College Football, Star Wars and Baby Behemoths
Books, Burnside Sells Out, Featured, Sports — By Jordan Green on August 6, 2010 at 8:00 am
One of the many things Chad and I agree on.
Last September, while my wife was almost 9 months pregnant, I flew to Birmingham to spend a weekend with the Gibbs. Chad and I are uncannily similar. We are both uproariously funny and we are both brilliant writers. We both love college football and we both think Boba Fett is badass. Despite our status as born and bred American Protestants, our favorite international soccer team is Celtic F.C. What’s particularly surprising, though, is both of us somehow alchemized our bumbling charm and sluggish lack of ambition into marriages with beautiful, red-haired pediatricians. Chad’s wife, Tricia, just finished her final year of residency in Birmingham while my wife’s last year just started in Phoenix.
Over the years, Chad and I had become good internet friends, but we’d never met. It was nice to greet him face to face, to discover he wasn’t considerably taller than me (unlike Aaron Donley), and to stand awkwardly waiting for luggage. Fortunately, the ice was broken during the 45 minutes odyssey of finding where Chad had parked his car.
That night, Tricia joined us for dinner at Dreamland BBQ, which was delectable as most all BBQ places are.
“You’ve gotta try some of this. It’ll change your life,” he said, ordering me a glass of sweet tea. I didn’t tell him that, with a grandma from North Carolina, I was well acquainted with that particular form of liquid crack because, hey, free sweet tea!
Most of my knowledge of Alabama is culled from Drive-By Trucker songs and Forrest Gump, so I expected to see a heavy dose of moonshine runners, dullards with crewcuts, and tornadoes. While there were, at least, tornadoes, I found Birmingham to be a charming and cosmopolitan town. For a region where Shocktop is considered a fancy microbrew, I was pleased to discover J. Clyde, which ranks right up there with Falling Rock and the Horse Brass as one of the best pubs I’ve ever been to. If I lived in Birmingham, I would live across the street, and I would go there every day, and I would probably die of liver failure.
After dinner, the Gibbs took me home and Chad popped in a DVD featuring clips of great Auburn football games.
“This will get you fired up,” he pointed at the screen. “We watch it every Friday night.”
As Chad replayed a particularly vital field goal in slow-motion, I began to realize SEC football was different. I consider myself a diehard fan of the Oregon Ducks, despite the fact I didn’t actually attend that school. I get email notifications for every recruit signing. I scan Ducks Sports News and Ted Miller’s PAC-10 Blog on ESPN on a daily basis. The only excuse for missing gamedays with my friends is weddings, and even those are met with grumbling resentment. I don’t attend many games at Autzen Stadium, but I’ve tailgated there with an old Army buddy who is the most hardcore fan I know…the kind that suffers crippling depression after a disappointing loss, or at the end of the season.
Jordan and Chad survive Hurricane Noel
As far as I could tell, everyone I met at that Auburn game was at least at that level. The quality of SEC football, as a whole, is better than the PAC-10. I can admit that. But I don’t think it’s that much better. The fandom, though…sheesh. It’s like all that pent up state pride, damaged from losing the Civil War, was funneled directly into pigskin. It’s something to see. We all have nationalistic tendencies — the bent toward curling inward and rejecting what is not us — and there are more dangerous manifestations of those tendencies than cheering for a sports team every Saturday. I was rooting for Auburn, but a tiny part of me wanted to see what 87,000 crushed dreams looked like. Every time West Virginia’s Barry Sanders-clone halfback, Noel Devine, ran out to the edges, you could feel that crowd seeth, “Git ‘im…git ‘im…” I can’t imagine what that level of vitriol would’ve felt like paired with a firehoses and dogs in the 1960s.
But the people I met and ate with at Auburn that day were wonderful hosts, with trailers outfitted with John Henry-sized HD televisions and pit smokers bleeding oak into the wet, hot air.
I cannot say the same for West Virginia fans, who’s genetic abnormalities and drunken debauchery rivaled the French National soccer team’s ability to reaffirm stereotypes.
“Here’s what scary,” Chad whispered as we passed a collection of Deliverance extras milling around a 24 pack of Natty Ice in the middle of the street. “Those are the fans who have enough money to travel.”
I could go on about that weekend, but the more memorable parts should be left to Chad’s book, God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC. Don’t worry…there’s more to it than Chad and I sitting around playing cornhole.
13 Comments
I have heard Karen SZ tout this book, and was considering it. I don’t like college football much, and my memory of Alabama is a negative one, since I spent 4 months getting trained at Ft McLelland (near Anniston) by drill sergeants who weren’t particularly polite. But this piece is about to put me over the edge and make me want to buy the dang thing.
Great piece. I grew up in Lexington, KY praying for basketball season to arrive because, when I was twelve, going to Wildcat football games meant eating better hot dogs than my mom made while waiting for the Cats to lose (they’re quite a bit better now). Then I went to an ACC school and realized how lucky I was to see KY get killed by really great teams while the Demon Deacons (also quite a bit better now) died slow deaths at the hands of mostly mediocre teams. So I’m off to to buy the book. I also want to see where Chad went to church in Lexington (for his sake, I hope it’s not the one I grew up in).
You mean you were a Kentucky fan during those tiny windows when they were awful? Then you were a Wake Forest fan during the times THEY were awful? You sound cursed, Steve.
When I was at Wake, they made a rule that you had to be out of the parking lot and in the game by the end of the 1st quarter because people would tailgate the whole game otherwise.
I’m cursed with college football, but basketball season was usually redeeming. Tim Duncan was freshman when I was a senior!
great write-up jordan! looking forward to reading this piece of brilliance.
JamesW, trust Jordan on this one. I was lucky enough to work with Chad for 2 years prior to his meteoric rise to fame, but I had known of Chad for a good while longer. Chad used to write a wickedly funny blog every football Saturday about Auburn’s opponent that my husband, also an Auburn fan, sniffed out and shared with me. When Chad took the job at my office, we were crushed because he quit writing his column. I got to read some sections in the book as he was traveling through the South last year (and I’ve read parts of the baby behemoth memoir) and I really don’t think this book will disappoint!
A disclaimer first: I can’t help it. I’m biased about Chad Gibbs. He is, after all, the child I gave up for adoption following an ill-advised affair. (Don’t anybody tell Chad but his biological father is Pat Dye. I’m waiting till the right time to tell him. At this point, Chad doesn’t even know he is my biological son.)
Okay. Now that we have the disclaimer out of the way, I will give you my completely objective journalistic opinion about Chad’s debut book: God & Football.
First of all girls,this is not just a boy book.I’m fairly certain even Martha Stewart would pack this book, along with copies of her Living magazines, should she ever have to do another stint in the pokey.
I’m married to a coach. I’ve hauled kids to games for the past 3 decades — football, basketball, whiffle ball. You name if – if there’s a ball involved my husband has coached it.
I grew up 30 minutes from Auburn. I asked Jesus into my heart while kneeling on a blue rug next to a bed with an orange bedspread. (Mama was engaged to an Auburn Alum). So I get that whole football fanaticism that Chad writes so compelling about.
Anyone who has evvahh attended a high school football game will appreciate this book.
But at it’s core this is not a book about football. It’s a book about the love between a grandpa and a grandson. It’s about the legacy of faith and how we pass that to future generations. .
I have read this entire book. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It makes me proud of my people and it makes me remember in tender ways the Jesus who met me there in that trailer in the bedroom decorated Orange and Blue.
Read it. Buy your granny and grandpa a copy and tell them how much you love them. Get your mom and dad a copy, too.
You will thank me for telling you about Chad’s book. And, you’ll even forgive me my biases because this is going to be a huge bestseller and you heard it here first on the Burnside site.
That’s the inside scoop from a woman who knows.
Karen aka Chad’s other mama.
Really looking forward to this book.
Thanks Jordan for the nice piece, and all you guys for the comments. Hard to believe the book is actually sitting on my coffee table right now. I still feel like it’s some elaborate prank. I do hope you all enjoy the book, and Jordan, I’d love to put you on the NYT list once again!
Chad Gibbs is my friend. And I am proud.