I’m Pre-Emptively Tired of This Future Bullshit, or
It’s That Roll Tide Time of Year, Again
You can tell football season is upon us once again by the way the boys on the shop floor swagger back and forth between their machines. For the next several months, eighty-five percent of their collective self-worth is going to be defined by how well the Alabama Crimson Tide play football.
I suffer no such delusions. Aside from the Trump presidency, I’ve never disliked an institution as much as I despise college football and the vapid chest-beating that accompanies it. This attitude coupled with my propensity toward jotting down the odd line of poetry has made me a bit of an odd duck in the eyes of my co-workers.
In my defense, I wasn’t born into this morass of thwarted expectations sprinkled with the occasional appropriated glory where so much depended on whether you were born into the Crimson Tide mansion or the Auburn shack. I’m a Region Rat, originally. I scurried out from beneath the shadows of BP’s distillation towers and refinery storage tanks early into my twenties and sauntered south to the mountains of Northern Alabama. I never really thought much of sports fandom beyond the teams I was indoctrinated into rooting for. The Chicago Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, and Cubbies. I knew the White Sox existed, of course, but cheering for those rancid fuckfaces was the sort of thing reserved for the sad saps who would have gotten along fine with the Cenobites from Hellraiser.
Obviously, I was aware of the existence of a Notre Dame college football program out there in South Bend, Indiana. Likewise, Northwestern, Purdue, Ball State for those who were really gluttons for punishment. I always assumed collegiate sports were the sole domain of the alumni who still cheered for their teams so as to keep some tenuous thread connected to the best years of their lives. My cousins from the successful side of the ancestral tree had graduated with honors from these universities and insisted on gifting me with the team apparel, clothing that sat neglected in the bottom drawer because they did not bear the visage of the only mascot who has ever mattered. Iron Maiden’s Eddie the Head.
So, when I first arrived in rural Alabama and immediately sacrificed my future to Hydra Hydraulics, the first question put to me was “what about it.”
“What about what?” I replied like a rational person unaware that this was just a shitkicker salutation along the lines of “what’s up, pussycat?” or “how’s it going?” or that greeting made famous by 4 Non Blondes.
Once the initial guffaws died down to gap-toothed chuckles, the second question, the only question that really mattered to these boys, “you for Alabama or are you for Auburn?”
Now, I had noticed the proliferation of Alabama Crimson Tide apparel within moments of arriving at the factory. There was one guy, Nick Camp, who come to find out, every day, for years, bedecked himself in nothing but Crimson Tide clothing. Bright red Crimson Tide T-shirts in the summer, Tide sweatshirts in the winter. Sweatpants bedazzled with fancy A’s. Every hat featured the prominent A. His red shoes were Crimson Tide sanctioned. He wore a Crimson Tide watchband, a faux ruby ring with Alabama insignia created from the finest cubic zirconia. He muddled through life looking like a rodeo clown who had traded in his bucking bronco for Nick Saban’s dick.
And I thought to myself – fuck me, man. There’s an awful lot of Alabama graduates working at this piss ant machine shop.
Come to find out – This was not the case at all.
The guy I had this initial conversation with was not Nick Camp. We’ll call this asshole Albert. He’s dead, now. He drank until his liver gave out so there’s no chance of a redemptive arc where he finds Jesus and learns that there’s more to existence than Crown Royal and football Saturdays.
Before he was dead, he asked again “Alabama or Auburn. It’s a simple question.”
“I don’t watch… college football.”
“Ah, so you’re a homosexual, then.”
“Fuck you. I’m just from up north is all.”
“Dammit, man, that’s even worse. There’s no such thing as dumb yankee conversion therapy. You’ll just always be a dumb yankee.”
“I think I’m okay with that.”
“Tell you what, we’ll give you a week’s grace. Then you can decide if you want to stand with the team with the eighteen national championships and a legacy of greatness, class, pride. Or you can number yourself with that school across the way, ate up with cowfuckers and dirt farmers who are lucky to win a game without cheating.”
“Well, which is which?”
“Damn, boy, you really are a dumb yankee. I thought you was just playing. There’s only one football college in this state and that’s the Alabama Crimson Tide. Roll, Tide, Roll.”
And that’s how I came to hate Alabama Crimson Tide football.
Over the years, all the jackasses who have entered and exited my life, mostly through the auspices of working at Hydra Hydraulics, whether they be know-it-all plant managers who think they are gods made flesh because they oversee a rinky dink factory boasting a twenty percent on time delivery rate, pedophiles posing as preachers posing as manufacturing engineers, to the knuckleheads who think they invented live tooling because they know how to press a couple buttons on a Doosan. They’re all united by their unflagging devotion to Crimson Tide football and their irrational belief that they somehow contributed and therefore can take credit for the program’s gridiron victories.
Every year there’s another batch of new hires I have to explain my aversion to college football on account Hydra has a problem with employees running out the door screaming. This year is no different. Strangely, there’s more mulleted, mustachioed machinists than ever before. I guess that looks to be making a comeback. The confusion my disregard for the Tide/Auburn rivalry inspires remains the same. I can’t escape it, but I can enjoy the results of a crushing loss, such as the resounding thrashing number eight ranked Alabama received at the hands of unranked, suck ass Florida State, with their new offensive play caller, Gus Malzahn, who spent a few years as either Auburn’s genius coach or utter dipshit nosepicker, depending on the Auburn ranking at any given time.
It seems these last few years I’ve been grudge watching football if only to throw Alabama defeats in the faces of the Crimson Tide Crestfallen. Yes, I’m that guy. The hater. When Vanderbilt of all teams beat Alabama last year, I didn’t stop talking about it for six weeks straight. I even wrote a poem about it. And with that crybaby Saban retired since NIL leveled the playing field, I’m fully invested in Alabama’s continued downward spiral. Not to the point where I’d actually cheer for those cowfuckers Auburn. That would require me to actually put down the book I’m reading, get on college message boards and find out how many five star recruits, the team is paying for, and how fast they can run the forty, and after all these years of Southern living, I’m still not quite prepared for that level of commitment.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
