College Football, Family and the ties that bind us together

John guests on this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback to talk about football, family, and the transcendent nature of sports.

My Dad called me on Saturday morning. My heart stops for a second every time my phone lights up and his name comes across the screen. I always assume the worst, that something is wrong with him or someone in the family is sick or dead. He rarely calls just to chat, Something is usually wrong.

This time, though, he was calling to see if I wanted to play golf with him. My Dad picked up golfing a few years ago, and in his free time it’s what he likes to do when he gets the occasional itch to leave the house instead of slumping in front of the T.V. for Andy Griffith or M.A.S.H. reruns.

My Dad asking me to do something with him would have filled me with joy 15 years ago. During my youth, I can’t tell you how many times I longed for him to take me fishing or to shoot basketball or to even play a board game. Those occasions were rare, you see, because my Dad was far too tired to do much after he got off work from a mentally taxing job; he felt the urge to do little outside of wasting away in front of the television.

Now, when he calls to ask me to play golf with him or to go to lunch or dinner, my mind is filled with an instant annoyance. Annoyed that my plans for the day now have to change because he wants to do something.

Saturday was no different. I was in the middle of finishing the last episode of season three of True Detective, and the rest of my day revolved around sitting in my favorite chair, alternating between wasting away in front of the television to watch the second round of the NCAA Tournament and diving deeper into a new book I got for my birthday. I had not plans to leave the house, and no real cause to outside of maybe grabbing some takeout food for lunch or dinner.

The annoyance running through my head in those moments makes me feel incredibly guilty because I know there are so many sons who wish they could still get that phone call from their own fathers who are now gone. It’s that thought that always makes me reluctantly accept his offers, the extended branch just close enough for me to still grab it.

So I went. My Dad, my brother, and me. None of us are very good at golf, which makes us roughly in line with 90% of those who try and fail to persuade an insubordinate little white ball into a four-inch wide hole.

None of us played the game when we were younger because golf has typically been a sport for more affluent families, and we had trouble enough paying rent and keeping food on the table when I was a kid.

I didn’t start playing the game until I was in college, and it came about for no real reason other than the fact that I started working for a local public course part-time so I could have money to buy beer and cigarettes.

I played a lot back then, mostly because it was free, but also because it’s an addicting game that allows you to hang on to some semblance of athletic prowess even when those days are long behind you. It’s a competitive game that you can play with someone of nearly any age, with little worry of getting injured or even overly winded.

My Dad wanted to learn how to play golf because my brother and I had been playing, and he figured it could be something he could bond with us over. Even if he would never explicitly say that was the reason. We knew it, and we relished it, even if neither of us would admit that, either.

My Dad has never been an overly affectionate person. Not with his kids or my mother. His idea of romance is a $20 bill stuffed inside a card he probably didn’t even bother to read before picking it out for Valentines Day.

We have little in common, even now. Our interests and ideas rarely align. But we’ve also had sports, and, more specifically, we’ve always had Alabama Football.

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My Dad’s mortality has been on my mind a lot more recently than it ever has. He turned 70 last December, and for the first time in my life he had a legitimate health scare: a blood clot in his leg that ran from his ankle all the way up to his groin. I didn’t even know blood clots could get that big.

He didn’t know either, and he had no warning signs of any issue until he woke up on a Sunday morning in the fall to get ready for church like he always does. This time, though, he had a shooting pain in his leg that brought him to his knees when he rolled out of bed. He couldn’t walk, so he called my Mom from his cellphone, who was in another area of the house. It’s always an uneasy feeling when my Dad calls, but it was especially so for my mother knowing they were in the same place.

She took him to the doctor, and he was immediately hospitalized. He would stay in the hospital for a week, mostly immobilized, as the doctors put him on a blood thinner to try and break up the clot that could at any moment break loose and move toward more serious parts of his anatomy, like his lungs, and cause a pulmonary embolism and just like that, my Dad would be gone.

It scared the hell out of me.

Like most kids, I always viewed my Dad as superhuman, even if I had long accepted him as an extremely flawed individual. He wasn’t superman in the context of his personality and charm, but he was certainly invincible like Superman. I don’t remember seeing my Dad with so much as a cold up until to that, and now his life literally was hanging in the balance in a tiny hospital room in Anniston, Alabama.

To my Dad’s credit, he never seemed all that worried about it. He never is in regards to his health. His idea of healthcare is just ignoring things until they get better. His major concern was being stuck in the hospital on Saturday and potentially missing the Alabama game. He watched, as he always does, but he was forced to watch the Crimson Tide dismantle Arkansas on a tiny hospital television that made it nearly impossible to make out any of the finer details of the game.

He didn’t care. He was just happy he could see something.

My Dad doesn’t miss Alabama games. No matter what.

Mention it to my Mom, and she’s bound to still opine about how he seemed more interested in the Alabama/Penn State game in 1982 than he was for the birth of my brother, his first son. Most dads would be soaking up every look they could get of their child in that moment; mine couldn’t help but let his eyes drift toward the T.V. set.

Alabama won 42-21, and he became a father. I honestly couldn’t tell you which he was happier about.

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Some of my earliest memories revolve around sports, specifically football. I mostly played basketball growing up, but on Saturday’s in the fall, I, like most people in the state, worshiped at the alter of Alabama football.

My earliest football memory was watching the 1999 Iron Bowl, which would become known as “Victory on the Plains” as the Crimson Tide finally exorcised their Jordan-Hare Stadium demons and toppled Auburn there for the first time in five tries.

I was young, but I understood the significant of that win because my Dad had drilled it into me. He bought the VHS tape of the game just as soon as it was available, and we rewatched it together countless times, reliving the key moments and still sitting in awe, jaws agape, as Shaun Alexander ran roughshod over the Auburn defense in the second half.

My Dad took me to my first Alabama game in 2002, after three years of begging to go. Going to games aren’t cheap, and we rarely could afford the luxury of such excursions on a shoestring budget. 2002 was different, though, because he had gotten tickets to the season opener for free, somehow, through something at his job. I didn’t ask a lot of questions, I was just beyond ecstatic to finally go.

Alabama still played the occasional game back then at Legion Field, which was the location of that season opener. Alabama was playing Middle Tennessee State, which I knew little about apart from them being in a much smaller conference and that there was little doubt of an Alabama victory.

The Tide rolled early, breaking out to a 22-0 advantage that surprised no one in attendance. To MTSU’s credit, though, they refused to go away and made a game of it. They battled back, and we couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief until Freddie Roach intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter and returned it 41 yards for a touchdown to mostly seal the deal. Alabama would escape 39-34.

I had already been in love with Alabama football, but that hot August day in those steaming metal bleachers in the endzone of a derelict stadium revved it up a notch. I was hooked.

Football can transcend boundaries. So can any sport, really, but football in the south is something different. It’s more akin to a religious experience to sit inside Bryant-Denny Stadium or Jordan-Hare Stadium on a Saturday in the fall and watch the Tide or Tigers go to battle.

Football has always brought my family together. I have little in common with my Dad outside of that, and likewise with the rest of my family. I don’t agree with their political standings and they rarely agree with mine. We can’t talk about politics or social issues because we are almost certainly on opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s like that in my hometown for me with pretty much anyone I talk to.

I grew up and live in Calhoun County, Alabama, an area where you are either Republican or a Communist hell-bent on destroying this country.

No type of gun-control could ever be “common sense” and climate-change is a myth purported by liberals to take attention away from the real issues.

It’s an area so conservative that most areas still restrict the times you are allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays because the Lord can’t abide a beer before noon or after 9 p.m. on his day.

Racial overtones and alt-right viewpoints are prevalent everywhere, and it can get overwhelming.

My parents went to Wellborn high school, a school infamous for one of its football players, intentionally or unintentionally, killing Speedy Cannon, a black running back for nearby Jacksonville High School in 1972. There are conflicting reports about that fall Friday night, but some things are undisputed: confederate flags flew prominently in the stands, racial epitaphs flowed freely, and the band, as it always did, played Dixie.

Cannon was hit with a helmet-to-helmet blow in the third quarter after doing what he had done for most of the night: gouging Wellborn with a 31-yard gain. It was, by most accounts, a dirty hit. Cannon had already been tackled on the sideline when a player came in late and dove head first at his head, connecting the crown of his helmet and smashing Cannon’s head against the earth.

Cannon miraculously walked off the field and watched some of the game from the sideline until he collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. He had a serious brain injury and bleed, and he would pass away at around 3 a.m. that morning in the hospital.

I graduated from Jacksonville high school and walked past a trophy case with Cannon’s No. 21 jersey on display. No one really talked about it, though, and I knew little about him until the Sports Illustrated long form piece came out.

My Dad said he didn’t remember much about the incident outside of Cannon’s death, refusing to cop to any of the racial activity going on in the Wellborn stands. My Mom admitted hearing the band play Dixie as they always did, but nothing more. If there were racial slurs being thrown out from the stands, it was probably too commonplace to even be memorable.

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Alabama has an ugly history of racism, something that remains in the seedy underbelly of the state. There’s still a lot of hate in the hearts of people here, a hate that is impossible to ignore or accept.

It makes living here difficult to nearly impossible. A bunch of people who on the surface would seem to be the nicest of folks, the ones who would go out of their way to help a neighbor or give you the shirt off of their back, but behind closed doors their true selves are revealed.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that racism is over. It’s alive and well. Flourishing, even. Just earlier this month, a group of high school students in Birmingham were filmed going on a racial tirade, with thoughts they had undoubtedly heard from their parents and others in their communities, but were too young and ignorant to the world to hide their true feelings like their parents do in public.

I don’t believe my parents are racist. If they are, they’ve done a much better job of hiding it from me than the parents of those kids in Birmingham did. But I have plenty of relatives and acquaintances who have prejudiced-filled hearts. How do you reckon with that?

I don’t know what the right answer is. No one really does. My only hope is that one day that hate eventually dies out, but the influx of children who share the misguided and bigoted views of their parents seem to be as prevalent as ever.

It’s not a topic I often speak about. Neither is religion or politics because it’s exhausting to constantly be outnumbered, and most people are too deep-rooted in their own beliefs to ever give an inch. And that’s true for people on either side.

My Dad is hardheaded and opinionated, though he rarely has cause to speak about politics, at least around me. Maybe it’s him doing me a favor because he wants to avoid unnecessary conflict.

Sports transcend those things. They bring people from all different backgrounds together with a common enemy: that group on the other sideline who dares step into the gladiators’ pit and challenge our beloved team. And those blind zebras, who are clearly in the pocket of the other head coach. How much do ya’ll think he paid him?

On Saturdays in the fall, people from different religions, races, genders, and political beliefs will once again converge on college football stadiums across the country to yell and scream and will their team to victory or to collectively curse them in defeat.

They’ll laugh together, cry together, suffer the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Together they’ll celebrate the triumphs, and together they’ll sit quietly in defeat, stewing in simultaneous anger and sadness, positing about what the coach should have done to ensure victory.

Next. Podcast: Amateurism, Scheduling, and Coping with Heartbreak. dark

At Bryant-Denny, fans will undoubtedly scream in unison about the need to run the damn football. Two hours northeast, my Dad will be thinking the same thing, unafraid to yell and berate the T.V. as if his words and actions have any affect on the outcome. I’ll probably be there next to him, yelling in unison and pacing the floor, hoping for an Alabama victory so our Saturday isn’t ruined.

Football attracts opposites, and it can be the bind that ties a family, or simply just a father and son, together.

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