September 29, 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Riding a Crimson Tide Over the South By FRANKLIN FOER Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania By Warren St. John 275 pages. Crown. $24.
If you reside in the spiritual heartland of blue-state America, the Great Northeast, then you probably regard college football as a phenomenon in the same class as Wal-Mart and evangelical Christianity. You know that it occupies a good deal of your compatriots' weekends. And you have a sense that it does more than that: it is part of life's fabric, capable of exerting an almost mystical grasp. But the reasons for the fuss are entirely befuddling.
Two characters supplied in the introduction to Warren St. John's book ''Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer'' encapsulate the slavish devotion that many Americans feel toward college football. Like almost all of the fans whom Mr. St. John describes, Freeman and Betty Reese own an R.V. that they drive across the South chasing after the University of Alabama football team. The Freeman's tricked-out R.V. cost a nice chunk of change, about $300,000, and it has roof-mounted air horns that screech the 'Bama fight song ''at roughly the decibel level of a civil defense siren.'' Such are their feelings for Alabama that the Reeses skipped their own daughter's wedding to attend a game.
To understand the mindset that leads fans to ascend to such heights of absurdity, the author spent a season among them. He bought a used Allegro brand R.V., nicknamed ''The Hawg,'' which chugs gas at 4.5 miles to the gallon, and passed his weekends tailgating in smog-filled encampments on the fringes of college towns where Alabama played the 1999 season. Gonzo journalists have applied their style to football before; the godfather of the genre, Hunter S. Thompson, even writes columns on the sport for ESPN.com. But Mr. St. John brings a singular empathy for his subjects. He is, after all, a lifelong devotee of the Crimson Tide who provides the unsettling image of himself curled up on the floor of a Columbia University dorm, sobbing himself to sleep after an Alabama loss.
Unfortunately, this empathy doesn't lead to many interesting anthropological conclusions. Mr. St. John, a reporter for The New York Times, can't pin down why fans behave like such fools or why college football games prove to be ''the most intense emotional experiences of their lives.'' In fact, he doesn't really try to posit an explanation, even though he suggests that is the reason for his book.
But, in the end, it is hard to be bothered by this omission because he writes so hilariously about such charmingly eccentric characters. In many ways, ''Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer,'' a title borrowed from the lyrics of an interminably repeated cheer, serves as the American counterpart to Nick Hornby's diary of obsessive soccer fandom, ''Fever Pitch.''
If you only looked at an outline of ''Rammer Jammer,'' it would be hard to imagine that the book could sustain any momentum. Mr. St. John introduces one crazed fan after another, with only his travelogue propelling the narrative forward. Fortunately, these oversized personalities are rendered with irresistible zeal and light up like the book like a stadium scoreboard.
Take, for example, Jerral Johnson, a bumpkin who made a small fortune selling ice. He now suffers from rich man's ennui, so he passes the time by breeding ''show chickens,'' paying a childhood friend to fish with him and traveling to Alabama games. Everything in Mr. Johnson's house celebrates the legendary coach Bear Bryant, including a bedspread and headboard.
The success of these portraits owes much to Mr. St. John's ear for dialogue -- a gift well suited to Alabama, where the citizens he encounters speak in a Southern fried slang that somehow never grows tiresome. They bust out exclamatory lines like ''oh, horse hockey!''; deride enemies as ''mullet heads''; and describe beautiful belles who ''really crank my tractor.''
Mr. St. John is blessed with such likable subjects that even his villain, a columnist and radio shock jock named Paul Finebaum, who has built a career of trashing the Crimson Tide, comes off as an adorable crank. (Typical Finebaum line: ''Welcome to the State of Alabama -- Loserville, U.S.A.'') This has made him among the most hated men in the state. Before Mr. St. John's first meeting with Mr. Finebaum, a stranger warns: ''Be careful. Stray bullets don't have names on them.'' Mr. Finebaum's appearances endow the book with much-needed tension and genuine danger.
There's only one fleeting moment in which Mr. St. John turns against his fellow fans. After a victory over Florida, they gather around a television set to watch highlights. When ESPN breaks news of an Alabama scandal -- a cop made a player's speeding ticket disappear -- the fans spew racist invective. The incident disgusts Mr. St. John, who spends a few pages feeling guilty about his association with these bigots. But he never really investigates the underlying sentiment or explains the racial history of the program.
This failure is symptomatic of his unwillingness to address some of the complexities of fandom. Teams like Alabama's don't just represent 11 men on the field; they have far larger cultural significance. Piles of interesting scraps in ''Rammer Jammer'' beg to be developed and might have enhanced our understanding of this significance. For instance, most of Mr. St. John's fans never attended the University of Alabama, let alone any university. Many are unabashed rednecks. Nevertheless, they think of themselves as genteel and taunt opponents as low-class cow-tippers. How'd that happen?
In the end, one suspects that Mr. St. John is inflicted with acute homerism, the tendency to write kindly about one's own team. But there could be another reason that he doesn't delve into any dark and heavy stuff: That might ruin the fun of his picaresque adventures. After all, a great road trip doesn't require stopping at every cultural center and historic monument. Like college football itself, a road trip can be a pleasure pure and true.
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