Every so often Chris's buddies sidled over, reminding him to talk to me about football. Chris's friends called him "Radio," for his volubility, and he called them "Coach." Scott Wadsworth, a retired Special Forces, had a bushy white mustache and a cap autographed by former Alabama QB Kenny Stabler. When Denny Chimes, the campus bells, chimed the hour, Scott told me the sound sent chills down his spine. He loved everything about the campus. C. D. Lackey, who was wearing an Alabama apron and manning the grill, brought me a bourbon and Coke with about seventeen shots of Maker's Mark in it. He was an engineering analyst and worked alongside many Auburn grads. Last year was tough, C. D. said, with his colleagues teasing him about the Iron Bowl: We spotted you twenty-four. You were never really in it.

"It all came together for Auburn last year," Scott conceded. But the Tigers had lost thirty-one players, and he thought it unlikely they'd win eight games this season. Alabama, by contrast, seemed as mighty as in the days of Bear Bryant.

"It's good right now, Coach!" Chris howled.

Scott and C. D. returned to the grill, and Chris began telling me that his father was the twenty-third of twenty-five children. The family named kids Huey, Dewey and Lewie Rogers, ran through many of the presidents, and by the end were just rearranging cousins' names to come up with new ones. Chris's father was a church elder, and Chris remembered him putting a fist through a door when Stabler threw an interception, breaking the television when the Tide lost. "He wasn't the exception, he was the rule," Chris said. "Until someone shoots someone else, nothing's out of hand."

My own sports allegiances were formed in what seemed like another world—the South Side of Chicago, where the local college, the University of Chicago, was a football powerhouse way back in the first decades of the last century, and most people rooted peaceably for Notre Dame, over in neighboring Indiana. I've attended hundreds of White Sox games in my time, but on many days during the off-season I think of my team not at all, and never do my passions run to hate for the crosstown Cubs. Yet Chris and his tailgating squad didn't treat me like an outsider. Cheering for their team together, they experienced such joy, their lives were enriched, and they thought generously how much better my life would be if I, too, could partake. They described for me the grandeur of C. D.'s Bama Room, its sixty-one-inch digital TV and walls all painted crimson. They told Auburn jokes of the dumb-blonde variety. They recited, as a litany, the names Joe Namath ("Our Michael Jordan") and Shaun Alexander and "the Deuce," David Palmer. Here was a system of belief, a communal faith, and it filled them with ecstasy, purpose and at times rage. Scott placed in my palm a pair of buttons he had bought for me: auburn ain't shit and aubs eat boogers. They insisted that I come visit them at their homes and "tablegate" there during away games. Before I left, each one hugged me, offering me a heartfelt "Roll Tide," and I can't deny that I was filled with the desire to "Roll Tide" them back.

···

Exactly a month later, I ate lunch with Harvey Updyke at a seafood shack about forty miles north of New Orleans, on the west bank of Lake Pontchartrain. We both ordered fried-alligator plates, and for nearly four hours Updyke confessed to the incontrovertible fact of his loving Crimson Tide football. It had started in Milton, Florida, twenty-eight miles from the Alabama border, where as a boy he watched The "Bear" Bryant Show on Sundays. "He always seemed like to me he was trying to teach the young men right from wrong," Updyke recollected. "And I just said, 'Man, if I ever have a son, I'm going to name him Bear Bryant.'" His first child was a girl, Crimson Tyde, and later came Bear Bryant, who was now thirty and a die-hard Texas Longhorns fan. Harvey's third wife rejected his bid to christen another daughter Ally Bama. He still thought the name pretty. "I would call her Bama," he mused. A yellow Lab got that name, and another dog Nicky, after Saban. Updyke now wanted to go unnoticed, so he wore the beginnings of a pointy beard and a rather subdued checked crimson shirt. He figured the last time he hadn't dressed in crimson, houndstooth (Coach Bryant's signature) or some Bama gear was way back in the early 1980s. Yet there were some lines that even he wouldn't cross. "Jerseys are for kids and women," he told me. "A grown man wearing one is cheesy."