I will never forget walking into my dorm room for the first time at a small, Christian college just outside Raleigh, North Carolina. My roommate, a stout fella from Jasper, Alabama, was unloading his personal effects, trying to give the cramped quarters a homey feel. I watched him dig a George Foreman grill out of a duffle bag and place it on the lavatory. On the tiny flakeboard desk next to his bed, he laid a leather King James Bible as big as an old Sears catalog, held together with at least half a roll of duct tape to keep Deuteronomy from falling out. Beside it stood a picture of “Miss Sandy,” his sweet mother. Her cherubic face served as a totem, reminding him of home, and of the fiery wrath he would incur if he got up to too much foolishness. 

On the wall above the desk he hung a large portrait that stopped me in my tracks. It was an enlarged version of an Alabama postcard from 1966 of Paul “Bear” Bryant walking on water. 

“What in the name of God is that?” I asked incredulously.

“That’s the Bear,” he answered.

“Who’s the Bear? And why is he walking on water?”

He was as amazed at my ignorance as I was at his near-idolatrous icon. We stood looking agog at each other before he finally answered.

“The Bear is the greatest college football coach who ever lived!”

“But why do they have him walking on water?”

“Because he could.”

That was the day I first heard the gospel of the Crimson Tide. Soon I would become a true believer and evangelist myself. It is gospel truth that the South still takes two things seriously: religion and football. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell which is which. Marino Casem, longtime coach at Alcorn State and Southern University, is credited with arguably the most apt summation of the game’s quasi-religious significance for my people: “On the East Coast, football is a cultural experience. In the Midwest, it’s a form of cannibalism. On the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction. And in the South, football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day.”

Devotion to college football is as pervasive in the South as honeysuckle and kudzu, with roots running deeper than both. Speculations abound as to why this is the case, but if you ask most older southerners, you will likely get the same answer one always gets when one pokes and prods about why we are the way we are: “It all goes back to ‘the War.’” And of course they mean the War between the States. 

Though the conflict ended for the rest of the country in 1865, those who lived beneath the Mason-Dixon line endured several years of recrimination by an occupying force. Reconstruction left the war-torn South demoralized, calumniated, and broke. Due to the economic strain, southerners continued to experience a sense of defeat and loss in their own land. As the rift between the industrialized North and the largely agrarian South grew wider and more pronounced, proud southern people in humble circumstances went searching for a means of regaining their former dignity. And one of the ways they could do that was by beating the Yanks at their own game.

Football wasn’t invented in the South, we just perfected it. The first college football game took place in 1869, between Princeton and Rutgers. For the next 32 years, teams from the Northeast owned the game. About the time that southerners began dabbling with football, H.L. Menken, famed journalist at the Baltimore Sun, was writing scathing essays about those neighbors he regarded as being more than geographically beneath him: “Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums… a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence.” Soon, however, Mencken and the North would be hearing from us again.

Though it took some time to get there, the conditions for dominance on the gridiron seemed to favor the South. The summers were long, the weather was hot, and boys grew stout from hard work and bowls of beans. It was as though God himself had smiled on Dixie to fit them for the task. For boys accustomed to picking acres of cotton under a boiling sun, or stacking endless bales of hay until they could hardly stand upright, any minor suffering caused by running around for a little while with a ball under one’s arm would probably be deemed a light affliction. 

In 1925, the Alabama Crimson Tide had its first undefeated season, giving up only seven points all year. This caused the reluctant officials of the illustrious Rose Bowl to extend an invitation for the Tide to come to Pasadena, where they were expected to lose in a glorious fashion. But they hadn’t counted on men like Champ Pickens.

Pickens was a tireless supporter of southern football, and of the University of Alabama in particular. When word came that the Tide would be going to the Rose Bowl, Pickens began meeting with the players to remind them of their obligation to their families, their homeland, and the long, gray line of Confederate dead. Then he launched a telegram campaign, wiring for the support and encouragement of these young men upon whose shoulders the honor of the South now rested. The Crimson Tide was carrying the torch, and Pickens saw to it that it would not go out for want of fuel.

When the Huskies were on top of Alabama 12–0 at half-time during the Rose Bowl, Coach Wade Wallace reminded his boys that they were fighting for home. “I told everybody you southern boys would fight. Now fight, dammit!” And fight they did, coming back to win the game, 20–19. As the train carrying the Alabama players made its way back into the South, they were met with impromptu parades from New Orleans all the way back to Tuscaloosa. Once they made it home to Tuscaloosa, they found the whole town gathered on the Quad, cheering themselves hoarse.

That matchup in Pasadena is often hailed as “ The Game that Changed the South.” Andrew Doyle, historian and professor at Winthrop University remarked, “You can look at the 1926 Rose Bowl as the most significant event in Southern football history… It was a sublime tonic for Southerners who were buffeted by a legacy of defeat, military defeat, a legacy of poverty, and a legacy of isolation from the American political and cultural mainstream.” Just under six decades after the first kick-off, the South rose to claim the title, and with it, a bit of her erstwhile pride.

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That game lit a fire in the South that still sets fields ablaze every Saturday from September to New Year's Day. 

I grew up seeing grown men with rubber pigs on their heads running around shirtless, wild as a pack of peach orchard boars, yelling “soooooiiieeee.” I saw a woman at a fuel pump dog cuss a life-sized effigy of Nick Saban before tearing out onto the highway in an old El Camino. The tags said “Sportsman’s Paradise.” And I once met a man from Slap Out, Alabama whose entire torso was covered in a hound’s tooth tattoo. I didn’t understand it then, but now I think I do. It is part history, part liturgy, part community, part solidarity, and probably at least one fifth Wild Turkey. 

So when a boy from Jasper, Alabama hangs a portrait in his dorm of Bear Bryant walking on water, it is probably more about fidelity than it is idolatry. Paul Bryant was born to a dirt poor family a few miles from where I was raised. He came from nothing, but died a legend. He proved to all of us that the South could lead the nation in more than illiteracy and heart disease. “The Bear” became a symbol for the kind of hardscrabble honor conferred on people stubborn enough to step out on faith and believe in impossibilities. While he may not have actually walked on water, he is the only coach that was so good they named an animal after him. But I reckon it’s hard to paint a portrait of that.