Q&A with JD Scrimgeour

by William Meiners

JD Scrimgeour is finishing up his 21^st year of teaching at Salem State University. In a town best known as the site for one of America’s oldest of witch hunts, Scrimgeour has adapted a teaching style to better suit his students, published work in three genres (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction), and provided a great deal of reflection on the games he’s played.

One poetic essay, “Living in the Outfield,” earned Scrimgeour the top prize in Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. The essay, he says, poured out of him like a poem where he tried to avoid conventional sentiments. Hence the line in the first paragraph: “There are no fathers and sons in the outfield.” Except for maybe that short time when Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Junior played together in Seattle.

William Meiners: In your award-winning book, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education in and Out of Class, you talk a lot about race, about class, as well as how much you learn from your own students at Salem State. In general, how are students different now from 12 years ago?
JD Scrimgeour: I’m going to qualify this answer by saying that I wouldn’t trust it, since it has so much to do with where I am in my teaching career. Here goes: I continue to admire Salem State students for their pluck and endurance. Salem State students today do more of their homework than they used to; they seem to be more obedient (subservient?) than in years past. They also are ridiculously overworked and generally stressed and depressed.

The obedience might sound like a bad thing, but what a joy it is to have a class discussion when most of the students have done the reading! On the other hand, they also seem more obedient to their true overlords — their bosses at their crappy jobs who won’t give them a night off to see a play or poetry reading on campus.

Students have always worried about getting a job after they graduate from college, but now they are worrying about a job before they start. And, of course, they are working more than ever while trying to cram in as many courses as possible. They are feeling the squeeze that the middle-class is experiencing in the U.S.

I fear for our students, and for higher education. Yet I suspect desperate situations will lead to necessary action. I see sprouts of activism in students today. I find that heartening.

WM: There’s a nod to Langston Hughes with this book, beginning with the title and the essay, “Me and Langston,” which details some of your earliest attempts at poetry as a Columbia University student in the mid-1980s. How has your “relationship” with Hughes changed over the years?
JD: Our first loves often are inexplicable. We like the poets we like irrationally. Hughes’ sense of social justice is mine (though I suspect my blinders are different than his). He knows that there are both cruel systems and cruel people in the world, but, as he says in The Big Sea, “most people are generally good.” I feel that we have no choice but to believe that, too.

Hughes also mocks pretension, and celebrates our small failures, those weaknesses that make us human. He’s got a great little poem in the voice of a guy who plays the numbers (the underground lottery in Harlem). The guy swears that if he ever hits his number he’ll stop playing: “gonna salt every dime away…I ain’t gonna/play back a cent.” But then he adds, “(Of course I might/combinate a little/with my rent.)” I love this poem irrationally. Why? Because it shows us real human behavior without judgment, with warm humor. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t stick to a no-sugar diet.

I never was fond of Hughes’s overtly political or inspirational verse, which tends to get a lot of play, especially these days. Like James Baldwin said, Hughes kept stuff that “more disciplined” writers would have thrown away. Still, when he’s on, like in “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” well, I fall in love all over again.

WM: There’s a rhythm to basketball — from the particular game itself, to a player finding that zone where everything seems to go in the bucket. I know you’ve explored that through some of your poetry. Can talk about how your own basketball game may have influenced your poetry?
JD: I’m not sure it has that much. In the essay, “Announcing My Retirement,” I draw a few connections, but I also suggest there may be more differences than similarities.  Basketball is what I did to avoid writing poetry, to escape words.

WM: Sport Literate published what seems like more of a narrative poem, and you’ve obviously published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. I’m curious about your approaches to each genre. Do you have a favorite? What do you find, if anything, limiting in one of the genres?
JD: I never planned to write in different genres. Very simply, I gravitate toward whatever makes it easy for me to write. There was a time when I was writing dramatic monologues because the voices I inhabited felt fresher and more human than the other poetry I’d been trying to write. And then suddenly they stopped, and, though I wanted to write more of them, I wasn’t able to, so I moved on to something else.

Poems come to me only occasionally, and then I dink around with them for a long time. Curiously, I need a longer stretch of time to write a poem than to write prose. I have to draft an entire poem (or a section of a long poem) in one sitting. I can use a spare 15 minutes to write two paragraphs of a short story or essay, but I can’t just “make progress” on a poem.

I find poetry has the most limitations, as well as the most possibilities. Poetry not only has a limited audience, but often I feel that poetry’s audience goes to the genre for different reasons than I do; they want flashes of scintillating language, density, and complexity. My own preferences and aims in poetry are more like those mentioned by Elizabeth Bishop in one of her letters: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery.

I feel that the essay might be the best form to expand a reader’s aesthetic (and consciousness). There aren’t as many preconceived notions of the form, and so readers don’t have their guard up in the same way as they might with poetry or fiction.

But fiction? Recently fiction has been what has enabled me to write. I’m writing a collection of stories about youth baseball, based on years of coaching my sons in Little League. It has made me realize how much I came to know that environment, and how much I assumed. It’s a way to test out what I thought I knew about that world by pressing the buttons of class, race, and masculinity and seeing “how folks do.”

WM: “Spin Moves” explores your history with pickup basketball. It’s also the last essay in your book. What are the biggest life lessons you take away from the basketball court? I also read the essay on your “retirement.” What do you miss most about playing?
JD: I’ve learned that people care if you’re good, but they usually care more about whether you’re a good teammate, whether you’ll be in the right place or make the right pass or understand what’s needed in a particular situation. I try to be a good teammate.

I’ve never been in therapy. That’s probably because I played basketball. The nonstop pace cleansed my mind. I could focus only on the next moment on the court. I miss that tremendously, as now my head gets cluttered with Trump, and grading, and email. It seems that I can never empty it.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of the basketball memoir Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. He’s also published three collections of poetry, The Last Miles, Territories, and Lifting the Turtle. His essay, “My Outfield,” won Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. He runs the creative writing program at Salem State University. “Today, Late April” is part of a longer piece, “Forest River Park,” which is from of a collection in-progress of stories about baseball, Hit By Pitch. The title story appears in the most recent issue of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

William Meiners is the editor-in-chief at Sport Literate.

Q&A with Rus Bradburd

by Nicholas Reading

Recruiting Shawn Harrington to New Mexico State from Marshall High School in Chicago, Rus Bradburd described him as an “exceedingly smart, unselfish, and fearless” basketball player. Then an assistant coach, Bradburd was known for bringing Chicago players to the southwest. A decade prior, he lured the future NBA great Tim Hardaway to Texas at El Paso.

In 2014, when Harrington was back in Chicago coaching at Marshall, his unselfish fearlessness was on full display, as he covered his daughter’s body to protect her from drive-by bullets in a case of tragic mistaken identity. In saving his daughter’s life, Harrington was left paralyzed.

“Shawn’s shooting was all over the Chicago news. A coaching friend texted me about it within an hour of the incident, so I began tracking it on the internet,” says Bradburd, now a creative writing professor at New Mexico State. “Although I hadn’t seen Shawn in 20 years, I had spoken to him when his mother was killed in 2003, so I still had his phone number. I waited a week to call, but I thumbed through the New Mexico State basketball programs to rattle my memory of his time playing for us at New Mexico State — which is where things got complicated.”

That complication eventually led to the book, All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, which will be released on May 1, 2018.

 Nicholas Reading: Your book invites the reader into the lives of Shawn Harrington and the Chicago West Side community. The value of making folks, who might be otherwise unknown, into very real, very living people, is immeasurable. You write intimately and personally about their experiences. What do you hope this portrait contributes to the national discussion about guns, violence, and the state of our communities?
Rus Bradburd: I only wanted to tell Shawn Harrington’s story, and the story of the Marshall High School community. At the outset I had very strong opinions about guns, cops, education, and the situation on the West Side of Chicago, but whenever I tried to address the bigger issues — or pretend I had answers — the book started to spin out of control. So I kept the story smaller, which of course became tricky as more and more Marshall players got murdered.

NR: It is one thing to sympathize, even empathize, with someone who has experienced hardship. It’s quite another to initiate the task of writing a book and giving someone’s experience a wider audience. How did you arrive at the idea for this project?
RB: Initially I was only advocating for Shawn, writing to friends who were journalists: Hey! Here is an astonishing story of courage. I was going to sleep at night thinking of Shawn’s trouble, waking up and wondering how I might help. And the more he was ignored — and I was ignored — the more determined I was to keep banging on my drum. I have a daughter the same age as Shawn’s younger one, so the act of heroism in saving a girl’s life was profoundly moving.  Finally, Alex Kotlowitz [bestselling author of There Are No Children Here] said to me, “Why don’t you write this yourself?”

NR: What is so striking about sports is that it is often a confluence of social, racial, economic, political concerns. If Shawn’s story and your writing is a lens through which to closely examine our society, what issues does your book bring into focus?
RB: I think people will read the book differently. As they should, I suppose. Basketball, more than any other sport, gives us a window into African American culture. Even in Chicago, though, you can go through your entire life and never really come in contact with what it’s like for millions of Americans on a day-to-day basis. My hope is that in the specifics of Shawn Harrington’s story that there might be a more universal feeling of empathy. Although I only wanted to tell his story, there are issues of health care, race, guns, unions, poverty, education, basketball, and community policing all swimming around in the book.

NR: What do you think are the most damaging or prevalent misconceptions about communities ravaged by gun violence?
RB: I think the Black Lives Matter stance is badly misunderstood at times. Here’s where it became real to me: nothing tears apart a community like an unsolved murder. In Chicago, there are far fewer murder detectives than there was a decade ago. That’s the institutionalized problem: shootings and killings are never brought to justice, and an unsolved murder encourages revenge. The closing of schools ruins neighborhoods, too. Marshall, when Shawn attended, had over 2,000 students. Today it’s below 400. Empty schools aren’t good for the community. Schools should be the center of the community.

NR: How did the team respond after Shawn was shot? What is their response when mounting numbers of teammates and friends are victims of gun violence? What does this response say about them? About their reality?
RB: One of the surprising things about writing the book is learning how everyone has a connection to the violence. This was mirrored for me in the 10 months I lived in Belfast: everyone had been touched by “The Troubles,” and people mostly didn’t want to talk about it. I was surprised that the players and coaches never talked about their own gun violence experiences, but maybe that’s just me: my impulse is to talk about something until I’m blue in the face. That’s something I learned from writing the Nolan Richardson biography, Forty Minutes of Hell: things don’t get better by not talking about them.

NR: The book opens with a quote from Langston Hughes that seems to both lament and hold dear a, “dream that’s almost dead today.” Obviously, an inspiration for the title of the book, but I wonder if you could explain how the poem speaks to you? What is the dream?
RB: To my ear, Langston Hughes has two voices speaking in the poem, and the refrain “America was never America to me” feels reflective of the West Side community of Chicago. I think if Shawn had saved a girl’s life in Iraq while on duty, he’d be on the cover of Time Magazine. Because it happened in Chicago, it’s just another shooting, and, in fact, a “good” story because he lived.  In any other Westernized country, Shawn would have a far better safety net than in America.

NR: Sports are sometimes relegated to mere pastime, entertainment, and maybe exercise. Though, it seems that the role of basketball in the lives of the folks you present is far from just a hobby. In your view, how does the sport, the gym, offer not only a haven from the streets, but mentor-ship, a way of surviving?
RB: Basketball can be a blessing, but only 20 or 25 boys play at every Chicago Public School. And in some ways, for the ballers, the game can be a mirage or a time-killer. For so many, once basketball season is over senior year, there’s the stark reality: Now what?  The game gave them discipline, teamwork, a goal. But what about when the game is over? And I think a more important question might be, “What about the other kids, the 90 percent who do not play?”

NR: What does Harrington say, what does the community say, what do you say about a hope for a solution to gun violence? You have brought to our attention, with intimacy and urgency, the faces and lives of people living in an America that many can’t fathom. You have called Harrington’s situation a “failure of America,” and I think the reader understands why. This question might be an unfair burden, but where do we go from here?
RB: I don’t know. One thing I stress is that there are great people who have dedicated their lives to ending the violence, so I’m modest about offering any solutions as the “new guy” who just arrived. While Shawn has remarkable courage and endurance, and so many of us find that inspiring, I think the big answers are complicated.  Poverty, education, family, community policing, ending the drug wars — they’re all tied in, but again, I only really know Shawn’s story. Yet, there’s the “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” idea that if you know one thing, you know the world. I guess I’m saying that I hope that reading about Shawn’s life might be a start — just as basketball was a window into a part of black culture for me, perhaps his story might a window into the West Side for others.

NR: What does Shawn envision for his family, the future of Marshall? For himself? And is his story unique?
RB: Shawn’s struggles are very much day-to-day. Get out of the house. Get his exercise. Go to therapy. Talk to Marshall kids and ex-players. That’s one of the great tensions in the book: I want him to be Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali, be the spokesman for progressive movements. He wants that stuff, sure, but it’s the daily grind that wears on him, I fear. The scariest part to me is that there are thousands — really, thousands — of young men in Chicago like Shawn who have been physically and emotionally torn apart by guns. There won’t be a book about many of the others, or not an in-depth study. But who will advocate for them?

NR: Writing about your relationship with Shawn you observe, “… our lives were intertwined. His success or failure would contribute to mine.” How has Shawn’s life changed your own?
RB: I believe that Shawn’s suffering and struggle stands for more — that it has enriched my life, as strange as that is to say. He’s both fully heroic and fully human. That’s part of the human psyche, sort of Joseph Campbell 101: The Hero makes things better for everyone else.

NR: Is there an experience or realization that you encountered over the course of writing this book that surprised you?
RB: Let me see if can answer that sideways.  What I miss most about coaching in Division I basketball — where I spent 14 years and made 8 NCAA tournaments — is the total, free health care. No waiting, no charge, no hassles, you get to see the doctor right away.  I’m fairly healthy, although not that young, so I don’t worry so much about health care. But seeing it up close, how you need a full-time advocate to battle the system — well, what kind of country is this?

NR: How does Shawn’s story, the story of gun violence in Chicago, and the story of hope fit into the national discussion on the subject?
RB: Dorothy Gaters, the legendary Marshall girls’ coach, says that Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School are not on the West Side. She’s right: it’s a national problem, and it’s uniquely American. The “line” is always drawn somewhere — I can’t own a bazooka or a tank or an ICMB, right? We just need to move the line. That’s happened so many times in American history, and it’s always a collective consciousness that changes. I hope Shawn’s life can be part of that conversation.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the poetry editor for Sport Literate and teaches a freshman seminar on sports and literature at Butler University.

Rus Bradburd spent 14 seasons as a college basketball coach at UTEP and New Mexico State, then two more in Irish Super League. He is the author of All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed (Chicago Review Press, 2018), an examination of gun violence in Chicago; the novel-in-stories Make It, Take It (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014); the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell (HarperCollins/Amistad Books, 2010); and the memoir Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). He lives in New Mexico and Chicago.

Super Bowl Ring

by Michael Downs

The game ended, and then came the rush outdoors into the noisy February dark, fireworks and gunfire the exclamation points at the end of every hell yeah and damn right. Joyce shimmied on her porch.

Across the street, Kenny and Tracy’s daughter, Elsa (not yet a year) slept in her grandmother’s care.

All Sefton Avenue envied her parents — Kenny who worked for the team, and Tracy, unsettled at leaving her daughter for the first time. But when would she and Kenny ever have a chance like this again? So that night, as Elsa wrinkled her nose and made fists of her hands, her parents partied in the Big Easy, blinking away the glare of celebrities and their glitter and bling.

Months later, the ring arrived. Kenny first showed Joyce and even let her slide it on her finger. Word spread, and we all gathered to marvel. Diamond after diamond after diamond. A Raven on the face, Kenny’s name on one side. Nearby, Tracy watched, bouncing Elsa in her arms and grinning. We cradled the ring in our palms, felt its heft.

“What’s that?” Sylvia yelled from her fence.

Kenny brought it over for her to see. After, he knocked on Bert’s door.

Months earlier, just home from the hospital, he had carried infant Elsa door to door, the child for whom they had waited years and years. Elsa Bear, he called her. Little Elsa Bear.

Michael Downs’ debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, is forthcoming from Acre Books (May 2018). His other books include The Greatest Show: Stories (Louisiana State University Press) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.

Driving by a Baseball Park in Winter

by David Evans

Three spindly-legged crows were occupying
a piece of snow crust between second and third,
their beaks pointed toward home plate, as if
waiting for a hot grounder to scramble their wings,
or a frozen-rope single to sizzle right over their heads,
making them duck . . .

when I slowed down for
a closer look they lifted and turned around as one and
flew way out over deep center, heading, I guessed,
for the scattered concessions in the Western Mall
parking lot on 41^st Street.

David Evans has had nine poetry collections published. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, The Norton Book of Sports, Splash: Great Writing About Swimming, and American Sports Poems. He was a Fulbright Scholar twice in China, and a professor and writer-in-residence at South Dakota State University. He was also poet laureate of South Dakota for 12 years, and received the Governor’s Award for Creative Achievement in the Arts in 2009.

Another Day in Key West

by Jack Ridl

Our houseboat is a little houseboat.
Some here are two stories, three

bedrooms, a roof-top patio garden,
the view taking the eye across

the bight out over the cypress
and onto the Gulf where the tarpon

slow dance and the fishing boats
settle in, lines tossed or dropped.

Those on vacation can rent a charter
and hope to take home a photograph

of their catch, the tough scaled fish,
having fought and given in, now hanging

alongside the smiles. Today again
the clouds will pass over us,

the sun will bring sliding light
across the water, time will bring

its illusion to carve its way
into our ephemeral cells,

and we will sit again on our deck,
the wind chime alchemizing the breeze.

Jack Ridl’s most recent poetry collection, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, received the Gold Medal from Indie/Foreword Reviews. Broken Symmetry won the best collection award from The Society of Midland Authors. Losing Season was named one of the 10 best sports books of the year. His joy, too, he says, is that more than 85 of his students are now publishing. Two years ago, two of them won major first book awards.

Names of Old Teammates

by Robert Brickhouse

Spike
ran our rival’s T-plays
on the scout team
with such joy
the coaches put him in the real game
to baffle and wreak havoc.

Moose
hitchhiked to school with no breakfast
no braggadocio, anchored
both sides of the line, retired
a multi-millionaire.

Willy
wore thick glasses with a head band,
wasn’t fast or strong,
guided us up and down the court
with calm precision.

Rags
had a gentle heart, a twisted
smile if he liked you,
sharp elbows if he didn’t and
a fo’-barrel fifty-fo’ Ford.

Bokey
could barely see
over the middle he backed. Any
runner who got that far
never knew what hit him.

Bugsy
saved my ass one night
when I walked alone through his part of town.
Challenged to a fight by a dimwit in a beater,
I said “you know Bugsy?”
He said “any friend of Bugsy’s is a friend of mine.”

Bull
led the state in sacks and held the shotput record.
He’d lock his hands behind his head
at the end of every wind sprint,
strut around to catch his breath and teach us
how good it was to be alive.

Robert Brickhouse, a multi-sport benchwarmer in his youth, has worked as a newspaper reporter and writer for university publications in Virginia. His poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines, among them the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Pleiades, and Light Quarterly. “Names of Old Teammates” first appeared in the American Journal of Poetry.

Local Rules

by Andrea Dejean

In the French overseas département of French Guiana, located north of Brazil, we play golf on a course carved out of the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps not unlike courses in other “wild” areas, we have a long list of local rules.

You get a free drop if your ball lands on a red ant nest or close enough that you can’t properly take up your stance without getting bitten; if a monkey moves your ball or steals it, you can replace it (no penalty); grounding your club in a hazard is acceptable only if you are assuring yourself that there are no snakes or in the event that the resident caiman emerges from the water hazard on #5. Back-ups are possible between holes #6 and #7 because the wasps nesting there tend to attack for no reason — and, no, you don’t have to be close. You can almost always place your ball, clean it, or move it — especially on the greens where tunnelling insects wreak havoc on putting lines. The giant anteater on #10 is not aggressive, but don’t get too close or it will wrap you in a suffocating bear hug. If you make a ‘pit-stop’ in the bathroom before teeing off on #13, remember to check that no hairy, urticating spider is snuggled up in the toilet paper tube. Dogs are allowed on the course, but a female puma has been seen teaching her young to hunt along fairway #18, so it’s probably best leave your pup at home.

Tournament play is almost never called due to rain, no matter how torrential, especially because electrical storms are extremely rare. If, however, you cannot find relief from standing water in the middle of the fairway, you can tee up your ball. If you cannot find your ball in the middle of the fairway because it has plunged deeply into the humid earth, you can drop a ball in the closest approximate area — which is not always as easy as you might think because the first ball rarely leaves a trace. On the contrary, during the dry season when much of the course turns to hard pack, you can place your ball on grass as long as you do not move it closer to the pin and as long as you can find some grass. Seasoned players will advise you to avoid the tufts that resist the drought. Clubheads have a tendency to get stuck behind them and the ball usually squirts out any which way, but not generally the way you intended.

You are also advised to resist the temptation to try to fly your ball up and over any of the oil palms on the course at the risk of finding it perched in the fronds (especially on #8) or nestled out of sight behind the protective shell covering the pendulous strings of seeds on two ‘maripa’ palms on #11. Luckily, as the seeds ripen, the shell slowly detaches itself and falls and you can get your ball back — but it might take a week or so. These palms pose another, improbable threat. Several years ago a friend “ker-plunked” her tee-shot into the foot of one of the sock-like weaverbird nests hanging from one of the palms on that same hole.

So, it’s funny that when you are playing on a manicured course in some other part of the world and stopping yourself midway as you bend down to place your ball quite unnecessarily because the ball is sitting on a perfect lie or topping a second shot on lushly carpeted fairways because the thought of taking a divot breaks your heart or five-putting on greens smooth as billiard tables how much you’ll miss this place. You’ll miss the golden quality of the light as the sun sets and the zany, bouncing flight of the toucan overhead, the sound of laughter and conversation as members share cold beer and stories in the open-air clubhouse and how the mangoes that fall onto the tee-box on the third hole make the sweetest jam.

Perhaps the most important local rule, here and elsewhere, and totally contrary to what every instructor has ever told you is: do lift your head. Lift your head, look around, take it all in and realise what a privilege it is to be standing where you are.

The Association de Golf de l’Anse in Kourou, French Guiana, celebrated 20 years of existence in 2015 and is managed entirely by volunteers.

Andrea Dejean is the translator of a book on biodiversity and has published her own poetry and creative fiction and nonfiction in both independent and university-affiliated literary journals. A native of Michigan, she is now a permanent resident of France.

The Lost Cause

by Virginia Ottley Craighill

Disaster Artist
It’s raining and cold. The massive crowd is going nowhere fast. Mashed together like cattle in a stockyard, we are about 30 yards from the entrance. From here we can see only two security screens, like the ones at the airport. Some guys farther behind us get ugly, start pushing, and scream at the gatekeepers, “What’s the fucking holdup?! You guys are idiots! We paid a lot of money to stand here in the fucking rain. Get us inside now, ASSHOLES!” People close to the entrance turn and collectively roll their eyes, although we’re probably all thinking the same thing. It’s 7:15 and kick-off is in an hour.

We’re waiting outside the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, Georgia with tickets to the 2018 College Football National Championship Game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. The Tide vs. the Dawgs, in the vernacular. The guy behind us is right about one thing: everyone in line likely paid a lot of money to be here. My husband went to Georgia, and he loves football, so he paid some obscene amount of money, an amount I never want to know, to take us, our son and daughter and me, to this game.

The problem, I suspect, is Donald Trump. The President of the United States flew to the game earlier on Air Force One and is now ensconced in a cozy luxury box with former Georgia Governor and current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. My suspicion is later confirmed by one of the ticket takers, who says Trump’s arrival set security back hours and caused traffic gridlock and unconscionable waits at the entrances. Trump knows he has a fan base in Alabama and Georgia.

We’re now 30 minutes from the coin toss and have only moved two feet. The man behind me presses his crotch into my backside. I am tempted to #MeToo him after watching the Golden Globes, but he appears to be pushed forward by the aggressive crowd behind him and probably can’t help where his crotch ends up. I give him the benefit of the doubt. My husband keeps telling the people in line around him how badly he needs to use the bathroom, which is probably not what they want to hear. My son, who wears a Georgia sweatshirt and a red ribbon in his hair, points out a woman a few yards ahead of us in line. She has a whitish translucent pointy poncho over her head that we all agree looks disturbingly like either a condom on a penis or a KKK hood. But her hair will be fine once she gets inside. My husband holds up a broken and ineffectual umbrella

The National Football Championship Game would be an excellent setting for a disaster film. Instead of a vengeful sniper (Two-Minute Warning) or a suicidal Vietnam vet flying an explosive blimp over the stadium (Black Sunday), in my version the electricity in the stadium would be cut once everyone is inside and the stadium doors locked while kidnappers with night-vision goggles hired by a secret cadre of Republican senators seek out the President. This is not as far-fetched as one would think since the electricity went out at the Atlanta International Airport two weeks before Christmas.

When I mention this to my family, my daughter, who is wearing a Georgia football hat and ear plugs, tells me to keep quiet in case the Secret Service is listening. In disaster films of the 1970s, the smart, attractive people always made it out alive, while the stupid, unappealing characters died in horrifically entertaining ways. The drunk, screaming guys behind us would definitely meet their maker in my film. Even a nice character like the one played by Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure had to die because she was fat and somewhat old. At least she drowned sacrificing herself for one of the cuter, younger characters. At fifty-seven, I most likely would not be saved in my own film, but my children would probably make it.

Getting inside has become a matter of increasing urgency for my husband. We slowly inch closer to the security screens, jamming ourselves toward where you empty your pockets into the little bowl, raise your arms and submit to metal detectors. Shouts of joy come from those who have finally made it through to the other side. The women in front of me have clear plastic purses with the Georgia bulldogs insignia on them; they get through quickly. The men take longer because they have to pull everything out of their pants pockets and often forget some piece of change. That sets off the scanner, and they have to get a pat down from the guards, who probably do not enjoy it any more than the fans do.

My husband goes first, after telling the guard, the woman scanning the electronic tickets, and everyone around him that he’s going to piss himself. He does not get a pat down. The woman points him in the direction of the nearest bathrooms, three floors up. He hands me his phone with the electronic tickets for the rest of us, and runs. Not having bathrooms on the ground floor seems like short-sighted planning for a building that costs 1.5 billion dollars. After our son and daughter scan in, they take off for our seats. It’s close to kick-off. They yell back at me to go to Section 309. I stand on the gray concrete floor and wait for my husband, though we did not communicate about where to meet, and I have his cell phone, which has the seat numbers on it. After five minutes, I get anxious and head up the first flight of stairs. The stadium is cavernous, bigger than anything I’ve ever been in, bigger, probably, than the ship in The Poseidon Adventure. It has no logic. Crowds of people who just made it through the scanner run past me to their seats; it’s a blur of red and black. Someone has urinated on the second flight of stairs. I pray it’s not my husband.

“Fuck Trump”
Section 309 is all the way on the other side of the stadium, about two miles away, over something called the Sky Bridge. The announcer introduces President Trump, and there are sounds of booing, hissing, and cheering. My feelings about him become more negative, if possible, because of the inconvenience he has caused the people trying to get in, and I mutter under my breath, “fuck you, Trump.” I realize I sound like the rude people in line behind me, but their anger was misdirected at the security guards. Apparently, I am not alone in my sentiments: protesters projected “FUCK TRUMP” in giant letters onto the stadium before he arrived. At this point, people are mostly in their seats, though many are frantically buying $8 beers. We had our beer and chicken tenders from Publix earlier while sitting in our car in a vacant lot where we’d paid some guy $30 instead of $50 to park. We gave the attendant a piece of chicken, and he left to get a cup of coffee and never came back. My husband will probably spend the rest of his life trying to make up the cost of these tickets, so I hope our car is still there when we get back.

I see my children standing in the hallway outside Section 309. They don’t know where the seats are, and they don’t know where their parents are, who know where the seats are. I pull out my husband’s cell phone and show them, but they’re angry that I left him. He’s a big boy and probably knows where to go, I say. We spot him a few minutes later. His pants are clean, so we all embrace for a moment before heading in. We’ve missed the anthem, the president, the coin toss, and the kick-off, but are otherwise on time

0 to 0
There is no way to express the hugeness of the new stadium; it is huger than Trump’s hands, and the crowd — over 77,000 people — is possibly bigger than his inauguration. Our seats are high up on the 25 yard line, but the field and players are clear; we can see every play. And if we can’t, there are multiple Jumbo-trons that make it possible to see each hair on UGA quarterback Jake Fromm’s scruffy beard. We’re in the UGA section and the fans around us seem reasonable enough. All of them are white, though I don’t correlate reasonableness with whiteness. In the first quarter, UGA makes some stunning plays, and the crowd erupts. The woman in front of me wears a black sweater, black pants, and black booties, has a red and black G painted on her cheek. She turns around and high-fives me every time something good happens for the Dawgs. The man next to me high-fives me, too. Everyone’s congenial and rabidly excited by Georgia’s strong opening.

13-0
I should explain that I am not a football fanatic, or even a fan. I’m from Atlanta and went to graduate school at UGA but never went to a game, so my loyalty is questionable. If I watch football, it’s because people in my family are watching it. I’ve come along with a sort of anthropological mindset. What makes so many people spend their hard-earned money for this event?  Why is it so important?  What will change if Georgia wins?  Or loses? Why is college football like some kind of religion?  The man next to me graduated from UGA in 1997 (he looks older). He flew out to Pasadena the week before for the Rose Bowl (Georgia beat Oklahoma, which is why we’re here). The woman next to my husband flew down from Washington with her husband, but left him in their hotel room because he is older, she explains, and she doesn’t want him to have a stroke or a heart attack if the game gets too intense. People should not die over football games. Neither my son nor daughter went to Georgia, but my son feels some esoteric emotional connection with this team, perhaps inherited from his father. My husband and my son played football, but my daughter is the real athlete of the family, and her interest stems from a physical and intellectual understanding of what it takes to do what these players do on the field.

What they do on the field is slam into each other a lot. The Tide plays dirty. Because of the Jumbo-tron, we can see when one Alabama player takes down the UGA ball carrier then knocks him in the head after he’s on the ground. We can see another ‘Bama player put a last minute choke-hold on a UGA player that doesn’t get a flag. It’s beginning to make me mad, and this surge of emotion is actually helpful because now I’m standing up and screaming at the ref and cheering “sic ‘em, sic ‘em, sic ‘em” when Georgia kicks to ‘Bama after another touchdown. My husband takes a picture of me doing this to send to his friends who bet him I would be reading a book throughout the game. It suddenly seems hopeful and joyous, though there is a gnawing sense that the evil genius Nick Saban will never let Alabama lose.

At the end of the second quarter, Georgia is up 13-0 and the crowd is elated. My son notes that, curiously, Saban has benched his first-string quarterback and put in the second string “true freshman” quarterback, a guy from Hawaii named Tua who’s never started a game. It interests me that Tua is from Hawaii, which is nowhere near Alabama. A “true freshman,” by the way, is someone who is actually a first-year college student, not someone who’s been sitting on the bench for a year. So the two quarterbacks in this game now are just around 18 years old. What would it be like to be eighteen and the center of this storm of insanity and adulation? What would it be like to know that the President of the United States (whoever it is) has flown down in Air Force One to watch you?   What would the rest of your life be like after this?

Kendrick
My son is excited that rapper Kendrick Lamar is the halftime entertainment. It’s the first time the National Championship has had a halftime performer, and certainly the first time Donald Trump has seen Kendrick Lamar perform (it turns out Trump did not see him perform; he supposedly left before halftime). When I comment to my son that the majority of the people in the stadium are white, so Lamar’s rap might be lost on them, he notes that the majority of people who go to Georgia and Alabama are white, with the exception of the players on the field. I tell him this sounds racist, but he tells me it’s not racist if it’s true.

Lamar appears on the Jumbo-tron but he’s not on the field. They’ve set the halftime show outside in Centennial Park, a free, non-ticketed venue, instead of inside the stadium, which makes sense. Why should Kendrick Lamar perform for all the rich white people in the stadium (including Trump, if he were still here), who probably only listen to Tony Bennett or Taylor Swift, when he can entertain the people of Atlanta, the majority of whom are of color (at least it appears so on the Jumbo-tron) and have been waiting outside in the cold and rain? It seems like a very egalitarian choice, except for the fact that we’re inside a warm, dry stadium, and they’re outside freezing

Most of the people working in the stadium are also of color, blacks, Latinos, immigrants: the servers, bathroom staff, security, no doubt a few of them from what Trump will allegedly call “shithole countries” this very week. When I go to the bathroom (surprisingly empty), the woman cleaning has a knitted rainbow scarf around her head. I thank her, but she doesn’t acknowledge me. No one seems terribly happy to be working the game. Maybe because Trump is here. Maybe because we’re playing Alabama

And fans of other teams hate The Crimson Tide. Sometimes that gets mixed up with the state, though having just marginally disposed of racist and alleged pedophile Roy Moore in the special Senate election, one is inclined to cut Alabamians some slack. To be fair, the whole stadium is a sea of red, and it’s not just because both teams wear the same colors. Both Georgia and Alabama are red states, and I wonder how many rosy-robed fans here voted for Trump. An Alabama judge once described former Governor George Wallace, a demagogue in the same mold as Donald Trump: “’[Wallace] keeps tellin’ ‘em, ‘You the children of Israel, you gonna lead this country out of the wilderness!’ Well, goddamn. We at the bottom of everything you can find to be at the bottom of, and yet we gonna save the country. We lead the country in illiteracy and syphilis, and yet we gonna lead the damn country out of the wilderness…’”  And maybe that’s why some people love the Crimson Tide the way they love Trump. Because they’re always on top. They are always winners. Nick Saban is gonna lead them out of the wilderness and into another National Championship. But not yet.

20-10
Halftime passes quickly while everyone catches up on their texts. People are sending pictures and Snapchats to their friends watching the game at home, or they are posting on Instagram or Facebook. I have friends in San Antonio and Italy who keep sending me game emojis. People who have no reason to be Georgia fans are completely invested in the outcome. Once we were in Seville when Spain was in the finals of the World Cup Soccer tournament; our lodging was on a big square in the heart of the city and every single bar and restaurant set up enormous television screens on the border of the square. All the patrons were sitting outside drinking and screaming at every play; everyone was unified in their desire to beat Germany, or whoever it was. It felt good to be there, to be a part of a larger organism, something that everyone agreed on and cared passionately about. It felt very human. But maybe there’s another side to that, like possibly rabid nationalism.

The good part, the unifying part, seems to be what’s happening here, too, but not quite. The walls of the aptly named Mercedes-Benz stadium contain a fairly rarified group, most of whom have paid full price. A man on our row walks past us on his way to the bathroom and says something to my son. After the man has gone, my son tells us what he said: “I hope you know how privileged you are to be here.”  This is curious and somewhat ambiguous. Does he mean my son is privileged to be watching the University of Georgia play in the National Championships?  Is he privileged to see Georgia beating Alabama, to see Kirby Smart defeat Nick Saban? Is it a privilege to be in the same building as the President of the United States? Or is everyone in this arena simply privileged because they have enough disposable income to blow on four hours of football?

20-20
In the somewhat inevitable, at least to my mind, denouement of the fourth quarter, Tua rides the now rising Crimson Tide the way he might ride a surfboard in his native state. Since he’s never started before and hasn’t played much in other games, the Dawgs don’t know what to expect from him. He’s creative and unpredictable. We start to hear from the other side of the stadium, as the Alabama fans get louder and louder and the Georgia fans look more and more like deflated balloon animals. “Sweet Home Alabama” plays over the loudspeaker, a song I like, but know I’d better not sing or dance to now. The woman in front of me is no longer reaching back to give me high-fives. Someone several rows back dumps what must be a Coca-Cola onto us. I feel the sticky, syrupy mess drying in strands of my hair as the Tide gets closer to a tie. And then it is a tie game. You can almost hear the breath leaving the balloon animals as if they’d all been punctured at the same time. Alabama is going to kick a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game, which seems to me to be a cowardly loser way to win. This would be a good time for the electricity to go out.

The kicker misses the field goal. The lights stay on. We’re in overtime.

23-26
It’s midnight. I pray for a quick ending, and hopefully a positive one for Georgia. It is quick. Georgia’s Roderigo Blankenship, who should get credit for his name alone but is also a great field goal kicker, makes one, and it’s 23-20. Now the ball goes to Alabama. The quarterback gets sacked, then he throws, the ball is caught, and ‘Bama scores. As fast as that, all the hopes and dreams of the people on our side come to an end. Suddenly, the other side of the stadium bursts into cheers on the other side and glittery confetti explodes from the ceiling of the dome. Everyone in our section stands there dumbfounded. My husband sits down. Our daughter has her hands on her head. Our son says, “We’ve got to get out of here, NOW.”  There might be tears in his eyes. The feeling seems familiar, as if it had happened before, maybe back in early November of 2017.

Exodus
As if all the Georgia fans had the same thought at the same moment, like ants silently communicating, there’s a unified and dignified movement out of their seats and into the hall. No one says anything as at least 50,000 people march towards the stairways. And just like the beginning of this disaster, we are suddenly pinned in a flesh press of bodies all moving the same way. On the stairs, one man has the temerity to squeak out, “Roll, Tide,” in a tiny, uncertain voice, but he recognizes the danger of being celebratory on this side and fades into the crowd.

I am holding my husband’s hand with one hand and grasping my son’s sweatshirt with the other because this is the kind of crowd that would trample you in an instant, the kind of crowd where you could get shanked and your body would be carried along upright until you got outside, the kind of crowd where you could lose your children forever. My daughter is farther ahead; I can tell she’s pissed and she’s not going to hold anyone’s hand; she’s just going to get out, but we keep track of her.

The short-sightedness of the stadium planners again becomes evident as tens of thousands of sad, angry, disappointed, possibly suicidal and/or homicidal Georgia fans attempt to squeeze through two solitary exits before Alabama fans really start celebrating. Personally, I am not feeling all that bad now. It was a good game, and it was exciting; Georgia played better than Alabama. But nobody around me wants to hear it. My son starts whining about how it’s a curse on Georgia teams and recounting the admittedly depressing story of the Atlanta Falcons’ loss in last year’s Super Bowl against the New England Patriots.

This attitude makes me think about a line from the film “Talladega Nights,” which, I should point out, is set in Alabama. Ricky Bobby, the main character played by Will Ferrell, is a race car driver at Talladega, and lives by the motto, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” It doesn’t matter if Georgia won the Rose Bowl and the SEC Championship; it doesn’t matter if they had a fantastic season and played honorably and well in their home state in the National Championships. If they’re not first, they’re last.  This could be Trump’s motto, too. Trump loves winning, thinks of himself as a winner, no matter the facts. The president is no doubt now an Alabama fan even if he was a guest of Sonny Perdue because Perdue is now on the losing side. Later this week, Sonny’s first cousin, Senator David Perdue, will defend Trump’s profane comments on immigrants from Haiti and Africa, claiming he cannot recall the president using any such derogatory terms.

We’ll Get ‘Em Next Year
Once outside, we head in the wrong direction and have to walk all the way around the stadium. The crowd is still eerily silent and controlled. No one screams or fights or curses. The concrete barriers around the stadium are covered with beer cans and bottles from earlier tailgaters. I think about the stadium workers and their grim, stoic faces, who will be cleaning up this mess until dawn. A tall gangly black man coming from the direction of Centennial Park walks in front of us and yells, “Fuck Alabama! Fuck Saban!” to some white fraternity guys with Georgia shirts on. They hesitantly high-five him and mildly respond, “Yeah Dude, Fuck ‘Bama!” The frat guys walk closer together. The man keeps on walking beside the boys, mumbling to them, “Yeah, fuck that! We’ll get ‘em next year!”  He kicks some empty beer cans and kind of trips off the curb. The fraternity boys walk faster.

Virginia Ottley Craighill grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and received her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. She has been teaching English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee since 2001, and lives in Sewanee. She has commentary on the letters of Tennessee Williams  in the Winter 2018 issue of The Sewanee Review and has a chapter on Eudora Welty in the upcoming volume Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, and Kalliope, among others.