My Southern Journey Read online

  Once, fishing a small lake with my brother, I hung my crankbait up on power lines that crossed the water.

  “Just reel it up to about a foot shy of the line,” Sam told me, “and flip it over.”

  I did as I was told and flipped it too hard—and into the high branches of a live oak tree.

  Sam just stared.

  “I do believe,” he said, “that’s the first time I ever seen that happen.”

  It is still up there, shining in the sun.

  The path to my redemption—or what I hope will be so—can be traced back to the fall of 2002, when I used the money from a book contract to buy my mother 40 acres of pasture and mountain land on the ridge where my grandfather, the expert fisherman Charlie Bundrum, had made whiskey 75 years before. Near the blacktop, just inside the cow pasture, is the pond, and the one fish.

  It is a beautiful place, sandwiched between two ridges of hardwoods, alive with deer and wild turkey and rumors of bears. The pond is shallow and clear on one end, where the bream form a moonscape of round beds in the spring of the year, and deep and green on the other, where the big bass hang suspended in the murk. A snapping turtle the size of a 14-inch tire lurks here, and I have my orders from my Mama to shoot it if I can, because she is afraid it will eat her ducklings. There ain’t much glory in shooting a turtle, so I hope it stays hid until one of us dies of natural causes. Her mature ducks dodge my casts, and her two miniature donkeys, just pets, come down to drink and snort. They have never seen a real donkey, and believe they are normal size.

  The place is so green it looks painted on. The live oaks dip their limbs into the water, and the grass is waist high except where Sam has used the tractor to cut a trail for my mother to walk. The path blossomed with tiny yellow flowers. “Ever’where Mama walks is flowers,” he said, and it struck me, for the thousandth time, how beautiful the language of my people can be.

  It is paradise, this country, give or take a few billion ticks and red wasps and fire ants, but the pond is all I really see anymore.

  I have fished it since the day we bought it, and, almost from that day, I have known she was here. It happened when my mother and I walked the rim of the pond, checking to see if her duck was on its nest. In the deep end, the fish hovered.

  “What is that?” Mama said.

  “Bass,” I said.

  “It ain’t,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “what is it?”

  “Sea monster,” she said, and walked to the house.

  We got our first good look at her when she was on the bed. She had laid her eggs on the gravel bottom, then floated above, watching. I teased topwater baits across the very end of her nose and trickled worms past her lower lip—being careful not to drag the bait through the bed itself—and she either ignored them or followed them for a few feet before circling back to the bed.

  I hooked her, I am sure, in the late spring.

  I never really believed in the science of fishing—I always thought there was more luck in it than most people allowed—but I always paid attention when Sam lectured me on the mechanics. When a fish hits, he said, don’t worry about popping the line in two or snatching the bait out of the fish’s mouth.

  “Break ’er jaw,” he said. Set the hook hard and quick. Not only will it hold, but it will also keep the fish from taking that second gulp that will often pull the hook deeper into her guts.

  When I felt the tug on the tip of the rod, I broke ’er jaw.

  The fish—it had to be her—broke water, well and truly caught, but as I began to reel, I felt the line go slack and my stomach go sick.

  It was her.

  It had to be her.

  I am 45 years old. I guess I must face the fact that catching one fish would not truly cure me, would not alter my legacy as the worst fisherman in my bloodline. It is too late, I suppose. I would just be the bad fisherman who got lucky, once.

  Still, as the dusk creeps over the ridgeline, I carry my rods and tackle to the edge of the pond. The day, another day, will end in disappointment.

  But sometimes it also ends in fireflies.

  NICK OF TIME

  Sports Illustrated, August 2007

  They say college football is religion in the Deep South, but it’s not. Only religion is religion. Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused. But if football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And now has come a great revival.

  The stadium strained with expectation. The people who could not find a seat stood on the ramps or squatted in the aisles, as if it were Auburn down there, or Tennessee, and when the crowd roared, the sound really did roll like thunder across the sky. A few blocks away 73-year-old Ken Fowler climbed to his second-story terrace so he could hear it better and stood in the sunlight as that lovely roar fell all around him. He believes in the goodness and rightness of the Crimson Tide the way people who handle snakes believe in the power of God, but in his long lifetime of unconditional love, of Rose Bowl trains, Bobby Marlow up the middle and the Goal Line Stand, he never heard anything like this. His Alabama was playing before the largest football crowd in state history, and playing only itself. “We had 92,000,” he said, “for a scrimmage.” It felt good. It felt like it used to feel.

  They came from Sand Mountain, the Wiregrass, the Black Belt, the Gulf Coast, and just wide places in the road. They came in motor homes, private jets, $30,000 pickup trucks, $400 cars, and dime-store flip-flops to see Nick Saban walk the sideline of Bryant-Denny Stadium in April.

  They have welcomed him as Caesar, as pharaoh, and paid him enough money to burn a wet dog. Now he will take them forward by taking them back to the glory of their past—the 21 Southeastern Conference championships, the 12 national championships, the Team of the 20th Century (as The Wall Street Journal called the Crimson Tide in 2000).

  Saban has not promised them so much—“I don’t believe in predictions,” he says—but they believe. It may take two years, three, more, to be in the discussion again when people talk about the best teams in college football. But they know he will take them home.

  “I’ve been on this roller coaster for a long time,” says Fowler, a self-made businessman who could live a lot of places but settled on a house so close to the campus that he can all but see his reflection in the go-go boots of the Crimsonettes as they strut down University Boulevard before the homecoming game. “In the ’50s, under coach J.B. (Ears) Whitworth, we went 14 games without a win, and I watched grown men cry. People said then there would never be another coach here as good as Wallace Wade [who won national championships in 1925, ’26 and ’30] or Frank Thomas [1934, ’41]. They said it was over.

  “Then in ’58 we hired a coach who could do the things we needed to put us in a position to win SEC championships again and national championships again. People used to stare at him as he stood on the sideline, too, like he was about to turn a stick into a snake.”

  His name was Paul Bryant, and he was popular here. They named an animal after him.

  How people loved that man. But it is time, past time, to love again.

  “There is never anything wrong with remembering the past, but you can’t live in it,” says Mal Moore, the Alabama athletic director who was all but dragged through saw briars when it appeared that Saban and other marquee names—most notably West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez—were passing Alabama by. Then on Jan. 3 he brought Saban home with him on the school jet from Miami, where Saban had been coaching the Dolphins. People who had been calling for Moore’s resignation praised his leadership.

  There is no nice way to say it: The Alabama faithful are done with waiting, with mediocrity, and with disappointment. They are sick of Auburn, which has beaten them five years in a row; bone weary of NCAA investigations and probations reaching back to 1993; and finished with coaches who cannot gut out the expectations here, or who might have done well, someday,
with more time or a railroad car full of luck.

  “We wanted a man who had won a championship, and Nick Saban is that and more,” says Moore. “Saban brings a sense of command, a sense of toughness and discipline.”

  Saban is no rainmaker, no snake oil salesman. The way to his mountaintop is hard and paved with woe. “We can be part of something, build something all these people can be proud of and excited about again,” says the 55-year-old coach, who can look intense even when he is not mad and probably looks that way holding a kitten. “I got on our guys in a team meeting. I said, ‘I’m tired of hearing all this talk about a national championship when you guys don’t know how to get in out of the rain, don’t know what to do in the classroom.’ It’s like you’ve got little kids in the backseat, saying, ‘Are we there yet?’

  “The journey itself is important, not just the destination. You have to follow direction. Discipline, off-season recruiting, conditioning, practice, more recruiting, player development, classroom development. I’m not interested in what should be, could be, was. I’m interested in what is, what we control. And when we lose—and we will, one game, two, or more—we have to have a trust that what we are doing will work, trust and belief in who we are. And you get where you’re going, one mile marker at a time.”

  People here believe Saban is tough and smart and do not care that he can seem impatient, if not angry, when dealing with the media or hangers-on or just about anybody else, as if he has more important things to do. Like coaching football. In a state where some old men still test their truck’s electrical system by grabbing hold of a hot coil wire, football coaches are not supposed to be in touch with their inner child. Saban won a national championship at LSU in 2003, out of a conference where every game can feel like a knife fight in a ditch. No one cares how he did in charm school.

  One LSU fan told Alabama fan Sammy Maze that Saban could be, well, a little difficult. “You know he’s a son of a bitch?” the LSU fan said.

  “Well,” Maze said, “he’s our son of a bitch now.”

  Never assume that Alabamans give a damn what others think. “People can write and say that this exemplifies a fanaticism that needs to be curbed,” says Fowler, who would have gone to the Tide’s intrasquad scrimmage himself if it had not been broadcast live on television. “All Alabama proved, with 92,000 people at a practice, is that nobody loves football better. I don’t see how that somehow makes us subhuman. I mean, in some countries they kill soccer players, don’t they?”

  Saban has yet to coach a down for the Crimson Tide, but people are already naming their children for him. Tim and Hannah Witt of Hartselle, Ala., named their baby boy, born March 20, Saban Hardin Witt. They already had a son named Tyde. “At first I thought my husband was crazy,” says Hannah, “but it grew on me.”

  In these parts you do not name a child for a coach you expect to go 8-5. The Witts had talked at first about naming their second son Bear.

  Hank Williams once said he could throw his cowboy hat onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry after he finished Lovesick Blues and it would get at least one curtain call. It has been that way for decades in Tuscaloosa, except the hat is houndstooth.

  Will Nevin, a first-year law student, places an offering the night before every game at the feet of Bryant’s statue in front of the football stadium. He and his friends leave a bag of Golden Flake potato chips and an old-fashioned glass bottle of Coca-Cola, the sponsors of Bryant’s old TV show. Nevin, 21, never saw the show, never saw Bryant on the sideline. But the image of the Bear is alive in his mind’s eye. He just knows how it must have been, like hearing someone tell you how sweet an old Mustang used to run, before it was put up on blocks in the barn and covered with a tarp. The most you can do is run your hand over the paint and imagine.

  It seems like a dream now: From 1958 through 1982 there were six national championships, 13 SEC titles, a 232-46-9 overall record, a 19-6 mark against Auburn, and a stable of immortals that included Billy Neighbors, Lee Roy Jordan, Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, John Hannah, Ozzie Newsome, many others. But the Bryant magic was about more than numbers, more than X’s and O’s and big ol’ boys who would have blocked a pulpwood truck if he’d asked them to. It was about how he could draw every eye in the stadium to him as he leaned against that goalpost during warmups, a growling, mumbling golem glued together out of legend, gristle, and a little bit of mean. It was almost cheating, having him on the sideline, like filling your trunk full of cement blocks before a demolition derby.

  After a quarter century of dominance Bryant retired after the 1982 season with a 21-15 win over Illinois at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, in the freezing cold. Less than a month later he was dead, as if his life was hard-wired to the game. One paper sent reporters to interview the grave digger, and on Bryant’s burial day people stood on the overpasses and the roadside, hands over their hearts, to watch a hearse take away one of the best parts of their history.

  At any flea market in Dixie, you can still find Bryant commemorative plates. At every roadside bar, church basement rec room, or courthouse café, you can hear this joke:

  Guy gets into heaven. Sees an old man in a houndstooth hat walking on water.

  “Hey,” he asks Saint Peter, “is that Bear Bryant?”

  “Naw,” Pete says, “that’s God. He just thinks he’s Bear Bryant.”

  Nevin will always love the idea of Bear and always honor his legend, but it is clear that praying to a memory, however fine, has not worked amid so many missing elements. “We want something to celebrate,” says Nevin. “By God, it’s our right.”

  In one of the most storied, demanding, and impatient programs in college football, the comparison with Bryant has smothered the coaches who’ve come after him. With the exception of his protégé, Gene Stallings, who delivered a national championship in ’92, schooling trash-talking Miami 34-13 in the Sugar Bowl, men have perished in the shadow of Bear. It is his taped voice, God-like, that still booms across Bryant-Denny Stadium at the start of every home game: “I ain’t never been nothin’ but a winner.”

  But Saban totes his own national championship prestige into Tuscaloosa—the first Bryant successor to do so—and a résumé that Alabama was willing to spend a reported $32 million over eight years to procure. “I don’t think Saban’s afraid of the past,” says Kirk McNair, founder and editor of ’Bama magazine, who has covered Crimson Tide football across five decades. “I don’t think he cares.”

  Saban is 91-42-1 as a college coach, in stops at Toledo, Michigan State, and LSU—all rebuilding jobs. LSU had had only three winning seasons in 11 years when he took over in November 1999. Four years later he coached the Tigers to the pinnacle of college football. His 48 wins from 2000 through ’04 ranked third among major college coaches over that span. The Tigers were SEC champs in ’01 and again in ’03, when they went on to beat Oklahoma 21-14 to win the BCS national title. Saban builds his teams methodically, on a backbone of conditioning, rigid discipline, and a swarming, ball-stealing defense.

  He leads like a tough-minded CEO. Listening to him, you get the feeling you would not want him to decide your fate if your job production was down and your equipment obsolete. The lore of football, the poetry of it, does not complicate his language. But he knows that before the kickoff of Alabama’s season opener with Western Carolina on Sept. 1, thousands of Crimson Tide fans, especially the ones who remember, will look to the goalpost and miss the coach who led them so grandly for so long. It should be that way.

  “[Bryant] accomplished as much as anybody ever has,” says Saban. “He is someone you respect, admire, and appreciate. He established the standard of excellence, him and the players who gave their blood, sweat, and tears.

  “That, in itself, has no effect on the future,” says Saban, who knows that no ghost, or alumnus, has ever thrown a halfback for a loss. “We have to do the work now.”

  Saban will not go into great detail about his team, any more than he will discuss his opponents. There is no profit in it. But it is
clear that 2007 is a true rebuilding year, with a typically tough SEC schedule. Alabama goes against Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Georgia, and Ole Miss in the first half of its SEC schedule, then Tennessee, LSU, Mississippi State, and Auburn. A Sept. 29 game against Florida State in Jacksonville is not exactly a nonconference breather.

  It may be a team unfamiliar to fans used to seeing the Tide carried by a talented defense. Alabama lost too many big, fast, scary people. “If you can’t stop the run in the SEC, you’re in trouble,” says Mitch Dobbs, the assistant editor of ’Bama magazine, and a lot of the middle is just gone.

  But instead of an offense that was too often effective only between the 20s, Alabama may show off a little with junior quarterback John Parker Wilson and a corps of game-breaking receivers. The offensive line, which bore criticism—well, let’s face it, scorn—is expected to be less porous. And a redshirt freshman named Terry Grant, a former Mr. Football from Mississippi, runs like something bad is after him.

  Concerns that Alabama’s defense would be leaner this year materialized in summer practices, but the offense moved the ball smoothly in scrimmages on days when the temperature reached 106°F and 107°F. No matter how hot it got, however, Alabama players did not complain. Saban and his coaches would not allow their players to even use the word hot or heat in conversation.

  Alabama’s athletes could have made Saban’s summer a little cooler if they had behaved better off the field. Simeon Castille, an all-SEC cornerback, was arrested early last Sunday in an entertainment district near campus and charged with disorderly conduct. The police were not talking about precisely what Castille had done, and Saban indicated that he will handle the matter internally. Three other players—defensive linemen Brandon Deaderick and Brandon Fanney and running back Roy Upchurch, all reserves—were charged after a disturbance in July.