the Perils of Passion

Aweek after the Tennessee game, I was lured onto the road by the Hogs’ ongoing win streak. My eventual destination was Starkville, Mississippi. Yet my overriding goal was to spend as little time there as possible. All I wanted to do was drive straight to Davis Wade Stadium, watch the Hogs put it on the Mississippi State Bulldogs, and then leave. I was determined not to give Starkville, aka Starkvegas, any chance to counter its repute.

Susanne and I spent the day before the game in Oxford, our base for the weekend (the Rebels were playing at LSU). We hung out at Square Books, dined at City Grocery, and visited Rowan Oak, the Greek Revival home of novelist William Faulkner. I’m particularly susceptible to the influence of anything dusted over with literary tradition, so I swooned over Rowan Oak with its tall white front columns straining for shambolic glory, the vaguely-bookish Victorian furniture, gauze-thin white curtains that looked as if they’d been hung by wife Estelle Faulkner herself. When I asked the docent for directions to the facilities, she pointed towards the bathroom next to Faulkner’s bedroom. It felt honorific.

In the study, the white plaster walls bore the master’s handwriting — his day-by-day outline of “The Fable”, the novel that had won the Pulitzer Prize. I stared at the life-sized outline, witness to the obsession of a writer, and wondered if Faulkner was much of an Ole Miss fan. Surely in his last days, he had some inkling that the Rebels were in their Dynasty Years. According to some pollsters (Sagarin, the Dunkel System, and the Football Writers of America), Ole Miss had won the national championship in 1959, 1960, and 1962. With his deep connection to the history of his home state, didn’t Faulkner get some sort of charge out of this? I searched the white walls of his study for any subtle declaration of his enthusiasm: a scribbling of the words Hotty Toddy? Maybe a doodle of Colonel Reb clutching a football? But, alas, no dice. So, I went out to the back porch and stared into the surrounding forest and pondered Faulkner’s hunting stories called Big Wood, especially the one about the obsessive stalking of that poor bear named Old Ben.

The next morning, it was on to Starkville to watch the electrifying Darren McFadden, who had a serious shot at the Heisman Trophy. It was cool and sunny, and with my usual sense of game-day nervous anticipation I made my way to the visitor’s section at Davis Wade Stadium. It’s well established that the cowbells in Starkville are a problem. Despite restrictions imposed by the SEC, the fans wouldn’t quit shaking them. Certainly, I’d known this before I came to Starkville, just as I’d known on my first visit to London that it often rained. Nonetheless, this incessant ringing quickly got on my nerves and in due course I suffered an out-of-body experience when I found myself yelling my head off at Hog cornerback Matteral Richardson.

For reasons I could not fathom, this young man had decided his mission on this fine autumn afternoon was to single-handedly keep Mississippi State in this football game. By the second of his silly penalties, I rose from my seat. “Come on, number nine!” I screamed, invoking Richardson’s number because his last name wasn’t specific enough to suit me, and his first name sounded like a drunken slurring of the word “material.” The air was filling with my own sulfurous exhaust: “What the heck is number nine doing?” “Get him out of there! Come on! Come on!”

A few fans turned around to see who was doing all this fussing, and at least one patron expressed his displeasure by pelting me in the back of the head with a wadded paper cup. Embarrassed, Susanne got up and went to the bathroom.

Matteral Richardson aside, Mississippi State never really threatened in this game. With eight minutes left and the Hogs’ victory in hand, Susanne and I headed out for our car in a distant parking lot. Though she’d been to several Razorback games with me over the last five years, this was the worst I’d behaved, by far. As we trod

along in silence, I considered blaming my eruption on the damned cowbells. Surely, I wasn’t the only visiting fan ever to be unnerved by the ringing. After all, wasn’t the point of it to push the opposing team and their fans to the brink of a nervous breakdown? That’s right, the real culprit in all this was the Mississippi State fans and their damned cowbells. I was merely a victim.

But by the time Susanne and I finally got to our car, remorse had set in. In my ongoing struggle to mature as a fan, I had clearly regressed. Obviously, winning wasn’t enough. The Hogs’ streak, now at 10 games, had only raised the stakes even higher and made me more demanding, more cantankerous, more intolerant of sloppy play, more obsessed and crazed.

We battled the traffic around Davis Wade Stadium. Our goal — my goal — was to get back to Oxford as soon as possible. Then, just before the game ended, as if to rescue me, over our car’s radio, we heard the play-by-play announcer say number nine, Matteral Richardson, had committed yet another penalty. I cut my eyes at Susanne as if to say, “See there!” But she wasn’t having it. And she was right: There was no justification for my behavior.

A week later, on the day after Thanksgiving, the Hogs’ 10-game win streak ended against LSU, whereupon commenced a three-game losing streak. The Hogs finished 10-4 and, not surprisingly, the critics lashed out at The Dale.