If you don’t follow it, football may seem like a trivial thing to get worked up over. For most of my teenage years, I thought it was pointless, despite playing football briefly while I was in a Pee-Wee league. My dad was one of my coaches. He taught me the X’s and O’s and laced up my cleats.
Dad died three years ago this month. (Hard to imagine it has been that long ago. It seems like yesterday.) He was a life-long Louisiana State University football fan and he hated the University of Alabama.
The only times I’d ever seen him cry involved LSU football games. When I was a boy, my dad took me to some of the best SEC matchups; Alabama-LSU, LSU-Ole Miss. He even let me curse.
He had a wall that was a shrine to the Tigers, with framed schedules and a wooden tiger door knocker painted in purple and gold, the same colors as my bedroom. Dad placed an autographed picture of every LSU coach on that wall, even the bad ones. In the years where it was famine in LSU football, he kept the faith. In the last few years of his life, it was a feast.
I took the hard-earned money he saved for my education and attended the University of Alabama and became a fan. If that bothered dad, he never told me.
Shame I can’t talk to him about the LSU-Alabama game on Nov. 5, when the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country will hold a de facto championship playoff in Tuscaloosa.
It’s being analyzed to death, but it’s a pretty straightforward situation. This is grown-man football. It’s a game of equals and consequences. The LSU fan base loathes Alabama. Alabama fans don’t care for LSU. For those who don’t know the back story, Alabama coach Nick Saban previously coached LSU. LSU fans were livid when he returned to the college game from a brief stint in the NFL to coach one of their biggest rivals.
I’m Bama all the way, but I can’t bring myself to hate the school my dad loved. He worked too hard to teach me to love it.
A few years before he died, my brother Jacob accompanied him to Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge for the Troy-LSU game. It was the last game my dad ever attended.
It’s hard to say why my interest in sports waned in my teenage years. I was never very good at them, but, then again, I was never a competitive person. My brother seemed to siphon off all the athleticism in my family’s gene pool. I went into musical theater. My brother hit home runs and made clutch plays. I put on makeup and acted in plays. To his credit, dad was very supportive of anything I wanted to do, even if that meant going to Bama.
Eventually I came full circle and became an ardent football fan after graduating from Alabama in 2005 with a journalism degree.
I became a fan for lots of reasons. It’s a good conversation starter. Sports writing is some of the best journalism you’ll ever read. It’s also fun to watch grown men give one another concussions for the sake of a game.
But it was also something that helped me understand things about my father. Now when I watch LSU dominate opponents the way it does, I get chills. I know that somewhere dad is happy.
I hope Bama beats LSU down on Nov. 5. I just won’t be offended if my dad’s team ends up going all the way. And now the sportswriters are suggesting that the national championship could be a rematch between the two teams, if the game is good enough.
I think it will be.
One of the framed pictures dad had was an autographed photo of Nick Saban in his LSU garb. I think I might pull that one out of the packing box and hang it on the wall for the game Nov. 5, next to a picture of dad.
Dan Whisenhunt is Associate Editor of Reporter Newspapers. He can be reached: danwhisenhunt@reporternewspapers.net.
