The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  “Ain’t that the truth,” my father said, using one of Elzoria’s favorite sayings.

  Ole Miss crushed Houston 40–7 that afternoon. Houston had been undefeated, but it was as if the entire frustration and anger and humiliation and shame of the riots were unleashed on them. I walked down our street, Piedmont Street, to the end and could hear the crowd in the distance. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I kept walking toward the stadium. By Bailey Junior High School, I could see the stadium and hear the announcer, though I couldn’t understand a word he said. I stayed there as long as I dared and then started to walk back home. On the way home, a car passed me with Rebel flags and I waved and they waved and a crew-cut driver yelled, “Go, Rebels!” and I yelled right back. That’s what we Rebels did.

  Ole Miss won the eight remaining games that season, outscoring opponents by 247 to 53 for the season. It was that magical season of every fan’s dreams. Eventually, everybody quit talking about James Meredith and started talking about Fidel Castro and the Cuban missile crisis. I put extra batteries for my transistor radio in the crude fallout shelter my dad outfitted under the basement steps so that I would be sure not to miss any Rebel games if we moved in. It never occurred to me that if we were living under the stairs after a nuclear strike, the Rebels probably wouldn’t be playing.

  —

  Almost fifty-one years later, the Grove was again filled but with tents and fans, not troops and rioters. My father and I took a while to work our way through the game-day crowd to the flagpole at the center of the Circle. “Let’s sit awhile,” he said, edging down on the concrete base of the flagpole. It was crowded, and I’m certain that we were the only adults not drinking something strong.

  The Lyceum was directly in front of us and the statue commemorating the Confederate war dead directly behind us at the base of the Circle. In the late afternoon and dusk of September 30, 1962, it had been mostly students here in the Circle. But as it grew dark, outsiders from across the state and beyond had joined them. In his wonderful memoir, Dixie, Curtis Wilkie, who was an Ole Miss student at the scene, writes, “Within a half hour of the outbreak of fighting, the state troopers—who had maintained roadblocks at the gates of the school to keep troublemakers away—withdrew, leaving the campus open to posses of night riders.”

  As the riot escalated, one of my childhood heroes, the legendarily tough linebacker and fullback Buck Randall, saw the bloodied bodies inside the Lyceum and went out on the steps and appealed for calm. But the riot had passed the point of being calmed by words, the madness of the moment bigger than even the toughest guy on the toughest team.

  We walked down the center of the Circle toward the Confederate monument, surrounded by party tents with long tables overflowing with everything from ribs to casseroles. My dad spotted a particularly tasty collection of barbeque and moved toward it.

  “We don’t know these people,” I whispered frantically. “We can’t just walk up and take their food.”

  “Sure we can. Everybody does that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Phineas? Good God!” We looked up to see a smiling man elegantly dressed in a blazer and slacks. He had a bright white handkerchief artfully folded in his breast pocket. He was younger than my dad but not by much. They shook hands, and my dad took him by the forearm, the way he did when he was truly glad to see someone. The man turned to me and held out his hand, “Bill Threadgill. Your dad and I were in law school together.”

  “I was ahead of him in law school,” Dad said. “I’m much, much older. What are you, Bill?”

  He sighed. “Ninety. I know, you’re older. Don’t be showing off. You know what I did, Phinny? I bought a condo up here last year. Yes, sir, bought me a place here to come up for games and concerts. Just great.”

  His son, Tim, pulled us over to his tent. He was in his late forties, thin and athletic. He was a lawyer in my father’s old firm, and I’d met him before at an event the law firm had for my dad’s ninety-fifth birthday and we’d talked bicycles. He and a few friends had ridden the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of years before, passing through Asheville. My folks had come out on the parkway and met them for cheerleading and provisions. It was a trip I’d always wanted to make.

  “We’re all from Columbus,” Tim gestured to his tent crowd, introducing us around. “Half these guys I went to high school with. We’ve been doing this for about ten years now.” They had a long table filled with all sorts of food, folding chairs, and a huge television.

  My father and I dug in to jambalaya. “How do you do all this?” Dad asked, nodding to the food spread, the tent, the chairs, the television. “It must be a lot of work.”

  Tim looked a bit sheepish. “Actually, we used to do it more ourselves, but now there are these outfits that will just handle everything.”

  His wife laughed. “Except the food and the drinks. We still do that. But some folks, they go the whole catering route.” She gestured over to a nearby tent. It was laid out with china and silver utensils and had a candelabra hanging down. Under it was a little sign that read DON’T WORRY, THIS IS NICER THAN OUR HOUSE. It was easy to see why many fans just stayed in the Grove and watched the games on television. The food was better than any at the stadium and the chairs as comfortable as you provided.

  But Dad was eager to get to the game. “It’s been years since we’ve been in the stadium,” he said, putting his arm around me, and I realized I was excited in a way I hadn’t been at the first game in Nashville. That had been a football game and a good one, but this was more: the first home game of the season and a stadium full of Rebel fans.

  “I’m really glad we did this,” I said to him.

  “Me too,” he said. “You know, I feel pretty good. I wasn’t sure I was up for this but I feel pretty good.” We thanked our impromptu hosts and started walking toward the stadium. As we passed the statue of the Confederate soldier, Dad said, “It was said in my day that the good soldier tips his hat to every virgin coed.”

  I laughed. We’d walk a little, then stop and rest, then walk a little more. From inside the stadium, we could hear the pregame videos that have become a staple of college football played on the scoreboard screen. Every couple of minutes, a raucous “Hotty Toddy” broke out.

  “Do you remember when we would walk to Memorial Stadium from Bailey Junior High?” I asked as we rested on a stone wall near the stadium gate.

  “Of course,” he said. “Those were great games.” He wiped off sweat with a handkerchief; he always carried a handkerchief. I don’t think I’d had one since debutante dances. In front of us, a long line of fans streamed into the game. Several people recognized my father and called out. He’d wave and smile. “I remember how excited you would get at the games,” he said. “You talked about them all week.”

  “I think I did all summer.” We both laughed.

  “It was when I really fell in love with football, walking to those games with you. I can remember almost running to keep up with you.”

  “Not a problem now,” he said. “I’m moving slow. But we’re almost there.”

  We could hear the stadium announcer introducing the Rebels’ starting offense. It was time to go find our seats, but we both seemed content to wait.

  “I wish we had gone to more games,” I said.

  “When?”

  I shrugged. “The last twenty or thirty years.”

  He nodded. “That would have been nice, but you were busy, and we did other things.”

  “I shouldn’t have been so busy. I don’t know why I didn’t make more time.”

  “It’s what happens,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t worked as much as I did when you and your sister were growing up.”

  “Really?” I turned to him. We’d never talked about this sort of thing. “I know there are kids who think their dads weren’t around enough, but I never felt that with you. Never.”

  “Good.” He smiled, and I could see his eyes drift back to a different time. “But I missed
too much. I spent a lot of nights in hotels when you were growing up. We had to go where the work was. We were still trying to get really established.”

  His law firm had grown from five members to the largest in Mississippi and one of the largest in the South. “It was an incredible achievement to turn it into what it is today,” I said.

  “It wasn’t just me,” he said, and that was always how he handled any praise about the firm.

  “You know how you used to say, ‘There is no limit to what can be achieved as long as no one cares who gets the credit’?” I asked.

  “I still say that. Don’t have to put it in past tense.”

  “Right.” I felt scolded, as if I’d considered his expiration date had passed. “Do you remember where you heard that first?”

  “You don’t think I made it up?” he teased. “It was here at Ole Miss. A law school professor. Always stuck with me. Thought about it a lot when I was in the Navy.”

  The stadium behind us roared with the opening kickoff. We both got to our feet. “We have to get inside,” he said. “They may need us.”

  We started moving toward the ticket gate. The crowd was almost gone, everyone inside cheering the Rebels.

  “You know,” I said, putting my arm around him and squeezing his shoulder, the way he used to do to me on our way to games, “I thought you were the best dad in the world. I still do.”

  He reached around and put his arm over my shoulders, so we were walking like two drunks.

  “You’re a great son. We’ve been lucky.”

  And when he said that, walking into the game, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

  —

  Our seats were in the first row, behind the Ole Miss bench. I’d bought them online, more for their ease of access than game-side appeal. The idea of hiking up many flights of stadium steps with my dad had seemed crazy, and that was even before I realized just how slowly he moved.

  Like almost every major college football stadium, Ole Miss’s had undergone a series of renovations, expanding its seating to just over 63,000. The latest work had been completed the past August, and although I had good memories of the old stadium, I had to say the changes had been done well. It didn’t have the beautiful retro quality of the new baseball stadiums like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., but it seemed as though it belonged. You could still close your eyes and imagine Archie Manning running from LSU’s future Hall of Famer Ronnie Estay, fake pumping to freeze the secondary, and then throwing across his body in his strange but deadly style.

  “Hey, these are great seats,” the man next to me said. He was wearing an Ole Miss shirt, and next to him was his young son, about ten, and college-aged daughter. She had her arm around her younger brother.

  “Great seats,” I agreed. We introduced ourselves, the sort of open camaraderie that came so naturally at a game with the assumption of shared interests. I nodded to his game program. “They say in there where Southeast Missouri State is?” I asked the man. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”

  “Cape Girardeau, Missouri,” he said without hesitation. “We live there, actually. It’s my school.”

  I smiled the way you might if you walked into the wrong-sex bathroom by mistake. Smile. See, just a mistake, I’m not a bad guy. Honest.

  “Really?” I asked. There was a chance he was just kidding me. There had to be. “But what are you…”

  “My daughter’s a freshman at Ole Miss. We came down for the game.”

  “That’s fantastic,” I said, overcompensating with way too much good cheer. “She liking it?”

  “Loves it. You saw the scene today at the Grove. And she’s a big lit major. We came down here and went to Faulkner’s house.”

  “Rowan Oak,” I said.

  “Nothing like that at home.” Then he nodded toward the Southeast Missouri players taking the field. “Don’t worry. I know we’re going to get killed.”

  He was right. By the end of the first quarter, Ole Miss was ahead 17–0. By the end of the second half, it was 31–0. The Rebels scored on five consecutive series, with two long passes of sixty-plus yards.

  It was great fun. With games like this, at least for a while, it’s easy to forget that the other team was way overmatched and start believing such easy success could be had against an SEC team. The sun dipped below the stadium, bringing a hint of coolness and a tease of the season changing. We ate a couple of hot dogs and listened to the Ole Miss coaches yell at their players. A team could be up by one hundred points, and coaches would still yell. Not angry, but excited, bringing order, keeping the players’ minds in the game.

  At the half, as the Ole Miss band started to move out on the field, we stood and stretched, feeling good about the world. “You know,” my dad said, “I bet they could win this second half without us.”

  “Do we risk it?” I asked. This was another ritual of ours if considering leaving a game when the Rebels were ahead. Do we think they could win it without us? Do we risk it? We once left a game when Ole Miss had what seemed an insurmountable lead, only to have them lose by the time we got back home. It was agony. There was no way not to believe that if we had stayed, it would have made the difference. I once explained this to my mother, and she countered, “That’s why I don’t sleep on planes. Who’s going to fly the thing?”

  We made our way out of the stadium into the falling light. I stood there, thinking. “I have no idea where we parked,” I finally confessed.

  My father looked at me and smiled. “That’s what happens when you get to your age,” he said, then led us directly to the car.

  4

  After Southeast Missouri, Ole Miss played the University of Texas in Austin. We debated going to the game; my dad had spent some time at Texas studying oil and gas law many years ago, and I’d lived there for a year and a half during George W. Bush’s first campaign. We both had good memories of the place, and when I reread the great Billy Lee Brammer’s Gay Place, which I tried to do every year, it always made me want to be back in the Austin of clubs and beer gardens that he so beautifully describes. Brammer wrote of the crowd around Lyndon Johnson, but forty years later, when I was in Austin, the mix of political operatives, lobbyists, students, press, and musicians felt seductively similar.

  But in the end, my parents decided it was too far to drive, and though we didn’t admit it, we felt it was likely Ole Miss would lose. The year before, Texas had trounced the Rebels 66–31 at home in Oxford. This year, they were playing in the massive UT stadium in front of a rabid Longhorn crowd, and it didn’t seem likely they would get out of Austin with a win. But to our astonished delight, Ole Miss dominated Texas, winning 44–23. That made Ole Miss 3-0 and ranked in the top twenty teams in the nation. The next game was against Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and in the closing minutes of the Texas game the heady Ole Miss fans chanted, “Bring on ’Bama.”

  My parents were back in Asheville, and I was in Los Angeles working on a television show, but we talked all through the game, calling each other after every Ole Miss score, astonished the Rebels were headed to an easy win. “This is the year!” I yelled over the phone to my dad. “This is it.”

  “Well,” he said, “I imagine Alabama is thinking the same thing.”

  On the plane from L.A. to Atlanta, where I was going to meet my parents, I wore one of my growing collection of Ole Miss shirts and was amazed when several people on the plane saw the shirt and offered up “Hotty Toddy” or “Go to hell, Alabama.” It made me feel like a member of some not-so-secret society, though I had to wonder if the team were 0−3 instead of 3−0, if the response would have been the same.

  We spent the Friday night before the game in Atlanta and got an early start for the night game in Tuscaloosa. It was a beautiful, clear day, and the road was crowded with ’Bama faithful headed to the game. Every other car seemed to have a ROLL TIDE bumper sticker or Crimson Tide flag stuck to the windows.

  Halfway to Tuscaloosa, we stopped in one of the man
y gas station–grocery store combinations that sold fried chicken and barbeque. Above the counter was a large sign: AT ALABAMA, WE DON’T REBUILD, WE RELOAD! My father nudged me, nodding to the sign. Then he said to the woman behind the counter, “We’re Auburn fans.”

  She was punching out a complicated request for a lottery ticket and didn’t look up. “Honey, the good Lord blesses all sinners.”

  My father laughed. “That he does.”

  She looked up and smiled. It was a worn smile of someone who had worked too many hours for too long for too little but had never really expected anything else. It wasn’t bitter, just tired. “And if you want to be for those piss-poor-toilet-paper-throwing-sons-of-bitches, that’s your own cross to bear.”

  A man behind us laughed and said, “This is ’Bama territory in here. My wife is a War Eagle, and she is scared to come in.”

  “Bobby,” the woman said, “you know that’s not right. We wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “I’ve told her that.”

  “Just scare the crap out of her.”

  This broke everybody up.

  “You’re not worried that we’re going to poison you like we poisoned those trees at Auburn?”

  A younger woman behind the counter carrying an armful of cigarette cartons groaned. “That was awful. That man was two beers shy of a six-pack. Don’t think that was about loving ’Bama. ’Bama fans hated that.”

  “We’re really Ole Miss fans,” my mother said. She’d been searching the store for something healthy to eat and finally settled on peanut butter crackers. It seemed least likely to kill you quickly.

  “I was kidding about Auburn,” Dad explained.

  “Honey, we don’t joke about that sort of thing,” the woman said flatly. She didn’t smile. “This ain’t casual like Ole Miss and Miss State.”

  “I wouldn’t call that casual,” my mother said, laughing.

  “I would, sweetie,” the woman said, staring coolly at my mother.