Collegiate Sports

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Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones? In Alabama, a Certain Football Game Comes First
By MARC TRACYNOV. 22, 2017

Downtown Auburn is reflected in a storefront. No. 6 Auburn (9-2) hosts No. 1 Alabama (11-0) on Saturday in the Iron Bowl. The winner could play for the national championship. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

AUBURN, Ala. — Years before she was an award-winning journalist covering race and the South, Diane McWhorter was a student at Wellesley College, outside Boston. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, whenever she had the chance, she would watch nationally televised Alabama football games with friends. “I had to explain what a first down was,” she said.

These friends would cheer against the Crimson Tide, McWhorter said, because Alabama was “such an awful state,” a place only a few years removed from Jim Crow that had repeatedly elected the segregationist George Wallace as its governor.

But McWhorter, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about the civil rights movement in her hometown of Birmingham, could not help herself. She rooted for the Tide.

“It was my redneck joy,” she said. “I loved the football team.”

The crosshatching of political and social developments against college football dominance has been a feature of Alabama life for nearly a century. The Crimson Tide’s emergence onto the national scene in the 1920s coincided with the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the state. In the 1960s, football provided Alabamians a welcome point of pride during the tumult of the civil rights era.

Today is no different. This week, the state is bearing down for Saturday’s Iron Bowl here between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers, one of the most consequential meetings in the history of that annual rivalry game. The winner will play for the Southeastern Conference title and a spot in the College Football Playoff.

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Coach Bear Bryant was carried from the field after Alabama defeated Auburn in the 1973 Iron Bowl. Credit Associated Press

Yet, at the same time, Alabama also has been split by a contentious U.S. Senate campaign that has provoked outcry and judgment from far beyond the state line.

The Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, who was twice removed from the state Supreme Court, has been accused of seeking relationships with teenage girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. Moore has angrily denied the accusations, but in a state where a former legislative leader is serving a prison term for corruption and the former governor resigned earlier this year in connection with a sex scandal, the Senate campaign once again threatens to shape outsiders’ views of Alabama in ways that make its residents cringe.

“We’ve got a black eye, statewide and nationally,” said Trey Johnston, the co-owner of J&M Bookstore, an apparel store not far from Jordan-Hare Stadium, where Saturday’s game will be played. “The governor’s just resigned. A guy taken out of office is running for Senate.”

There will be a time to talk about all of that, Johnston said with a smile. Just not until after next weekend’s SEC championship game.

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Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times
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Pins and other items for sale in downtown Auburn, top. Houndstooth hats, popularized by University of Alabama coach Bear Bryant, for sale in Tuscaloosa. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
The current swirl of national scorn and college football prominence is just the latest example of what a song by the rock group Drive-By Truckers memorably called “the duality of the whole Southern Thing.” The song, “The Three Great Alabama Icons,” describes a place that simultaneously celebrates Wallace; the Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant, who wasn’t from the state but called it “Sweet Home”; and the legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant.

“We ranked 49th in almost everything,” said Patterson Hood, the Florence native who wrote the song. “Now they’re working hard — Roy Moore — where we can’t even talk about Mississippi anymore.”

“I think people grow up in a place like that and think everyone looks down on us,” he added. “Who do we have to look up to? Oh, we’ve got football.”

Those not so critical of Alabama’s political culture nonetheless describe the same yin and yang, between how most of the country perceives the state and where it ranks when it comes to college football.

“Even though there is still some stereotyping going on by ignorant people that really don’t know people in Alabama or don’t have the chance to sit down and get to know us, I think things have changed for so much the better,” said Phyllis Chapple-Perkins, a rabid Crimson Tide fan best known for calling in to Paul Finebaum’s daily sports-talk show as “Phyllis from Mulga.”

“And I think the football games are so much more interesting and powerful,” she added.

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An Auburn University cheerleader during a game earlier this month. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times
Chapple-Perkins is indisputably right about that last part. While the Tide claim more national championships than any other major program and Auburn has its own illustrious history, only in the past decade have both occupied the sport’s heights at the same time. In the past eight seasons, the winner of the Iron Bowl has won the SEC championship seven times, and the national title five; every year, the game’s victor has qualified for the national postseason.

The winner of Saturday’s game between No. 1 Alabama (11-0) and No. 6 Auburn (9-2) will play No. 7 Georgia (10-1), whom Auburn walloped here earlier this month, in the SEC championship game on Dec. 2.

It would be easy to see the contrast between the state’s disrespected stature in several areas and its impressive one in football as quirkily arbitrary; writing a place off as a “land of contradictions” is the oldest trick in the correspondent’s book. But this paradox is the product of a specific history.

It began with the 1926 Rose Bowl, which was the culmination of decades of failed Southern attempts to compete in the quintessentially Northern elite pastime of football. In the first Rose Bowl to feature a Southern team, Alabama upset Washington, 20-19.

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Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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A Waffle House restaurant decorated with the University of Alabama rallying cry “Roll Tide,” top. The student section in Tuscaloosa was filled with cigar smoke and pom pons at a game last month. Credit Brynn Anderson/Associated Press
It was the same year, noted Wayne Flynt, an emeritus history professor at Auburn, that candidates backed by the Ku Klux Klan won several statewide elections. By the next Rose Bowl, in which Alabama was to play Stanford, the governor invoked the Confederacy in urging Tide players to “fight like hell as did your sires in bygone days.”

“Alabama had borne the brunt of jokes by H.L. Mencken,” Flynt said, referring to the caustic writer who ridiculed Southerners. “Obviously the South got sick of this, and kicking Yankee butt got to be a habit.”

A few decades later, in 1958, Bryant became the coach at his alma mater, and the quarter-century that followed witnessed not only the reign of Wallace, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the end of formal desegregation, but also six Tide national championships.

“With Bryant, for the first time Alabama had a legacy of winning — and winning on hardscrabble Southern-agrarian terms,” McWhorter wrote in a New York Times essay when Bryant retired in 1982.

She added, “For hapless Alabamians, Bryant’s winners were proof of the rewards of hard work and determination.”

John Killian, a conservative pastor in Fayette County, echoed this point.

“We’ve never been the insiders,” he said. “George Wallace used to go up and down the state saying, ‘We’re just as cultured and refined as anyone else in this country.’”

Referring to college football, he added, “It’s an expression of Alabama pride when the state does well.”

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Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times
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Pia Kulakowski, an Auburn student, walked with Spirit, a mascot, at Jordan-Hare Stadium during a game this month, top. Ron Sanford and his dog, Tiger Jake, a fixture on game days in Auburn. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times
This dynamic persists to the present day, said Jared Hunter, an Alabama student from Wetumpka who is only the third black person to serve as president of the University of Alabama Student Government Association.

“It seems like the only thing coming from Alabama is corruption or negativity; that is something I think people do internalize,” Hunter said. “And so it is nice when your football team is as dominant as we are, and you have such a great head coach, and you can look to that as being what our reality is, rather than also facing our politics and our budget and things like that.”

Or, for that matter, facing Roy Moore. Although Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, has purchased commercial time during Saturday’s television broadcast, many Alabamians will look at Saturday’s game as a respite from a divisive campaign.

“It gives me something to think about other than this Roy Moore situation, because personally I find it embarrassing,” said David Alsobrook, who hails from Eufaula and is the former director of the presidential libraries for George Bush and Bill Clinton.

This is true, added the historian Leah Atkins, across all demographics. Atkins, who has lived in Alabama nearly all her life and who married an Auburn football player, noted that when she led the Alabama Historical Association, she never scheduled meetings on fall Saturdays.

Football, she said, “serves as a guideline for all social and political and educational things across the state.”

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Auburn fans celebrate victories by throwing toilet paper into the trees at Toomer’s Corner on campus. Credit Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times
Another of the state’s intellectual treasures who was fanatical about football was Harper Lee. Her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” introduced millions of Americans to what might be called the duality of the whole Alabama Thing.

Lee was from Monroeville, attended Alabama and, according to Flynt, a close friend, remained devoted to its football team throughout her life. “The only person Harper Lee idolized was Bear Bryant,” he said.

Flynt remembered visiting Lee in late 2013, a week after the dramatic “Kick-Six,” in which Auburn returned a short field goal to beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

Flynt said that in spite of that devastating defeat, “She was wearing a ‘Roll Tide’ sweatshirt.”

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