1.

December 31, 2000. I was lying on the floor in the living room at my grandparents’ house in Madison, MS watching the Independence Bowl. Mississippi State was playing future-SEC program Texas A&M, although we were about a decade out from that at the time. The reason I remember this game is that it was snowing in Shreveport, Louisiana and I don’t think I’d ever seen people play football in the snow before. This was the also the first time I had ever heard of Mississippi State in my whole life. Growing up an LSU fan, nothing really permeated my football awareness if it wasn’t purple and gold.

Thinking back now, I’m fairly certain my PawPaw leaned toward the Bulldogs in the Egg Bowl contest back then, but as soon as I chose Ole Miss for school, he was a Rebel through and through. As long as they weren’t playing Auburn.

2.

September 1, 2001. I was going to my first college football game. My dad was taking me for my birthday, which is conveniently always on the first weekend of football every year. I’ve never really though about it before, but I guess there’s a little poetry in that fact. Tulane was heading up to Baton Rouge to take on the Tigers. We stopped at a tailgate, as one is wont to do at an LSU game. I have no idea if we knew the hosts of that tailgate or not, but they gave us food and beverages in any case.

The man at the tailgate said something—mostly to the other adults there—about how in ten or so years, the brand new white LSU hat I was sporting that day would be a helluva lot dirtier. I can’t remember if there was an overt mention of the forecast grunge coming from future me passing out on the ground drunk, but the implication was there enough that I remember it to this day. Geaux Tigers.

We listened to Aerosmith on a cassette tape on the way to the game. It was the first time I had heard Janie’s Got A Gun. I still think of the drive to that game in my dad’s old champagne-colored Ford Ranger whenever I hear that song.

3.

Fall 2008. I write “Fall” as if it wasn’t August or September and still a hundred degrees outside, but Fall is when we do football, so football season means it’s Fall. I was a senior in high school working as a grocery bagger at a Market Street grocery store. Management, for some incredibly annoying reason, insisted that baggers also push the cart out to the car for customers and load the groceries into the car for them1. That meant there was a lot of dead air with customers that I had to get really good at filling, and as I’ve become accustomed to doing, I defaulted to asking folks about college football if I could see a school logo on them.

I had a woman come through my line wearing a University of Phoenix sweatshirt, and before my brain could stop it, my mouth said the words “University of Phoenix? How are y’all doing in football this season?” She looked at me with a face of disgust—probably assuming maliciousness in my remark rather than just a seventeen year old brain on autopilot—and said “we don’t have a football team.” And not a word was said afterward.

We weren’t allowed to accept tips even if people offered them, but I wasn’t going to be making one on the trip to that car no matter what.

4.

August 23, 2009.2 We still got paper tickets for football games because there still wasn’t really any other way to do it. That’s why I found myself sleeping on a sidewalk the night before my first day of college. As far as I could tell back then, this was the only guaranteed way to get student season tickets for Ole Miss football games. There were a lot of us out there, but I ended up sitting in line next to an upperclassman named Kevin. I didn’t know anyone at Ole Miss really, so I was there by myself.

I happened to hear this guy Kevin talking about the television show Big Brother, of which I was quite the connoisseur back then. When I tell you I barged into that conversation with the exuberance of an awkward freshman temporarily liberated from the fear of not being able to make conversation with anyone for the next four3 years, boy, I can’t overstate it enough. That’s how I made my first friend at Ole Miss. Talking about a reality television show on a sidewalk outside the ticket office the night before classes started.

5.

January 9, 2012. Our excitement was on the verge of becoming excess. After a full day of tailgating, my dad and I were so confident in our team’s chances of victory that we started looking for a pair of get-in-the-door tickets for the LSU-Alabama national championship game. Technically I was an Ole Miss student and fan, but my roots and my father are both purple and gold, so I was there as a Tiger. And I hated Alabama. Hoo boy I hated Alabama. Mostly Nick Saban’s Alabama, because if I’m being honest, I didn’t give a lick about them until Saban won LSU a trophy, left for the NFL, and then came back to coach a division rival.

Dad was in a makeshift ticket broker’s office in some hotel near the Superdome and I was sitting on the floor up against a wall in the hallway just outside. I believed in the Tigers. We’d won the 9-6 defensive masterpiece earlier on in the season, and the team was looking better and better. There were no consequences that night because history was on my side and I was drunk on the purest, most distilled intoxicant of them all: fandom. So I talked some shit on Facebook.

We did not end up spending a small fortune on tickets to that game. Instead, we watched the game on a giant projector screen from that hotel’s ballroom. We watched as Alabama shut down the Tigers with a chilling thoroughness. We watched as LSU was held to their side of the field for the entire first half. We watched with hope in those magical “halftime adjustments” as they came out of the locker room after halftime and took the field. We watched with dismay as the halftime adjustments never materialized and LSU was held to their side of the field for the entire second half as well.

As we walked home, my dad played Louisiana 1927 out loud on his phone. It was my first time hearing that song. I can’t hear it to this day without feeling just a bit of the shock, confusion, and numbness that came along with that humiliating shutout that night. And tasting a little bit of the crow I’d eaten later for the remarks I’d made before the game.

6.

August 21, 2021. I was at a fake English pub in Dallas watching a Liverpool match with my husband when I got a call from my mom that my PawPaw wasn’t doing well. He and my Mimi had both come down with Covid a week or so earlier in Hattiesburg during the Delta wave. They hadn’t gotten better yet, but neither were having trouble breathing, so it hadn’t seemed like things were too bad.

Anyway, the first call was to tell me that things weren’t going well. I was still watching the game, but it wasn’t the main thing on my mind. The second call was to tell me they’d taken him to a hospital. It was short on details, but long on fear. I was no longer watching the game, but for some reason, I was rooted in this stupid bar. I couldn’t leave. What if it happened and I had gone somewhere else? As if that mattered somehow. But I kept getting up and pacing and calling people who had no more news than I, hoping that being scared together would change the outcome for the better. The game ended and we left.

My mother called a third time on the way home. She was sobbing and yelling about blood clots and my own blood turned cold, hoping that somehow he’d pull through. I pushed the pedal, wondering if we had time to see him before it happened. Flagellating myself mentally for even going there, and then trying to pretend that I hadn’t thought that. We packed for Hattiesburg. If I take a black dress, am I just being prepared for the worst or did I just seal his fate by admitting it’s a possibility?

We’re somewhere on a highway in Louisiana a few hours later. I didn’t know you could feel the cold panic of adrenaline for this long, but it was still there. I was driving as fast as I could in hopes that I would get there in time but also trying to be cognizant of how terrible it would be for my mom if it happened and I also crashed and died on the way there. And then the fourth call. My mother sounded calmer and I hoped that was a good sign. Right up until she mentioned planning the funeral. The funeral?

The third call was the call but I couldn’t understand what my mother was saying, so this was how I found out. It had happened and I didn’t get there in time. I was cold and sick from my toes up. I can’t tell you much else from that drive. I can tell you I had to pull over at a Pilot or a Love’s or some other gigantic yellow truck stop so my husband could take over the driving. I can tell you that when I put the car in park, every instinct in my body forced me out of the car that was too small to contain my pain and shock and sadness and loss and fear and sadness and sadness and sadness.

This all comes back to college football, though, I promise. August 21 was nearly kickoff weekend that year. PawPaw was an Auburn fan like nobody else could ever be an Auburn fan. We’d talked earlier that summer about what on earth that Bryan Harsin hire was about and whether the buyout money they’d paid Ol’ Gus just to get this guy was worth it. Now he was never going to find out the answer. And that was a thing I thought about on the way to Hattiesburg, Mississippi on August 21, the day my PawPaw died.

Grief makes you stupid. It makes you think stupid things at stupid times. But so is college football. College football makes you say things like “that’s my lucky shirt, you can’t wash it” or “I turned the game off because they keep losing every time I watch” or “my grandfather died and now he’s never going to know if Bryan Harsin is going to be a good coach at Auburn or not”.

College football is not just what’s going on for three or four hours a week down on that field. It’s not just plays and formations and rotations. It’s just not fourth downs or touchdowns. It’s people and places and memories. It’s elation and heartbreak, love and hate, belief and hope. It’s a culture and a family and a place you can belong.

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