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By B.J. Bennett
SouthernPigskin.com Senior Editor
SouthernPigskin.com Senior Editor B.J. Bennett continues his exclusive look at college football in the south.
Down Here III is the third installment of Bennett's continuing series on southern college football. Click to read Down Here I and Down Here II. Email Bennett your southern college football thoughts at .
My personal experiences were no different from any other young boy who grew up in a southern state. It was like somebody, my parents namely, flipped on a switch at an early age. From that point on, my life became illuminated; my cares and aspirations clear to see. Saturdays were sacred and were reserved for football. Weekend tasks like yard work, spending time with family and grocery shopping were reserved for Sunday – unless of course the hometown team lost the day prior. Then it was a day of mourning.
The truth of the matter is that none of it makes a damn bit of sense, really. The fascination, obsession rather, that people in the south have with college football is just confounding. We pin our hopes and dreams, not to mention personal sanctity and salaries, on the fortunes of people we will never meet, on outcomes that we can never shape. Regardless of the irrationality of it all, the bond between fan and team, especially here in the south, is one of great resolve.
For my younger brother and I, wins were personal achievements. We walked around school with a newfound sense of confidence and brashly talked trash to our annoyed extended family members. While the two of us obviously had no impact on anything that happened on the field on Saturday, such nonsense didn’t matter. We won those games. That sense of accomplishment is what makes those memories so special. Such is the nature of college football in the south. More so than college football anywhere else, more so than professional sports and more so than any other affiliation outside of religion and family…and those boundaries are oftentimes tested.
Those outside the college football sphere can appreciate the joys of winning. Conference championships, bowl game victories and triumphs over archrivals can be compared to other life milestones; therefore the sentiment is not limited to or unique of unhinged southern pigskin fanatics. The exact feeling probably still can’t be properly described, but with childbirth, graduation, marriage and other things of that nature, the precedent for correlation is probably there. 
Losing is another story.
You hear college football coaches say all of the time that when they win it's a relief, when they lose it consumes them. The same can be said for fans. Winning was supposed to happen. If we didn’t win, there was a problem. Losing shook my family at its core, especially considering my aunts and uncles were sprinkled throughout the south like salt on a kitchen table. If my team lost on Saturday, it more than likely lost to relative's favorite squad. Open wound, insert the aforementioned salt. My worst memories as a child are those of losing big football games. I vividly remember crying myself to sleep on multiple occasions, locking myself in the bathroom and cursing at family members as a young child. More on in a moment. In most parts of the country, such actions would probably be grounds for counseling. Down here, those insecurities proved to my parents that I understood the big picture. Through my tears and hours spent in the bathtub, I was becoming a man.
As a grade-schooler, my responses to team shortcomings were borderline-psychotic, but far from exaggerated. I usually needed a two-to-three day bereavement period after each loss before I could even begin the mourning process. As mentioned above, there was (and sometimes still is) the bathtub soak. For whatever reason, the bathtub became my personal release and private shelter from losing. It started as a halftime recuperation session. In the bathtub, I could collect my thoughts, think rationally about the remaining two quarters and more importantly, avoid sky-is-falling comments from my reactionary parents. To them, a seven-point deficit at the half didn’t mean the other team was playing well or maybe that we started sluggish, it was a telltale sign that our coaches were losing their grip, the program was on the decline and we simply weren’t what we used to be. Nothing short of a New Years' Day bowl bid ever calmed those concerns. If we recovered and won, all was well. A loss, however, would send my home into dejection and me back into the bathroom. Maybe the water soaked away my sorrows; maybe I drowned my miseries away in my own, juvenile way. Who knows. From the bathroom would be the bedroom, where I would promptly leave all televisions and radios off for at least 24 hours and sit in solace until late Sunday evening. I just couldn’t bare to see my players hand their heads in defeat. Then there was the crying. Losses would make me cry – and everyone knew it. I wasn’t ashamed of it and didn’t hide it. You can never mask true, unadulterated emotion. And I didn’t.
The majority of my missed school days weren’t a result of strep throat, the flu or even skipping class, they were due to my unfinished recovery following football losses. My mother, the most dire, incessant football fan I have ever known, didn’t help matters. She would lovingly placate me, turning a blind eye to my normal temperature readings and lack of acute symptoms. She understood and sympathized with the pain of bruised pride. To understand that notion, you have to understand my mother. She isn’t an in-your-face, never-miss-a-game-in-person diehard, but rather a somewhat behind the scenes commodity. While her 5’2’’ frame and innocent look doesn’t scream intensity, her approach was quite deceiving. This is a woman who severely sprained her wrist after slamming it down in frustration after a missed field goal cost our team the game, a daughter who threatened to kick her live-in mother out of her house during a rivalry bout and a mom who invited me to stay home from school during National Signing Day on a number of occasions. Left alone, she’ll study the game from afar and share her vents with personal family and friends; bothered, she’ll challenge any veteran to a game of football history or call-out burly grown men and question their football knowledge like she did at a local establishment a few years back. Mom has come close to drawing fists in stadiums, stood on dumpsters as a child to watch games in the SEC and dated an Auburn football player. As a grade-schooler, she dislocated her knee playing tackle football with the neighborhood boys. The culprit in the injury? A future Florida Gator lineman.
My dad, a military man with an athletic background, is a cusser. There is no other way around it. A former college athlete himself, his Saturday afternoons are jam-packed with four-letter words. The same phrases are used in both celebration and angst; a concept I’m still learning to appreciate.
Needless to say, my groundwork was laid at an early age.
Midway through one of my team's worst losses of the past two decades, I began to have an epiphany. As an adolescent pondering deep life issues, I started to question a lot of things. With the game progressing, I merely sat with a blank stare. I was a bit confused, a bit concerned. There were no baths. Few tears. No tirades. I was sulking, but in a calm way. So much so that my mother slowly walked up to me as the game ended, looked me in the eyes and said as if I had just left my all out on that field, “I’m proud of you”. I had shown courage in the face of great difficulty. Mom recognized the strength it took to maintain my composure. 
Whether they knew it or not, the coaches and players on the field represented us. They represent families, communities, small towns and even entire states down here in the south. They represent grade-schoolers bragging to their peers, teenagers struggling to establish their identity, parents teaching their children lessons of the game and those in their golden years who appreciate the life lessons the game teachers us all. Regardless of age, race, religion, financial situation, political opinion or family stature, college football embodies us all. The game unites us, brings us together in the south.
"The definition of an atheist in Alabama," former Georgia head football coach Wally Butts once explained, "is someone who doesn't believe in Bear Bryant."
As a young adult, I don’t know if my view has progressed or regressed to be honest, but it has definitely changed some. Working in the field of sports media (via newspaper, radio and online), my growing objectivity and pure love for the game has begun to settle in, along with other pressing subjects like money, the thoughts of a family and other insignificant, but consuming issues. My fixation remains a passionate one, but perhaps I’ve embraced a new and rather novel mindset: sanity.
Make no mistake about it, I still have my favorite team in my blood, just as millions of other southerners do with their own teams. That’s inherent and unchangeable. It’s like a last name nailed down and wrapped with duct tape. Come hell or high water, it just ain’t going away.
My occupation and my age have placed a proverbial lampshade on my perception of the game and have forced me to view college football through a somewhat different eye. That said, beams still and always will shine through; you never can turn off that light.
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Comments
Ive been coming to this site for 5 years and it’s because of the info on the message boards, the back and forth. But mainly I’ve followed the stories published. BJ Bennett has evolved into the best writer in the south, if not the country. Where else besides Sports Illustrated do you read stuff like this....
This whole Down Here series is award winning in my opinion. And as an old sports fan, mainly football I’ve read alot of books, columns, exposes etc. Bennett is as good as it gets. Everyone of these tears me up in one line and makes me think back to my experiences and smile on the next. And I’m not generally a sappy guy. Great job! Looking forward to the next one.
That is what is called some serious interpersonal disclosure....and it speaks volumes to what is real in the south.
“Weekend tasks like yard work, spending time with family and grocery shopping were reserved for Sunday – unless of course the hometown team lost the day prior. Then it was a day of mourning.”
Just one quote comment. If that ain’t the truth I’ve been lied to my entire life!
Make Yourself Heard
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