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"FacebookPinterest\n\nLast January, two weeks after the Auburn Tigers vanquished the Oregon Ducks for the national collegiate football championship, Paul Finebaum, the host of a radio sports show in Birmingham, took a call from a listener in Dadeville who went by the name \"Al.\" Al's real name, police would later learn, was Harvey Updyke. A 62-year-old retired Texas highway patrolman, Updyke had moved to Alabama only two years before to be close to his favorite football team, the Crimson Tide. His first year in his new home, he'd attained something akin to sports-fan nirvana. The Tide had won the 2009 national title and Updyke had been in the stands to see it. His second year in Alabama was more like sports-fan hell.\n\nIn November he'd pilgrimaged to Tuscaloosa for the Iron Bowl, the regular-season Auburn-Alabama showdown. Alabama had jumped out to a 24-point lead, but in the second half, inconceivably, the Tigers came back to humiliate the Tide on their home field, 28-27. For the followers of Auburn, a land-grant forever in the shadow of the flagship state university, nothing was sweeter than this come-from-behind triumph over their condescending northern Alabama brethren. For Bama partisans like Updyke, the loss wasn't a loss at all but a travesty. On Finebaum's show, callers harped on the illegitimacy of Auburn's star quarterback, Cam Newton, who was nearly banned from the game after it was discovered his father had shopped him around as part of a pay-for-play scheme. To them, the Iron Bowl proved that Auburn could win only by cheating, that the \"West Georgia\" team was devoid of all honor, that, fuck it, look at our thirteen championships to your two. Roll Tide!\n\nUpdyke told Finebaum he'd seen Auburn fans outside the Iron Bowl dressing the statue of the late, great Paul \"Bear\" Bryant in a \"Scam\" Newton jersey. He claimed to possess a newspaper clipping that showed how years back Auburn followers celebrated Coach Bryant's death by \"rolling\" the live oaks at Toomer's Corner, the gateway to the Auburn campus where students marked wins by streaming the trees with toilet paper. So here's what Updyke said he did: He drove down to Toomer's Corner and doused the venerated trees with Spike 80DF, a lethal herbicide.\n\n\"Did they die?\" an incredulous Finebaum asked.\n\n\"They definitely will die,\" said Updyke.\n\n\"Is that against the law\u2014to poison a tree?\"\n\n\"Do you think I care?\" Updyke said. \"I really don't. Roll damn Tide!\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nArborists later confirmed that the trees had been poisoned. Police traced the call and charged Updyke with several felony counts, including two for vandalism of property on a crop facility. His disheveled, puffy-faced mug shot made the national news. Many Tide devotees were eager to write him off as a lunatic, a pathological fan. \"We might talk trash among our own, but that one misguided person went beyond the pale,\" said Gina Smith, a 2003 Alabama grad and the spokesperson of Tide for Toomer's, a charity hastily founded by University of Alabama alumni to raise money for the poisoned trees. \"The entire state is not like him,\" Smith told me. \"He doesn't represent us or this rivalry.\" But on Crimson Tide fan sites, Updyke was not without his defenders. Some even called on the school to build a statue of Updyke next to the ones of Bryant and other Bama heroes.\n\nPaul Finebaum likes to compare Tide and Tigers fans to the Hatfields and McCoys, and if you listen to his four-hour daily show or spend some time in Alabama, as I did last spring, the analogy won't seem all that far-fetched. The first two questions you're likely to hear there are \"What's your church?\" and \"Auburn or Alabama?\" and not necessarily in that order. Unlike the storied enmity between Michigan and Ohio St., opposing Tide and Tigers fans live on the same block, work in adjoining cubicles. There are other notable intra-state rivalries\u2014Florida vs. Florida St. or Texas vs. Texas A&amp;amp;M\u2014but these play out in places with professional sports teams, as well as booming industries and politics that matter to the rest of the country. For Alabama, a state that has long been among the nation's poorest, worst educated, sickest, and highest divorced, college football is the thing it does better than just about anywhere else. Of the state's 4,800,000 citizens, a 2007 Mobile Press-Register/University of South Alabama poll estimated that around three-quarters of them pulled for either the Tide or the Tigers.\n\nThe vast majority of those fans are known as \"sidewalk alums\" or \"dirt-road alums\"\u2014people with no official connection to either school but who nevertheless root for their chosen team with a tribal fidelity that can be, for an outsider at least, hard to fathom. On the day I visited Finebaum's studio last April, he led his broadcast with a clip of an Auburn fan admitting he'd referred to the autocratic Tide head coach Nick Saban as \"Little Hitler.\" The actual talking points hardly seemed to matter, though, as computer screens lit up with Alabama and Auburn partisans itching to blast buckshot across the airwaves. A World War II veteran named Bill offered the opinion that Auburn people \"are full of jealousy and hate.\" A Finebaum regular, a Tigers buff who used the handle I-Man, pronounced that he possessed the key to the Bammer mind and could unloose all the ravings there within. A Tide fan calling from the road said the Auburn-decorated car beside him was being driven by an older white guy, a beefy black kid riding shotgun, no doubt a booster in the process of some illegal recruiting, since \"you know how Auburn rolls.\" A painting I viewed at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute just before heading over to the radio studio seemed to capture well this state of affairs. Above a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.'s \"I Have a Dream\" speech, Auburn and Alabama players were depicted standing together at midfield, arm in arm, as if college football were the enduring civil strife that one day, maybe, shall be overcome.\n\nOr maybe not. I contacted one of Finebaum's frequent callers, a woman named Tammy Hethcox, a forklift operator from Rockford, Alabama, whose on-air taunts had helped push Harvey Updyke over the edge. She became an Auburn fan in 1973, when an uncle took her to the campus and an art teacher there showed her how to do some cross-stitching. Everyone else in her family, including her father, supported Bama, but none of them were right, and she hated her daddy then and hates him now. \"Mister Ben, if Nick Saban is on the cover of your magazine in a suit,\" Tammy told me, \"I'ma find you and lay on you a bad country asswhooping.\" Then she unleashed Auburn's battle cry: \"Waaar Eagle!\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIn April the famous trees at Toomer's Corner didn't look like the victim of a felonious poisoning. Gracing the entrance to Auburn's redbrick campus, the live oaks were abundantly in leaf. Banners declaring Auburn the national champs fluttered from every light pole, and posted signs announced a special trees and traditions fund, \"to do whatever it takes to save, replace, or find an alternative for the Toomer's oaks.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAcross the street, in the University Barber Shop, Darsie Rogers was sitting in one of four barber chairs, awaiting customers. Built like a defensive end, with a shiny hairless pate and trim silver goatee, Rogers grew up a Tide fan in Liberty City, over in Tallapoosa County, because he didn't know no better. \"It didn't take nothing to like Alabama,\" he told me. \"Like pulling for the Yankees.\" But the day he opened up shop, in 1960, he became \"a full Auburn man, pure Auburn, and never sorry of it.\" He had cut the hair of most coaches and players, at least back when the team was by and large white. The current coach, Gene Chizik, was in there just the other day. The shop had a radio and a large television, both off, and I asked whether he listened to Finebaum. \"When he's getting paid by Alabama?\" he spat. I ventured that Alabama fans think he's partial to Auburn, and Rogers rose violently from his seat and flopped back down, throwing me a wild look.\n\nA guy in a leather vest entered the shop, grabbed a pair of scissors, and started trimming his own graying hair. He was greeted as Ray, and Ray announced that you could pick out the Bama fan in any crowd. The stereotypes held that the University of Alabama, the preeminent state school in the more industrialized north, was full of doctors and lawyers and undeserving legacies; Auburn, formerly the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, was in the state's agrarian south and supposedly produced only veterinarians, soil specialists, and pulpwood merchants. It was culture versus agriculture, seersuckered snobs and cow-fucking rubes. But Ray insisted that he wasn't talking about students or graduates of either school. What Ray was talking about were fans, by which he meant the \"dirt-road alums,\" of which Alabama had many more. Auburn partisans liked to say that Bammers couldn't find their beloved Tuscaloosa campus with a GPS. Auburn folk spoke of themselves, by contrast, as a family, a persecuted sect, what Tiders dismissed as a cult. Ray explained that Alabama people were \"all redneck, with greasy hats, camouflage overalls, big ol' trucks, talking like dat right dare. \"To my untrained ear, his mock-Bama voice sounded little changed from his own. \"To them we just nothing,\" Darsie Rogers cut in. \"Ol' Bear calling us a cow college. Everything we do is wrong. Everything they do is right. They say that was Cam cheating at the Iron Bowl last year. But they waking up now. Got to. We're just as good\u2014or better.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nBecause the football rivalry in Alabama is like a blood feud by other means, just about everybody picks a side. A kid who moves into the state is bullied into making a choice and then later bullies others to do the same. For most, the allegiance is part of a long family tradition, a history. Others independently find their following. David Housel, a former Auburn athletic director who showed me around the campus, went to his first football game at the age of ten, the 1956 Alabama-Auburn match-up. Back home, he wrote the two schools asking for information about their programs. Auburn sent him a media guide with a handwritten note thanking him for his interest. Alabama sent a media guide and a bill for $2. \"Alabama got my $2,\" Housel said. \"Auburn my heart.\" Engraved into his wedding ring are expressions of love for his wife and also the initials BB, for Beat Bama.\n\nBecause of a diabetic wound to his foot, Housel conducted my tour of the school from his Chevy Traverse, the radio tuned to a SiriusXM oldies station. Housel was a preeminent scholar of all things Auburn, the author of (by his count) five or six books on the school. He drove me past the train tracks students in 1898 had pig-greased to send a visiting Georgia Tech team skidding two miles beyond the Auburn stop. He pulled over at one point to introduce me to Johnny Valentine, a guard on teams in the late Sixties, who was in town from Florida for Saturday's \"A-Day Game,\" the annual intra-squad scrimmage that caps the spring practice season. Valentine, Housel said by way of introduction, played on the 1969 team that scored the most points ever against Bryant. Indeed, Bear Bryant so dominated Auburn, winning nineteen times in 25 years, that the Tiger faithful often resort to chalking up isolated achievements and moral victories. \"If you take out the Bryant years\u2014and I know you can't\u2014we actually lead the series,\" Housel reflected.\n\nHousel felt last year's Iron Bowl was magical, as was the annual face-off in 1982 when Bo Jackson leapt into the end zone on fourth down with just minutes to go. But for him the single greatest moment in Auburn history occurred in 1989, when the team played its first home game against the Tide. Up to that point, Alabama would not deign to compete in Auburn, and the Iron Bowl was held in Birmingham, supposedly a neutral site. But with Bama hosting some of its other games there and a bust of Bryant outside the stadium, Housel said, it was \"about as neutral as the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.\" Housel chewed over with disgust what it meant for another school to dictate where you play, to treat you second-class, the inequality in it. Auburn won the big game 30-20, but even more importantly, Housel asserted, \"We insisted on our rights.\"\n\nAs we made our way to Toomer's Corner, Housel said there was just something more spiritual about Auburn. \"The Auburn spirit is the human spirit, the American spirit. It's deeper than football.\" Alabama, on the other hand, was consumed with the end of the journey, with winning, so much so that they counted among their thirteen national titles those years before the advent, in 1998, of the bowl championship game when even a single piddly poll named them the top school. If Auburn used the same math, Housel figured, they could claim like eight or nine titles themselves. Other broad-stroke differences between the schools had disappeared over time. Auburn had caught up athletically and academically. Housel said the schools were now like two old Greek city-states that are pretty much alike but swear their way of life is better. Still, Housel reckoned he'd \"rather be an ag school than a law school. When you eat your supper tonight,\" he told me, \"you can bet Auburn had something to do with it. A country that can't feed its people can't be free.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nOn my way from Auburn to Tuscaloosa, I drove into the eye of a tornado. Not the figurative one of the rivalry but an actual one that tore through the town just as I arrived on campus. This wasn't the mile-wide behemoth that ravaged a sixth of the city two weeks later, killing thirty-six. In the wake of that disaster, Auburn fans created a nonprofit called Toomer's for Tuscaloosa, which sent hundreds of people and tens of thousands of dollars to aid what previously had been thought of as enemy territory. Gina Smith, of Tide for Toomer's, said of this further sign of goodwill, \"I believe Alabama football will serve as a stronger rallying point than ever this season. Much like the Saints after Katrina, the Crimson Tide has the potential to help heal the wounds of the city and the state.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAs sirens blared and warning lights blinkered, I took refuge inside the Bear Bryant Museum, where staff quickly shuttled me into a windowless research room. While waiting out the storm, I spoke with Ken Gaddy, the museum's director. Gaddy had previously helped run the Natural History Museum on campus, but in 1991 he ascended to school football history. He talked about the winning tradition at Alabama and its larger cultural significance. The region had languished long after Reconstruction, with night riders wreaking havoc, people dying from an array of treatable illnesses. So when a group of fresh-faced Tuscaloosa boys traveled to California in 1926 and beat the University of Washington in the Rose Bowl, the victory was shared across the South. On the train ride home through Dixie, crowds and brass bands greeted the team at every depot. A thousand people thronged the station in New Orleans. A generation later, in a decade when Alabama was internationally maligned for its segregationist policies and brutal attacks on protesters, the school won three national championships. Not all causes in the South were lost.\n\nThe following afternoon, the skies were clear for the Crimson Tide's own spring intra-squad scrimmage. On the \"Walk of Champions\" outside Bryant-Denny Stadium, a Nick Saban statue was unveiled, everyone struggling to take a snapshot smiling beside the bronze folds of the giant sculpture's crotch. \"Sweet Home Alabama\" burst from loudspeakers too many times to count. The real Nick Saban\u2014no Bryant second-coming but nevertheless the apotheosis of today's CEO-salaried, NFL-style collegiate coach\u2014stood on the field ten yards behind his offenses. Quarterbacks were touched to end plays, and after every first down the announcer's call was met with a thunderous Roooll Tide! Returning players interviewed throughout the stadium Roll Tided their interlocutors as greeting and farewell, people in the stands shouted it loud and long as existential exultation, and it was yowled as a call to battle, a solemn acknowledgement, and a playful rebuke.\n\nLittle more than a glorified practice, the day's contest attracted 92,000 spectators and was broadcast by ESPN. (Downstate, Auburn's scrimmage drew only 53,000.) Because it was free, an unusually large percentage of the fans in attendance were sidewalk alums, those who didn't necessarily have the connections or resources to secure regular-season tickets. There were still the towheaded boys in white suits and bowties, the girls looking like wine candy in sleeveless pink dresses, and the mothers and daughters wearing matching sorority pins. But this was a day for the T-shirt-and-ballcap set. High walls of black plastic sheeting surrounded the perimeters of the fraternity houses, apparently to control entry into daylong luaus. Not far from the statues of Bryant, Saban and the other Bama luminaries, a compact twenty-year-old stumbled past a booth selling semi-abstract paintings of the Tide's elephant mascot. The young man accidentally or on purpose dumped his beer on an original print, and University and Tuscaloosa police were instantly around him, bumping him chest to face, their hands quivering above batons. The art dealer said the print cost $175 but he'd rather the guy be locked up. The beer-spiller lolled about as if balancing atop a football. \"I don't got it,\" he said. His father was there, a bearded man of fifty. \"Pay him the money, A. J.,\" he wailed. \"You want to buy the picture or go to jail? I'll lend you the money.\" A. J.'s dad turned his pleadings to the authorities. \"How much did you say it was? $175? Oh God!\" He then wheedled and begged for a different outcome. But the proprietor reluctantly sold, and A. J. and his crew walked off, the unhappy owners of a $175 print of a speckled, football-carrying elephant.\n\nUnder ordinary circumstances, Harvey Updyke wouldn't have missed the game. But he had been living in an Auburn stronghold, and in the weeks after he made bail his tires were slashed, his home bricked, his face bashed. He moved out his wife and a grandson staying with them before retreating alone to a secluded spot in the woods, just sitting there atop an ice chest for eight straight days. Later, he'd fled across state lines, to an undisclosed address in Louisiana.\n\nI spent most of the game-day away from the stadium, with tailgaters who had set up shop on a grassy patch of quad outside the kinesiology department, their turf for the past ten seasons. Chris Rogers, a regular caller to the Finebaum show, had told me by phone that he would likely arrive for the 2 p.m. game at around 5 a.m. and that he'd be delighted if I joined him. A fifty-four-year-old technician for ADT Security Services, Chris lived not far from the beaches of Gulf Shores. For the tailgate, he wore a white fishing shirt with Bama's curlicue \"A\" stitched above its breast pocket and a straw Crimson Tide hat above a sunburned face. We drank beers, and he recounted how he had arrived forty-five minutes late for his first wedding, in 1978, because he was at the Alabama-LSU game. Once while in the physical act of cheating on his first wife\u2014he did that a lot back then, was a real slug\u2014he tried to tune in Finebaum's show without exactly stopping what he was doing. That night ended badly, he said, but it damn well proved he was an avid Finebaum fan. He met his current fianc\u00E9, a Thai woman, while she was waitressing at a Bangkok go-go bar. \"Damn, I'm ugly,\" he shouted, bending at the knees, throwing his head back, and thrusting up an arm attached to a Budweiser encased in a Bama sleeve. He looked like a man caught in the throes of the Holy Spirit. \"But I'm about to have me a thirty-one-year-old wife!\"\n\n Every so often Chris's buddies sidled over, reminding him to talk to me about football. Chris's friends called him \"Radio,\" for his volubility, and he called them \"Coach.\" Scott Wadsworth, a retired Special Forces, had a bushy white mustache and a cap autographed by former Alabama QB Kenny Stabler. When Denny Chimes, the campus bells, chimed the hour, Scott told me the sound sent chills down his spine. He loved everything about the campus. C. D. Lackey, who was wearing an Alabama apron and manning the grill, brought me a bourbon and Coke with about seventeen shots of Maker's Mark in it. He was an engineering analyst and worked alongside many Auburn grads. Last year was tough, C. D. said, with his colleagues teasing him about the Iron Bowl: We spotted you twenty-four. You were never really in it.\n\n\"It all came together for Auburn last year,\" Scott conceded. But the Tigers had lost thirty-one players, and he thought it unlikely they'd win eight games this season. Alabama, by contrast, seemed as mighty as in the days of Bear Bryant.\n\n\"It's good right now, Coach!\" Chris howled.\n\nScott and C. D. returned to the grill, and Chris began telling me that his father was the twenty-third of twenty-five children. The family named kids Huey, Dewey and Lewie Rogers, ran through many of the presidents, and by the end were just rearranging cousins' names to come up with new ones. Chris's father was a church elder, and Chris remembered him putting a fist through a door when Stabler threw an interception, breaking the television when the Tide lost. \"He wasn't the exception, he was the rule,\" Chris said. \"Until someone shoots someone else, nothing's out of hand.\"\n\nMy own sports allegiances were formed in what seemed like another world\u2014the South Side of Chicago, where the local college, the University of Chicago, was a football powerhouse way back in the first decades of the last century, and most people rooted peaceably for Notre Dame, over in neighboring Indiana. I've attended hundreds of White Sox games in my time, but on many days during the off-season I think of my team not at all, and never do my passions run to hate for the crosstown Cubs. Yet Chris and his tailgating squad didn't treat me like an outsider. Cheering for their team together, they experienced such joy, their lives were enriched, and they thought generously how much better my life would be if I, too, could partake. They described for me the grandeur of C. D.'s Bama Room, its sixty-one-inch digital TV and walls all painted crimson. They told Auburn jokes of the dumb-blonde variety. They recited, as a litany, the names Joe Namath (\"Our Michael Jordan\") and Shaun Alexander and \"the Deuce,\" David Palmer. Here was a system of belief, a communal faith, and it filled them with ecstasy, purpose and at times rage. Scott placed in my palm a pair of buttons he had bought for me: auburn ain't shit and aubs eat boogers. They insisted that I come visit them at their homes and \"tablegate\" there during away games. Before I left, each one hugged me, offering me a heartfelt \"Roll Tide,\" and I can't deny that I was filled with the desire to \"Roll Tide\" them back.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nExactly a month later, I ate lunch with Harvey Updyke at a seafood shack about forty miles north of New Orleans, on the west bank of Lake Pontchartrain. We both ordered fried-alligator plates, and for nearly four hours Updyke confessed to the incontrovertible fact of his loving Crimson Tide football. It had started in Milton, Florida, twenty-eight miles from the Alabama border, where as a boy he watched The \"Bear\" Bryant Show on Sundays. \"He always seemed like to me he was trying to teach the young men right from wrong,\" Updyke recollected. \"And I just said, 'Man, if I ever have a son, I'm going to name him Bear Bryant.'\" His first child was a girl, Crimson Tyde, and later came Bear Bryant, who was now thirty and a die-hard Texas Longhorns fan. Harvey's third wife rejected his bid to christen another daughter Ally Bama. He still thought the name pretty. \"I would call her Bama,\" he mused. A yellow Lab got that name, and another dog Nicky, after Saban. Updyke now wanted to go unnoticed, so he wore the beginnings of a pointy beard and a rather subdued checked crimson shirt. He figured the last time he hadn't dressed in crimson, houndstooth (Coach Bryant's signature) or some Bama gear was way back in the early 1980s. Yet there were some lines that even he wouldn't cross. \"Jerseys are for kids and women,\" he told me. \"A grown man wearing one is cheesy.\"\n\nUpdyke retired from the Texas Highway Patrol in 1988, not long after he broke his neck in a high-speed chase. When he moved from Austin to a friend's lake house in southern Alabama, Updyke had actually given Auburn no more thought than he had the University of Tennessee, LSU, or other longtime Tide adversaries. Now he despised Auburn. He tried to explain this loathing as the natural\u2014even the noble\u2014response to unendurable wrongs. There was Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville holding up five fingers in 2006 after Auburn beat Alabama for the fifth straight year, while all along Tuberville knew Bama was on probation and the field wasn't level. And out of 120 Division 1 bowl-system football teams, Harvey railed, only Southern Methodist University had been on probation more than Auburn. He read about these and so many other slights and offenses on the website Tider Insider. He never missed Finebaum and all the trash-talking Auburn fools. Once at a Walmart in Alexander City, not far from the lake house, a guy said Harvey would soon be swapping out the Tide cap for orange and blue. \"I stopped dead still,\" Updyke recalled. \"I said, 'Buddy, I'll never have Auburn colors on!'\" I offered that the Walmart man's comments seemed like little more than playful banter. \"The reason that guy enraged me,\" Updyke said, \"is because I think Alabama is doing it the right way, and I know Auburn is cheating. And Auburn they don't care. Seriously, they don't care, as long as they win.\" At that moment a feral kitten hovering at our feet sprang and pinned a green anole against a wall, gobbling it up. I noticed Harvey hadn't touched his alligator.\n\nThe \"tree poisoner,\" as he was now widely known, wanted me to understand that he didn't do it. About herbicides he knew absolutely nothing, and he had never even laid eyes on Toomer's Corner until he left the jail and cruised by it as some sort of prayer vigil for the oaks was taking place. He did call Finebaum's show and say he spiked the trees, but that was just a verbal hoax to piss off the Auburn family. \"Even if I did do it,\" he said, \"they're comparing me to ax murderers and church burners.\" The four Auburn players arrested for armed robbery last spring would no doubt get probation, Updyke said, while he'd inevitably go to prison. And he a guy who had a defibrillator, pacemaker, diabetes, clinical depression, and not too infrequently passed out. \"They will not be satisfied until they get a pound of my flesh.\"\n\nMost of all he hated that this stupid prank would be his legacy, would sum up his life. Updyke said he had been a pretty good highway patrolman. In one month in 1983, he said he caught forty DWIs, a Texas state record, and once stopped a U-Haul truck filled with 7,000 pounds of marijuana. At his Florida high school, he was awarded one of twelve senior superlatives. Now he was a pariah. Jay Barker, the quarterback on Alabama's 1992 national championship team, said on his radio show that Harvey was a nut who had nothing to do with the school. But not all Alabama fans condemned him, Harvey related with a chuckle. When he left the jailhouse, twenty of the men in lockup ran over to the bars as he passed. \"Roll Tide!\" they all yelled.\n\nA week after our meeting, Harvey's lawyer entered a plea of both \"not guilty\" and \"not guilty for reasons of mental disease or defect.\" But Harvey didn't seem deranged to me, or maybe what has become the norm is now just a hairbreadth from insanity. Chris Rogers had told me, \"If I had a chainsaw, I'd want to cut down the Toomer's trees. I wouldn't do it, but I'd think about it.\" Even Gina Smith, of the Tide for Toomer's clique, said a switch flipped when it came to football. \"We can't lose to Auburn. It's bigger than a sibling rivalry,\" she said. \"Some things just can't be squared.\" In many ways, Harvey Updyke's mug shot had become the appropriate face not only of Alabama's intra-state rivalry but also of the zealotry infecting all of college football today. Across the country, professional-grade football programs are now grafted onto institutions of higher learning. Nearly every school has its own rivals website, its endless torrent of blogs and message boards. What teams aren't pushing their fans to ever greater extremes? What colleges aren't willing to break rules to keep pace with Alabama and Auburn and the rest of the Southeastern Conference, whose teams have won the last five national championships? Crazed, high-stakes college football isn't just a case of Southern exceptionalism but of the Alabama way becoming the American way.\n\nBefore we parted, Updyke asked if I knew the story of the 1954 Cotton Bowl. With Alabama already trailing by a point, a Rice University running back broke through the line at his own five and sprinted freely downfield. A Tide player named Tommy Lewis, who was sitting on the bench as the play unfolded, leapt helmetless onto the field and into the path of the unsuspecting Rice back, who crumpled to the turf. The stadium went silent. Rice was eventually awarded the 95-yard touchdown.\n\n\"What Lewis did was cheating. It was totally wrong,\" I nearly shouted, believing I might somehow help Harvey by showing the flaws in whatever allegory he was drawing. He merely waved me off, smiling slightly. Updyke said Lewis was one of the nicest gentlemen anyone had ever met. When asked why, then, he did it, Lewis could say only that he was too full of Bama. \"That's what my problem is,\" Updyke pleaded, not unhappily. \"I'm just too full of Bama.\"\n\nBen Austen is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. His article about the decline of Nascar, \"Southern Culture on the Skids,\" is included in The Best American Travel Writing 2011. \n\nA version of this story appeared in the September 2011 issue of GQ magazine."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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