspaper story, and I had my first taste of that odd mixed emotion, of pride in the work, of seeing your story at the top of the page, and of that terrible sadness that the words contained.
Because I was a working reporter, I did a lot of other, less dramatic stories. I covered the county commission in Cleburne County, and city council meetings at Anniston, where my favorite politician of all time, Pink Junior Wood, a barber by trade, sat on the dais. It was one of the grand things, of being a newspaperman in the South: just being able to write at least once a week the words “Pink Junior Wood.” I wrote about speed trap towns and cockfighting rings and accidents on the lonely, twisting roads. I interviewed the mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmar, who was so conservative that he compelled black people to vote in droves for George Wallace.
I continued to swap notions and stories and make friends with the Yankee reporters, and made fun of them even as they made fun of me. The experience of working shoulder to shoulder with so many educated and privileged young people was good for me, I am sure, but the chip I had carried on my shoulder for a lifetime grew in those years to about the size of a concrete block. To me, they had everything, and I am sure I resented it, foolishly, childishly. I could only write, a little bit.
After the Birmingham News hired Randy Henderson away, I worked for a metro editor who didn’t think a lot of me. I am sure he had his reasons. But one meeting still sears me whenever I think about it. The managing editor had offered me the city reporter’s job, about the best job on staff, because he thought I was good and because he did not care that I had never been to Princeton. The metro editor had another reporter in mind, a talented young woman who was better at straight news than me. The metro editor took me for a drink after work, and told me, to my face, that I was not sophisticated enough to be the city reporter. I should have cussed him, but instead I just sat there and let it pass, hating myself for it. The next morning I walked into the managing editor’s office and told him that, yes, I would like to be the city reporter, thank you very much.
The fact is that, in some ways, the metro editor was probably right. I had no business being a reporter. I had six months of college and four years sitting in press boxes trying to get the quarterback’s name right. All I knew how to do was tell stories on paper, and didn’t have even one dollop of what one respected editor, Basil Penny, called “jelly.” Basil explained “jelly” as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension. Me and him, we were just plain biscuit.
But the main reason I took the other editor’s insult was because I had no choice. I needed the job. By then I had a house payment, responsibilities. I had a $250 electric bill.
I had, by then, a wife.