WE WANT BAMA

A rollicking, politically charged portrait of a college football team in “the Foul and Venomous Year of Unholy Universal Biting Bullshit that was 2020.”

College football is a secular religion in the South. Nowhere is that more true than Tuscaloosa, where Alabama’s Crimson Tide has racked up an enviable record—first under Bear Bryant and then Nick Saban, who has surpassed Bryant in championship games won. In addition, writes Goodman, “he defended what was right when the hour of truth demanded it.” That defense was a repudiation of Trumpism in the heart of Trump country, with Saban and his players publicly affirming the Black Lives Matter movement and denouncing racism. Goodman has a healthy sense of both the symbolic power of football and its limits. “College football,” he writes sagely, “is American bloodlust played by unpaid gladiators, and game days in the Deep South are the feasts before the altars of decadence.” Tailgating, beer chugging, fights—all part of the deal, compounded by Covid-19, which the Alabama program took seriously. The political consequence of taking a knee and masking up? Trump, of course, backed Auburn, endorsing its former head coach in his 2020 Senate run. Goodman has no use for Trump, nor for the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy. As he observes, Birmingham wasn’t founded until after the Civil War, and thus there’s no excuse for any Confederate memorials there. Goodman is constantly aware of what social justice advocates on and off the gridiron are up against: “Always remember what sells in the Deep South: ‘White Southern men’ are the real victims of history.” If David Foster Wallace was from red clay country and liked football instead of tennis, he might have approached Goodman’s gonzo-lashed prose. Goodman is wholly an original, and he delivers a spirited reckoning of what’s right and wrong with the South.

An outstanding work of sports journalism that far transcends mere sports. Roll Tide.