How to Process Your Joy
The New York Times just called Alabama head coach Nick Saban a “masochist.” Read that here. Well, if that’s true, there are several million others out there who have bonafide memberships in this particular branch of the tree.
Including me.
I just got off the phone with a friend and confessed that last night, a night after Alabama won its latest national championship (17 by Alabama’s account), I couldn’t sleep and so got out of my warm and comfy bed where my wife was gently snoring away, and returned to the scene of my masochistic crime: our 55-inch LG TV, and proceeded to re-watch Monday night’s epic game. I did so, I told my friend, for two reasons:
- Alabama trailed 13–0 at halftime, and then 20–7 late in the third quarter, and if you ask me to relate just how they climbed back in the game and eventually won in overtime, I could not come close to telling you. So I wanted to watch again and see if I could figure it out.
- It’s a peaceful, easy feeling to re-watch a football game that your team has won, so you can relax and enjoy it this time, which no one who is a fan of any team can ever do in the real-time moment, and if you disagree, I won’t believe you, so don’t bother.
The funny part, of course, of reason two is that as I watch Alabama’s starting quarterback Jalen Hurts roll out once again to his right and once again sail a ball out of bounds to avoid a sack, I actually feel vestiges of the nausea, anger, and despair that I felt during the live game feed. As I re-watch, I remember clearly what I was feeling the first time — “Oh yeah, here is the point where I said “FUCK,” after Alabama couldn’t tackle gifted Georgia running back Sony Michele on a 3rd and 20 running play.
And here, remember this moment I say to myself, is where I went to the bathroom looking for pills or Tiger balm — that moment when Alabama’s place kicker did what I couldn’t believe and yet did believe he would do at the end of regulation (Why do kickers so nonchalantly kick extra points, but double-clutch at field goals from almost the same distance? That might be another way of asking whether field-goal kickers are sports’ ultimate masochists).
It was almost 2:00 before I returned to bed last night, roughly the same time I finally went down after the game was over on Monday night. But last night I didn’t have the two doses of Knob Creek bourbon in me, so I actually slept better from 2–6:30.
Why do I do all of this? Why look the way I look on these mornings after? Why care at all, and why am I about to drop roughly $125 on championship t-shirts for my family (including our dogs)?
I think anyone out there who loves their vicarious sport knows why. I think Nick Saban certainly knows why. When you love something, even something as virtual as your favorite football team, you revel in seeing, for want of a better term and at the risk of offending true miracle-workers, “miracles.” You live for crazy moments like replacing your starting quarterback with a true freshman who has never played a meaningful college down, and then watch him throw a bad interception, and take two sacks, one of which coming on the first play of overtime when his/your team is down by three and facing year’s extinction.
Then of course — of course because this is the stuff of fantasies and it doesn’t really change your life much less the course of the world by any fraction of a fraction of an iota — that same “kid,” who is old enough to vote, to fight in a war, and to masochistically or not, carry the weight of those millions of Crimson-clad fans on his shoulder (not to mention his coach who declared after the game that had he been able to reach said quarterback after he took the overtime sack, he would have never pulled off the miracle I’m about to describe), as calmly as you might carve a slice of beef tenderloin, launches a pass approximately 40.3 yards down the field into the hands of another true freshman Crimson Tide receiver.
This was the kind of perfect pass that my friends Steve and Robert and Joe and I used to practice in my Alabama front yard on Fairfax Avenue, oh maybe fifty years ago when another masochistic Alabama coach prowled the sidelines.
In less than 48 hours, I have watched that touchdown pass, that game-winning play, at least 75 times. I’m sure I can watch it ten times that number and still feel a thrill that I can’t explain. I could compare it to many things, other victories like the night in 2008 when I stood with people of all colors watching as America elected its first African-American president. I bring in the world of politics here because, you know, I’m that kind of masochistic. I will say, though that these thrills did not and could never match what I felt watching both of my daughters being born, so please know that I am some kind of healthy and sane, too.
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There have been other games where I’ve felt similar joy and/or ecstasy. I was going to name them in this essay, but have thought better of it for now. Those games, even the ones where Alabama lost (and if you don’t know, go back to the Iron Bowl of 1972 if you want to get depressed, or at least understand why I was), are part of my blood flow, my history, the legacy left to me by the man who sat me down in front of a TV one fall Sunday afternoon at 4:00 Central time. He didn’t suggest; he didn’t advise. He told me that this is the man to watch, to adore, to follow. On our old black and white TV, the man’s team’s colors looked black, not Crimson. But I followed anyway, never seeing the true colors until I was nine and went to my first game at Legion Field.
But it was the man who showed me the man whom I’m most thrilled for. He might have been a masochist for the Crimson Tide, too, but I also remember this moment, a testimonial of sorts.
At our annual Cub Scout banquet when I was nine, the head scout leader, Jack Guyton, stood up and awarded this man a prize: a framed picture and autograph of famous Alabama quarterback, Joe Namath (who got benched in 1964 for off the field wanderings, his backup, Steve Sloan, leading us to a Sugar Bowl victory over Ole Miss in the New Orleans snow no less).
“We’re giving this award to a man whose love for Alabama football is unmatched,” Mr. Guyton said.
And as I was wondering, but somehow secretly knowing, who that man was, I heard Mr. Guyton call my father’s name. I watched my dad, Alvin Barr, walk to the stage and receive his plaque to the cheers and delight of everyone there. And the bemusement, because everyone there who knew my dad knew that this award went to the right man. The most passionate, craziest Bama fan.
My dad might have been a masochist, too, but he would have understood what I did last night. He would have understood Nick Saban and loved him. He might even have agreed that Alabama’s current coach is the greatest in our history.
My mother tells this story about the kind of fan my dad was:
“When Bear Bryant came back to coach at Alabama, your daddy was so happy that he declared, ‘We’ll never lose another game.’”
That’s funny except that if you knew my dad, you also know that he believed it.
He’d so appreciate Nick Saban then for this reason, among many psychological others:
In Saban’s eleven years, Alabama has lost a few games. Twenty, to be exact. Six of those losses came in his first year at Bama.
Not bad.
For a masochist.
So Roll Tide to all, and now, about those t-shirts.