Insane
by Chris Ying
Insane is a word I hear a lot. It has crept out of the swamp of hyperbolic surfer-snowboarder rhetoric—along with rad(ical), gnarly, sick, killer, etc.—onto the shores of wider use. Restaurant people use it in various adjectival and adverbial configurations: “The duck is insane!” “These canelés are insaaaaane.” “We insanely ordered too much food.” (Also “We ordered insanely too much food.”)
To be colloquially as opposed to clinically insane implies something so fantastic in quality or outlandish in quantity that it shatters rational expectation. In its splendor or munificence, the insane thing may drive us to senseless, unhealthy behavior.
Sports fandom is insane. To the sports abstinent, those of us who bind ourselves emotionally to our teams—whether for geographic, nostalgic, or less explicable reasons—may appear deranged in the way we live and die with the outcome of largely meaningless competitions. But this means nothing to the sports fan. The joy of watching your team win is euphoric, and is amplified by how hard you have supported your squad. To leave a game early, even in the face of insurmountable odds, is unthinkable to a true fan. Showing up early is equally important. That’s where tailgating comes in. As Warren St. John tells it:
In the early ’70s, some mad football fan someplace … got it in his head to drive a motor home right up to the stadium on game day, probably for the simple reason that motor homes have bathrooms and therefore provided this fan and his beer-drinking buddies the luxury of a place to take a leak during their pregame tailgate party.
And so tailgating grew from beers and barbecue in the parking lot to a days-long ritual.
RVs completely changed the fan experience. Before, football games were circumscribed events. They took place inside a stadium on Saturdays and lasted about three hours, after which everyone went home. Logistical problems like traffic, the need for tickets, the need for those bathrooms—set games off from the rest of life. RVs blew open the experience. The event was no longer confined to three hours—it could last three days.
St. John is the author of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, an entertainingly self-conscious book about being a fan of the University of Alabama football team. A blog entry late last year for the New Yorker singled out college football as “perhaps our most insane cultural institution.” The writer, Reeves Wiedeman, was writing specifically about the Iron Bowl.
The Iron Bowl—the annual clash between the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn University Tigers—is one of the premier events in college football, a spectacular intersection of fierce internecine rivalry and not having much else to care about. There are no Big Four professional sports teams in Alabama, so these two titans share the full attention of most of the sports lovers in the state.
It has been said that the college towns of Auburn and Tuscaloosa, which alternate as the site of the Iron Bowl, come to a standstill during game week. Weddings and funerals make way. Businesses close early. The Iron Bowl is colloquially and DSM-5 insane. Dave Chang and I, being great admirers of sports, eating, and people acting crazy, flew to Auburn to take in the spectacle in person.
During Iron Bowl week, the citizenry is so focused on the game they pay attention to little else. They certainly didn’t flinch when two conspicuously oversized Asian men showed up in very not-Asian Auburn the day after Thanksgiving to visit a school neither of us attended to watch a football game neither of us had any stake in. “You guys here for the game? Cool.”
We were, by association, fans of Auburn. (Dave’s assistant, Kat, went to Auburn, and she arranged the trip to her alma mater.) But our explicit reason for coming was the tailgating—we’d been told that the schools of the Southeastern Conference have refined tailgating to an art. That was enough to sell us. Dave and I graduated from two schools without great football traditions. Mine at Berkeley was stronger than Dave’s at Trinity College, but as far as tailgating goes, they might as well have played in the same peewee division.
On our first night in town, with visions of legendary excess dancing in our heads, we crammed ourselves into a frat party that appeared to be extracted directly from an American Pie movie. Students were spilling out of a barn-ish building, perched on windowsills and atop tables and railings, watching four rappers on a raised stage. The musicians played to the grinding, hormonal sea of bodies, at one point unleashing the Auburn version of “Sweet Home Alabama,” in which “Fuck you, Alabama / War damn eagle”[1] is wedged in place of the chorus.
But conspicuously absent from the party were the overflowing rivers of booze we thought we’d encounter. I had expected more from my first SEC frat party. I’d imagined keg stands and boat races and cans smashed against foreheads. I thought I’d learn at least one new way to quickly force a twelve-ounce beer into my body.
The beverage drought, along with Dave’s realization that he was twice the age of the other party attendees, pointed to our imminent skedaddling. For most of the walk home, Dave held forth about how he would have orchestrated the alcoholic feng shui for such a party. “At least fifty kegs, stationed at the three points of egress….”
On the way home, we stopped at Waffle House. Hash browns at WaHo formed one of two pillars of our daily bread in Alabama. The other was Chik-fil-A.
The part of me that cares about other humans recoils a bit at the idea of eating at a restaurant chain with politics that are openly and aggressively discriminatory. But Dave has a way of sweeping you up in hyperbolic endorsement when he wants you to make him feel better about doing something he knows is wrong too: “You won’t care about civil rights when you got that biscuit in your hands.” So we went to Chik-fil-A—numerous times. If you haven’t had one, the namesake fillet is salty and a little bit sweet, the breading not aggressively crunchy, the spices passive and savory in a nonspecific way. It is eminently satisfying. The biscuit is the best vehicle for the chicken, but you can also try it on a bun, squishy and soft as it is. The truth is that everything in a Chik-fil-A sandwich, whether bun, biscuit, or bird, is essentially the same texture—a fact that comports well with the company’s well-documented homophobic politics. It’s a guilty pleasure.
It took me a while to identify what I found unsettling about Auburn. It wasn’t the usual Southern stereotypes that tend to furrow the eyebrows of big-city Yankees traveling below the Mason-Dixon. Sure, the trucks are big and decorated with Stars and Bars—the cars in general all seemed to be modified from their factory default. But that’s to be expected. We were likewise unfazed by the fact that we came across only two other Asian people the whole time we were in Alabama. The city of Auburn is a shade over 5 percent Asian. The undergraduate population of the university is 2.1 percent Asian (421 students) and 85.3 percent white (19,799 students).
What’s unsettling about Auburn is this: there are no weirdos. Where are all the disaffected stoners, goths, punks, and geeks? Where are all the people we hung out with in college? Dave and I are already anomalous among our own kin,[2] let alone amid all these happy white kids. During our stay in Auburn, we never met anything short of the most courteous, welcoming people one could hope to encounter, but that made our presence feel all the more incongruous. In addition to kind of being weirdos, we’re also kind of assholes.
Chief among the not-assholes were the Burketts, a family of peanut farmers from Donalsonville, Georgia, who have a daughter who’s a Tigerette (a sort of cheerleader–student recruiter hybrid). They, along with the Carters—more peanut people from Georgia, but not the peanut Carters of Georgia—invited us to a tailgate at their RV, stationed a hundred yards from Tiger Walk, where the players file in from their buses to the stadium to the thrill of thousands of gathered fans. (The football team spends the night before each home game in an out-of-town hotel to shield them from distractions.)
The spread comprised all the sustenance a Tigerette requires to smile and cheer and generally be ebullient about all things Auburn. Tigerettes, it would appear, are predominantly powered by sugar. There were pancakes and pecan French toast, mayhaw jelly, a honey-baked ham, and “crack dip,” a cloying mortar of cream cheese, brown sugar, and crumbled Heath bars. Plus Oreo pops, which are sort of like Oreo meatballs. To make them, you mix ground-up cookies with cream cheese, form the mixture into balls, and then dip the balls in melted chocolate. They become “pops” if you impale them with sticks.
My sweet tooth is small and undeveloped, so I stuck to inspecting the savory offerings: sausage, cheese, and egg strata; sausage balls; smoked hot links; shrimp and grits; cheese wafers. Dave, I think, shares my general aversion to sweets. He took a bite of an Oreo pop that was given to him, and then surreptitiously stuffed it in my hand as if I were a dog under the table. Before I could object, I saw the gaze of our hosts falling on us, so I jammed the pop in my mouth along with another half-eaten one I’d already been stashing. I felt a tingle in my kidneys that I was sure meant Dave had just pushed me over the threshold into diabetes.
At another tailgate situated at a site on campus reserved for high-profile tailgaters, we spotted Pat Dye and spoke with Yann Cowart. Dye is the legendary coach after whom Auburn’s field has been named since 2005. Cowart played for Dye as the center in front of Bo Jackson, and he cooked the ribs for the tailgate. I talked rib cookery with Cowart, who said the key to success was copious quantities of garlic powder and salt: “When you think you had enough, double it.” I thought that was charming even if the ribs were unspectacular, so I pressed for more recipes.
A guy named Steve told me about his tomato grits. I had never heard of tomato grits, and thought perhaps I could break the story on them. “You start with quick-cooking grits, and boil them with milk and water. Then take a big number-ten can of Ro*Tel diced tomatoes, and cook them with Kraft garlic cheese…” I jotted furiously, and Steve saw me struggling to keep up. “I’ll tell you what. The easiest thing for you to do is go to foodnetwork.com and search for ‘Paula Deen Tomato Grits.’”
There were rumblings from the early planning stages of the trip, all the way until kickoff, that we’d get to meet Bo Jackson, Auburn’s favorite alum and perhaps the most physically gifted athlete of all time. Standing on the sidelines before the game, our handler/host Wendy said that Bo might come out of the tunnel for a chat, but if he decided not to, our meeting just wasn’t going to happen. Sort of like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day. It seemed to me to be a mistake to give Bo the choice of whether or not to meet us; I was confused why he’d want to. But I was feeling lucky that day, and I told our photographer Gabriele as much.
Part of what makes sports worth watching and why it’s seen as a crime to leave the stadium early is that at any given game, there’s a chance you’ll witness something incredible: a physics-defying play, a miracle comeback, a last-second winner, an unbreakable record broken. But the odds are not in your favor. In reality, most games unfold as predicted—that’s why sports gambling and analyzing sports statistics are such big-money endeavors.
We had more or less struck out with the tailgates. I feel guilty saying it, as our hosts were supremely generous. The food was plentiful and quaintly homemade, but nothing had been especially insane. I don’t know exactly what I’d had in mind. Some blend of Memphis in May and Oktoberfest, I suppose—a cloud of smoke hanging in the air above hundreds of roasting pigs, girls flashing, beer slicking the asphalt, drunks fighting. I assumed the tailgates would be rowdier, that I’d see more Alabama fans being harassed. In the student union, a long line of Tigers stood politely waiting for the restroom with a few Tide fans. I wanted them to block those bozos from peeing! But these weren’t the hooligans of Among the Thugs. They were nice people not overdoing it too much before the game. Hell, I would’ve settled for a redneck calling me a racist epithet. At least it would’ve been a story.
As kickoff approached, I was nervous about how uneventful things had been so far, and perhaps that anxiety fueled my faith that we’d see something special on the field. Anyway, we never met Bo. But we did pose for photos with Nova, the actual war eagle that hypostatizes Auburn’s rebel yell.
The Iron Bowl is always significant to Alabamians, but the buildup to this past November’s encounter was amplified to a national frenzy because both teams were in the hunt for the national championship. Alabama is almost always in that discussion, but the Tigers were a surprise—a shock, really. Last season they were 3-9, and nobody expected them to be legitimate contenders. But here they were, number four in the country, and likely destined for the big dance if they could eke out a win against their bitterest rival.
If you have even a passing interest in football and you haven’t seen this game, it really is worth watching in its entirety. Those who saw it will be able to recall the details from memory for at least the next five years, as I will for you now. We’ll jump in about three minutes into the fourth quarter. A 99-yard Alabama touchdown knocks the wind out of the Auburn crowd. A roar of cheers rings out from the northeast corner of the stadium, where the visiting fans are corralled, but otherwise it’s eerily quiet. Time bleeds excruciatingly from the clock until finally Auburn ties the game with forty-one seconds remaining. Alabama receives the ensuing kickoff, and manages to move the ball 33 yards on three plays. There’s a moment of relief when everyone thinks that time has run out with the score tied. We’ll win it in overtime. But Alabama’s veteran coach Nick Saban appeals to the officials to check the replays, he’s pretty sure his guy was pushed out of bounds with one second left on the clock. The refs confer and decide to award Saban his one second and a chance for a game-winning field goal. This is it, we Auburn fans think. This is how it ends—that crafty wolf Saban is going to steal it. The teams line up for the try, and Auburn’s coach Gus Malzahn takes a time-out to ice the kicker. I’ll take this post hoc time-out to mention that all of this is taking place two weeks after what Auburn fans thought would be the most jaw-dropping, jumping-up-and-down-on-the-couch moment they’d experience this season and possibly their whole lives: a 73-yard, game-winning Hail Mary that was deflected by two colliding defenders, then juggled for what seemed like an eternity before ultimately being brought in and taken to the house by speedy wideout Ricardo Louis. Back at the Iron Bowl, the kick is true but short. Cornerback Chris Davis is waiting at the back of the end zone for this very possibility. The ball is catchable and technically returnable, so he cradles it under his right arm, and takes seven or eight strides to the right before cutting back left. One or two Crimson Tide players manage swipes that make fleeting contact with Davis as he flies down the sideline. It takes the crowd until Davis is at the 30 to realize what’s happening—it’s not often one sees a field goal attempt run out of the end zone—and it’s not until he’s at midfield that we entertain the possibility that maybe he’s going to make it all the way. Somebody has grasped onto my shoulders, and I can’t tell if I’m jumping up and down or being bounced like a baby in this person’s arms. And then Davis is gone, 109 yards for the win. And suddenly we are all infants, screaming and crying and bouncing.
Before the game, Dave had asked the usually bubbly Wendy if we could storm the field when Auburn won, and she had replied soberly, “No, we don’t do that.” But we did—there was no stopping us, along with most of the Auburn-favoring crowd. Once you’re on the field, there’s really not much to do but will yourself into absorbing as much of the moment as you can. I plucked a few blades of grass from the 50-yard line and put them in the folds of my hat.
Gabriele is Italian and finds the rules of American football mystifying. Later, as we filed out of the stadium, he asked, “So what we saw tonight, does this happen often?”
Not really, Gabri. It happened exactly one time, just now.
We thought for sure that the entire town would burn to the ground. We had front-row seats for the aftermath of the biggest victory in Auburn history, and if the campus had been swept off the earth in a tidal surge of ecstasy, we would happily have let ourselves be carried away with it. So we walked to Toomer’s Corner, where, until recently, everything good at Auburn was celebrated by veiling a pair of ancient oak trees with thousands of rolls of toilet paper. An unhinged Alabama fan put an end to that tradition, though, by dosing the trees with enough herbicide to kill a forest, and the oaks were felled last April. But the fans still gather, undeterred, to heave rolls of two-ply over everything in sight.
From there, we considered heading to the hayfields, the epicenter of Auburn tailgating. We’d visited earlier in the day, and gawked at the thousands of RVs that had been parked bumper to bumper for as long as a week ahead of the game. The fields have the look of an internally displaced persons’ camp but the sort of meticulous zeal of a comic-book convention. If we wanted to see insane, for sure that’s where it’d be.
Ultimately we decided that we should see what the kids were up to. We stopped in to a frat house where the boys were somehow celebrating without booze. We quickly moved on. Kat’s brother was still an undergrad living in a frat-ish house near campus—perfect. They were poor students, though, so they probably wouldn’t have much beer either. No problem—we stopped in at a liquor store and bought 120 cans from a very sour shopgirl who’d been rooting for Alabama.
We arrived at the house, hoisting the beer over our heads, thinking we’d be received like returning conquerors. But the denizens of the house were unmoved. A kid muttered, “Holy crap” from his supine position on an air mattress on the floor, but otherwise nobody deigned to join us. Kat and I played the most sullen game of beer pong while Dave checked his e-mail. We left the beer for the house and headed for Chik-fil-A.
I’ve had some time to consider how little drinking we encountered in Auburn, and I still haven’t figured it out. Were we just unwelcome narcs? Were kegs being rolled into closets and bottles emptied into toilets the moment someone caught wind that the old fogies were on their way? The day after the game, Dave and I questioned a bartender at the worst chicken-wing shop in America. He pointed to the Southern Baptists. (In a survey conducted by the Princeton Review, Auburn had emerged as the most conservative student body in America.) “Drinking is a sin,” the bartender said. “People drink, but they don’t flaunt it.”
Later on the night of the Iron Bowl, Gabri and I stopped by the hayfields to see if we could catch some drinkers in the act. But aside from a few scattered night-cappers huddled around fires, the place was quiet. Everyone was ensconced in their RVs or else partying in secret, somewhere we couldn’t find.
Kat had scored our tickets and access to the game through a friend whose father was a big donor to Auburn athletics. We couldn’t leave town without paying a visit to our benefactor, so after the failed party and sandwiches at Chik-fil-A we hitched a ride from Kat’s friend’s dad to his house for a late-night snack. It was two days after Thanksgiving, so on the menu were turkey-day leftovers, which I was happy to find, as I’d missed out on my own leftovers to be in Auburn. Kat’s friend described one dish as his “not-Chinese grandmother’s Chinese chicken salad.” I can never resist Chinese chicken salad, no matter how not-Chinese it is.
We sat together in yet another sleepy living room, and I surveyed my placid surroundings. Everyone was so happy to have won. They were tired and hoarse from screaming, but still buzzing. And I realized that there’s no single team or endeavor that my entire collective family and friends get behind. I don’t think I share a common rooting interest with more than two people. In fact, I generally get more pleasure from my friends’ teams losing than from mine winning. Maybe that’s why we drink so much beer when we watch sports. One of us is going to lose, so the only way for us all to be happy is to be drunk together.
We rewatched the “Kick Six” a few times from the DVR, and Dave kept whispering to me that this man was very important and very wealthy, and could I eat with a fork and not my fingers for fuck’s sake? Show some respect. He was the reason we had tickets to the best game of college football we’d ever see. The seats we had were thanks to his season tickets. I couldn’t help but think that the home we were in was not as lavish or gigantic as I’d imagined from a big-time Auburn booster. There were, what, four bedrooms? That was barely enough for his family of five.
Kat’s friend’s dad drove us home. On the way, I asked, “So how long have you been living in Auburn?” trying to get a sense of our bighearted sponsor. He responded matter-of-factly, “Oh, I don’t live here. This is a house we keep for game days.”
Insane.
[1] Auburn’s team is the Tigers, but they are just as closely associated with the battle cry “War eagle” (or, at extra-feverish moments, “War damn eagle”). Auburnites greet each other by saying, “War eagle.” You can also deploy “War eagle” to thank people for small favors—opening a door, giving you directions. I was half surprised that neither of the premeal prayers I witnessed in Auburn was concluded with “War eagle.”
[2] Size is the most obvious anomaly. The apocryphal tale of Dave’s relative largeness is that when he was young, he wanted desperately to be bigger than his brothers. In an impressive show of willpower, he drank a gallon of milk every day for something like five years, until he had blown past his siblings into the ninety-ninth percentile of Korean boys in Virginia. He says the milk was the cheap stuff—as in not from organically raised and pastured cows—and he attributes his success to bovine growth hormone. As for me, my parents owned ice cream stores for the first ten years of my life. I am much larger than my own brother, who did not spend countless hours skulking around the back room of Baskin-Robbins, gobbling down sundaes. I suppose I’m also a product of BGH.
