The Sportsmen
For its Iron Bowl party, the Sportsmen’s Club of Gadsden sets up a large tent on a grassy peninsula sticking half a mile out into Lake Gadsden, a vacant part of a housing development called The Cove that seems to have failed to launch. A shantytown of half a dozen RVs has formed a crescent around one side of the tent, where grills are smoking and big screens show the pregame pageantries. A few dogs skitter across the gravel untended.
Inside the tent, two dozen tables are decorated alternately with Alabama and Auburn colors, and a long buffet of typical tailgating fare is flanked by an open bar, overseen by bartenders from The Gridiron who the Sportsmen are helping to put through nursing school on scholarships and tips. Half a dozen big-screen TVs are attached to poles supporting the white canvas, TVs that will be raffled off after the game.
Despite the color-coded tables, the hundred or so fans of both teams, the Sportsmen and their wives and their friends and in some cases their grown children, sit in mixed groups as they watch the game. There is lots of early shouting from both sides during the first few drives, but they are all shouts that this tent has heard before, broken-in banter from the usual suspects.
It is, in short, a social gathering. It feels, as I sit drinking a Bud Light (sorry Barry, the choices at the bar are limited to Lights Bud, Miller and Coors), exotically familiar, like speaking a language you learned in college but have not practiced in years. It’s the same feeling I had when I went to pick up a to-go order of wings a few Saturdays ago at Jefferson’s on Rainbow Drive and was startled to see nearly every available inch of wall space covered in big screen TVs, families sitting in the booths watching the Auburn-Georgia game. Even fine dining restaurants in Birmingham have televisions. Football is life, and not in the sense of some shallow sports metaphor. It is simply one of the vessels in which life here takes place.
In Minneapolis, we once went into Pat’s Taps in Uptown on New Year’s Day, a total hipster bar that undeniably has a great beer selection and, according to my wife, outstanding wallpaper. We were hung over and wanted to nurse said hangovers with mimosas and college football. The place had one TV in it, a 1990s number in the corner of the bar with about a 13-inch screen that looked like maybe it did side duty as a monitor for security camera footage. It was turned off.
I asked the bartender if we could switch on the Northwestern bowl game. She made a face like I’d asked her to dissect a puppy on the bar. She said she didn’t even know how to turn the TV on, and went to the doorway to the kitchen, where we could hear her say to an unseen manager, “They want to watch … football,” holding the last word at arm’s length.
Minneapolis is a corporate town. When we moved there, I was told the Twin Cities has the highest number of Fortune 500 headquarters per capita in the country. And this creates what feels like a sharp dichotomy — you’re either corporate or you’re a hipster, and there’s not a lot of overlapping space in between for something like college football, which to some degree draws on elements of both political bases and fuses them into a new alloy. It is a good town for the NFL, with its unequivocal speed, efficiency and marketing. There is no second-guessing in the NFL, no esoterica, no acknowledging of the other side of an argument. There are no bizarre trophies stemming from century-old effrontery. It is pure invention, a planned city.
The Goodyear factory on the edge of town notwithstanding, Gadsden is about the least corporate place I’ve ever been. There is nothing big here. Birmingham has its regional banks and energy companies and hospitals. Tuscaloosa has the university, which may be corporatism disguised, but it’s still corporatism. Gadsden barely has a Walmart. Publix just opened last month. Mostly, there are small businesses: small banks, small grocery stores, small wealth management firms, small auto repair shops. And there are the people who own and run them. Football, at least four months out of the year, is a central platform for socializing in Gadsden, and this gives college football a different flavor.
People like to say that college football is so popular here because it’s “all Alabama has.” Especially, people from outside Alabama like to say this. It’s not remotely true, but even if it were, it would kind of be like saying, “all he has is a gold house and a rocket car.” (I’ll let you decide which team is which.)
At halftime, with a 12–6 score, everyone in the tent is restless: The Alabama fans because they aren’t as far ahead as they expected to be, and the Auburn fans because they’ve realized they have something to play for, but suspect it will come to naught in the second half. Most of the Sportsmen and many others have some money on the game. Everyone seems to have thought Alabama would be a safe cover. The Auburn fans have either taken the over/under or have waited until halftime to put their money on the line.
As the second half proceeds, the double-tipped touchdown pass causes the greatest amount of shouting until Derrick Henry’s touchdown with three minutes to play gives Alabama the backdoor cover. Someone points out a man and tells me he’s a bookie who has just lost $46,000, having gotten virtually no action on Auburn before the game.
Is it rowdy? Sure. But it is a sociable rowdiness. Auburn claims that it’s all about family, but here, it’s all in the family period when it come to college football, Auburn or Alabama. After the game ends, I watch two ample men from opposing sides trade sweaty, stretched out polos with each other and then pose for photos, an arm around one another and a rival’s insignia on their chests. Raffles are held, with half the proceeds going to scholarships for local college students who are studying in Jacksonville, in Birmingham, in Tuscaloosa or Auburn. After this, people take turns walking wobbly routes up to the front table to plunk down $50 or $100 for a local charity that buys Christmas presents for poor kids, the names of the benefactors called out over the sound system and cheered by the group.
Outside, it is dark, and bonfires have been struck in the shantytown, an orange counterpoint to the neon glow of the night games already playing on the big screens in the makeshift outdoor living rooms. I talk with another bookie who also has lost tens of thousands of dollars on that last touchdown run. But never mind, he says, he’s still up a hundred grand on the year. I’m not too worried about him.
