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THE SPORTING LIFE
By Fred Hobson

Click image for caption

This article is a reprinting of a piece that appeared in issue 1 (Summer 1986) of Alabama Heritage, pp. 12-21. Copyright The University of Alabama. All rights reserved.
[ Click images to enlarge. ]

The Southerner, George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1860, was a natural athlete. His athleticism came from the many hours he spent outdoors, riding, shooting, and working—unlike the poor Yankee drudge, wan and pale and emaciated, who spent his hours in libraries, laboratories, factories, and counting-houses.

If Fitzhugh was given to generalization, he was hardly the only son of Dixie given to such habits. Daniel Hundley of Alabama, in a fascinating but largely forgotten book entitled Social Relation in Our Southern States (1860), came to the same conclusions. And not only Southerners felt that way but a few Yankees as well—although they expressed their views in different language. In 1858 Henry Adams of Massachusetts, son of the famous presidential Adams family, entered Harvard College in the same class with Roony Lee, son of the renowned military Lees of Virginia, and the conclusion Adams reached about his representative Southerner Lee—recorded in his Education fifty years later—was, in one respect, like those of Fitzhugh and Hundley. The son of Robert E. Lee was tall, “largely built,” imposing, and possessed of “the habit of command.” But, Adams added, he was “simple beyond analysis…ignorant…childlike.” “As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage,” but “strictly, the Southerner had no mind.”

There was fearlessness in their eyes, but also innocence…

The idea, then, that the Southerner is somehow given more to the cultivation of the body than to the life of the mind is not an idea which sprang forth in the twentieth century. It has been around since the beginning of the Republic. You could probe and suggest reasons for this assumption, but, if I may first venture another generalization, the fact is that Southerners as a whole do seem to take sport more seriously than people in other parts of America. It might be, or might have been until recently, that the rural Southerner, unlike the urban Northerner, had little else to do. H. L. Mencken once wrote that Southerners flocked to revivals and lynchings because they had no art museums and symphonies. You might suggest they flocked to high school football games and stock car races for the same reason. Or you could venture—as Fitzhugh and Hundley argued in the nineteenth century and as, in a more scholarly manner, Southern historians Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney have argued in the twentieth—that it is in the blood (although whether Norman blood or Celtic, Fitzhugh and McDonald would disagree). And you might give other reasons—climate, isolation, an agrarian tradition, a military heritage, an emphasis on primal honor. But still the fact remains: nothing is quite so passionate as Southerners flocking to Legion Field, to Darlington and Daytona, to Rupp Arena or Carolina’s Blue Heaven.

The Birmingham Barons baseball team in 1913. (Courtesy Birmingham Barons.)

The Birmingham Barons baseball team in 1913. (Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts—Catalog Number OVH 551.)

Having contended this, I hear dissenters. Nobody takes football more seriously than the steel workers and coal miners of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. No one takes basketball more seriously than the crazies of small-town Indiana. True to some extent, but (except for the Hoosiers, and they too are usually rural) I don’t fully buy it. The coal miners and steel workers turn to football as a way out, as well as a way to define and manifest manhood, but sport does not seem to be so much a part of the fabric of society as it is, and has been for two centuries, in the South. Hunting, fishing outdoors activities of all sorts; the passion for horses, for cars, for speed, for danger, for violence: all these are not exclusively Southern but they sometimes seem predominantly so. A violently competitive spirit has existed in the South from the beginning. As historian Elliott Gorn has shown, rough-and-tumble fighting, eye-gouging, and other such gentlemanly pursuits were commonplace in the early nineteenth century on the south bank of the Ohio river, and on down into deepest Dixie—but were rare north of the Ohio. Southerners, it seems, were meaner and tougher.

Stock car racing is a madness unto itself, an indigenously Southern activity…

But when you think of Southern sports in the late nineteenth century you usually think of public competition—football, basketball, stock car racing, and so on. Stock car racing, of course, is a madness unto itself, an indigenously Southern activity, partly a legacy of moonshine-running in the North Carolina hills and partly of the Southerner’s legendary love of danger, sweat, dirt, and machines that can be tinkered with and made to go faster. Tom Wolfe, a genteel Virginian with refined tastes, once spent a racing weekend in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and came away calling that rowdy dirt-track wonder Junior Johnson “the last American Hero.” Since then Richard Petty has dressed up the stock-car image a bit, running for county commissioner, hobnobbing with respectable Republicans, and advertising fried chicken on TV—but the image has never departed far from dirt tracks, strung-together cars, and, in the beginning, mountain boys fleeing from revenuers around tortuous mountain roads.

But back to football and basketball, and by this I mean high school and college football and basketball, since professional sport in Dixie is another matter that will require examination going beyond sport into history and sociology. Football and basketball, unlike stock car racing and eye-gouging, were certainly not native to the American South. They were late nineteenth-century imports, slow to catch on at first in a region given to ruder combat and more concrete contests of personal honor. In fact, you can trace the history of American football, to some extent, in the growth of various American regions from agrarian to industrial societies The first great football teams—Yale and Harvard and Princeton—were in the then-industrializing East; by the 1920s supremacy had moved to the industrializing Midwest—Yost of Michigan, Red Grange of Illinois, and at Notre Dame, Knute Rockne, the Four Horsemen, and the Gipper; and then, as the century progressed, supremacy—or at least the chance for supremacy, the possibility of winning it all—moved South, led by the great Alabama tradition: the Rose Bowl teams of 1926, 1927, 1931, and 1935, and such folk heroes as Johnny Mack Brown, Don Hutson, and Dixie Howell.

Fred Hobson, #30, as a Tar Baby—a member of the University of North Carolina freshman basketball team—in 1961. (Photograph reluctantly supplied by the author.)

So football became in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s a sort of Southern civil religion, complete with icons, saints, and antichrists (a role to be assumed, in latter days, by Notre Dame). In the late 1950s and 1960s, when the poor, benighted South, guilty of racism and numerous other crimes against progress, was catching it from neoabolitionists far and wide, football became about the only means of salvaging regional pride. It was those little, tough Alabama white boys (sure Namath came from Pennsylvania, but he too was a good ole boy) against the alien hordes—unpronounceable ethnic Catholics or transplanted blacks—from beyond the Potomac and Ohio. Bear Bryant, the most revered saint, nearly a demigod, was accorded the kind of hagiolatry heretofore given only to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. And critical moments in Bryant’s career—the unleashing of the wishbone, say, against Southern Cal in 1971—were later recounted, misty-eyed, with all the fervor once given a retelling of Southern valor in Pickett’s Charge (except the wishbone proved to be much more successful). Bryant was, even more than that patrician Virginian Lee, an indigenous product of Southern folk culture, the legend of Moro Bottom, Arkansas, tough, wily, reminiscent of an earlier, more vigorous Old Southwest (when the Southwest mean Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas). In the 1840s, an expatriate Yankee named Thomas Bangs Thorpe had written a tall tale called “The Big Bear of Arkansas.” Paul Bryant of Moro Bottom was the Big Bear brought to life: he too could not be defeated.

Bryant made Southern football superior, then, and Alabama football superior in the South. The heart of Dixie became the Pride of Dixie and contributed a new kind of positive Southern image, a truer and more representative one—not the old, aristocratic image of Lee and the genteel Tidewater Virginians, but rather one of a yeoman, democratic, tough but shrewd-smart South—not the original Tidewater image then, but rather, in deference to rule by pigskin, a sort of Crimson Tidewater. When the Bear died in 1983 the folks lined the streets of Tuscaloosa as the hearse passed by, then lined the overpasses on the interstate to Birmingham. It was not unlike that throng of poor and plain Southerners who poured out of the piney woods in Faulkner’s story “The Bear,” to pay homage to another nearly legendary creature—are real bear—who had long dominated and finally had fallen. Or, more in keeping with Southern history, it was like the throng (only larger) that turned out for Lee’s funeral procession through the streets of Lexington, Virginia, in 1870; or those 150,000 souls who came to New Orleans for Jefferson Davis’ funeral in 1889. The civil religion that Southern football had become demanded that kind of ceremony.

The South served the same function in baseball that it served in the nation’s economy: it produced raw materials to be shipped North.

But Southern football, of course, went back much earlier than Paul Bryant, much earlier than the glory days of the mid- and late twentieth century. As the game developed, its seat of power shifted, and that shift was more a matter of sociology and academics than of sport. At the turn of the century, Sewanee—Sewanee!—was a Southern power. So were Vanderbilt and, somewhat later, Duke—and even Washington and Lee, and Davidson. (In 1931 Wallace Wade left Alabama for Duke, where he coached two decades and gave his name to an impressive stadium that is now rarely half-filled.) The student-athlete in those days was truly the student-athlete. Football was for character-building, and if it was also for victory, that only built character the better. My grandfather played fullback for Vanderbilt in 1897 (after already playing as an undergraduate at Trinity in North Carolina, eligibility requirements not being so rigid in those days), and as I look at the team pictures in those years I see a character-building muscular Christianity writ larger in the faces of those players than I find in any of the poems of Kipling or Henley or other turn-of-the-century advocates of the moral strenuous life. There was fearlessness in all their eyes, but also innocence, most of all uncorrupted youth, engaging in sport for the joy of sport. You don’t see that look in the faces in many team pictures, circa 1986.

Basketball, by comparison, has always seemed comparatively corrupt—at least it was as soon as it left the once-pastoral environs of Springfield, Massachusetts, and moved on to New York and Philadelphia. It had always been an urban game—dominated in its formative years by St. Johns, CCNY, and Philadelphia’s Big Five, and enshrined in Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, and the Palestra—and by the mid-twentieth century it was associated with urban vices, particularly gambling. The fixes in the early fifties nearly killed big-time Eastern basketball for a quarter-century. And it is no coincidence that it is about at that point that big-time basketball began to move South—first with transplanted Hoosier Everett Case who had just come to North Carolina State, then with St. Johns’ Frank McGuire who came to North Carolina.

But basketball power had always been, in one notable instance, in the South. In the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, even when St. Johns and CCNY were in their heyday and urban basketball reigned supreme, Kentucky was a force in the hinterland; and it is a significant fact that, even considering Eastern dominance in the first half century of the sport, today two Southern schools, Kentucky and North Carolina, rank nationally one-two in all-time victories. But Kentucky was a special case. More border state than deepest Dixie, sharing with across-the-river Indiana a passion for basketball that grew organically out of small towns and simple people, Kentucky sent its best to play for the Baron of Bluegrass, Adolph Rupp, at Lexington. But Kentucky, too, was shaken by the fixes of the early fifties, and it was at that point that Southern basketball supremacy shifted to the North Carolina schools and the new, suddenly frenzied Atlantic Coast Conference.

In recent years that frenzy has not diminished, in fact it has intensified as Southern Universities have become even more successful in both basketball and football. If, as I believe, many of Dixie’s most important battles in the twentieth century have been fought in stadiums and coliseums, in the past decade Southerners have won most of those battles. Not all certainly: what Alabamian can forget Notre Dame in the seventies twice depriving the Crimson Tide of the national Football championships—a humiliation that was undone only when Alabama beat another bunch of Yankees, Penn State, for the national title in 1978.

Paul Bryant, as a barefoot five-year-old, with his parents and nine of his eleven brothers and sisters on the family farm in Moro Bottom, Arkansas. (Courtesy the Paul W. Bryant Museum, University of Alabama.)

But, in general, in the past few years, Southern teams have won most of their crucial battles—to the extent that, to the television-addicted American who measures quality and forms images through witnessing crucial victories in bowl games, basketball’s Final Four, and other prime-time shootouts, it must seem that Southern universities are clearly the best universities. They produced NCAA football champions in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1983; and more important as a sign of higher civilization to some of us, college basketball has in the past few years (1985 being an aberration) been ruled by Southern teams. Southern universities were national champions in 1978, 1980, 1982, and 1983 (and 1984, if you include Georgetown, which is north of the Potomac by a few feet but south of the Mason Dixon line), and the hallowed Final Four has sometimes seemed to be a Southern invitational, including two and sometimes three Southern teams. North Carolina has the nation’s best record over the past decade. North Carolina has produced more all-Americans and more first-round NBA draft choices over the past decade. Kentucky and North Carolina annually lead the nation in recruiting. And so on.

But—and this brings us back to Southern society—you can’t consider Southern sport without considering sociology. It’s a cliché but it’s true: when Bear Bryant recruited Wilbur Jackson in 1970 and treated him like everybody else, he did more for integration in Alabama than John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson combined. And when, four years earlier, Dean Smith brought do-everything hoopster Charley Scott to Chapel Hill—even took him to church with him—suddenly segregation had a lot less appeal among Tar Heels.

There is no greater factor in the rise of supremacy of Southern football and—particularly—basketball teams in the past decade and a half than the recruiting of black athletes. It’s hard to realize now, that for a full half-century of relatively big-time Southern sports, blacks existed in the shadows, invisible men. I well remember my introduction to the civil rights revolution one winter Saturday afternoon in Chapel Hill in the early 1960s, and, looking back, it was an afternoon fraught with all kinds of ironies. I was a Tar Baby that year—that is, a member of the Carolina freshman basketball team—and as we took the court against somebody, Duke or Wake Forest or N. C. State, we noticed the stands were not completely full. There was a civil rights demonstration outside Woollen Gym, some of the fans were having a hard time getting in, and I remember, in those days of unraised consciousness, being irritated that we couldn’t get on with the game. As I say, there were ironies, not the least of which was that the real game—both for the future of the South and for the future of Southern athletics—was going on outside; and another of which was that, if the civil rights revolution had been carried out before 1962, not after, I and a lot of my white teammates might not have been playing college basketball at all—at least not in a Carolina uniform. Not long before, Sam Jones (later of Celtic fame) had played ten miles away at all-black North Carolina College in Durham. A year or two later Earl the Pearl Monroe would begin his legendary career at all-black Winston-Salem State. But the Carolina freshman team got more publicity than either of their teams.

I well remember my introduction to the civil rights revolution. I was a Tar Baby that year…

And if Southern sport, in the two decades since then, has changed Southern society, Southern sport has also reflected Southern society. The intermixture of Southern football and religion, for example, has always been a wonder to behold—and I’m talking about more than football as civil religion here. I mean the fervent Christian linebacker who, once he takes the field, wants nothing more than to take somebody’s head off; the pre-game prayer always followed by—at least—a “give ’em hell”; the Alabama football team marching as a body each year, the first Sunday of school into Calvary Baptist Church. There is more than a little of Onward Christian Soldiers to this: the Church Militant. In fact, Southern sport, religion, and beauty have long been curiously intertwined, quarterbacks and preachers and beauty queens forming a sort of Southern triumvirate, the sine qua non of Southern culture.

If I had to select one player, of recent vintage, to illustrate all this, it would be that warrior nonpareil, Steadman Shealy, who led Alabama to the national championship in 1979. With Shealy all my earlier generalizations about the corrupt modern athlete go out the window: he would be perfectly at home in the Vanderbilt team picture of 1897—earnest, purified, the muscular Christian even more virtuous for having resisted all the modern temptations. Steadman Shealy (the very name almost allegorical) possessed, like Roony Lee at Harvard, “the habit of command.” Not blessed with an abundance of talent or size or speed, he had an abundance of heart and spirit: all he could do was win. I do not doubt for a minute those who said that Alabama was destined to beat Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl and win that 1979 championship because Shealy was a witnessing, evangelical Christian. Confidence means everything to an athlete: in a crucial third-down situation the knowledge that God is on your side is worth infinitely more than a rifle arm or 9.5 speed. So Shealy did win the national title—the Bear’s last—and it is no coincidence that, three years later, on the day after the Bear Bryant’s death, Steadman Shealy gave the most moving tribute at the student memorial service in the Alabama coliseum. He said that Bryant, in his final weeks, had talked to him about god.

It is notable, perhaps, that I have written almost three thousand words and have not once—or only once—mentioned professional sports. That would be unthinkable for a writer in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or San Diego. But that suggests Southern loyalties: for college sports are really what matter in the Late Confederacy.

That is not to say that professional sports are without their historical and sociological significance. Indeed, if, as one historian has suggested, a metaphor for post-Civil War inferior South, the colonial South, was that 1886 decree by which all left-handed tracks of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad were moved three inches west in order to accommodate Northern rolling stock—Northern being considered standard—I suggest that the point at which the South began to rise from colonialism and back toward equality was that moment in 1966 when major league sports crossed the Potomac and Ohio heading south.

First was baseball, which was altogether appropriate since baseball was the national sport and the South had contributed more than its share of stars: Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron. But Dixie itself had no major league teams. It had only farm teams (the word was appropriate; bush league was its synonym), the Atlanta Crackers, the Birmingham Barons, the New Orleans Pelicans, the Charlotte Hornets, and so forth. The South, that is, served the same function in baseball that it served in the nation’s economy: it was the colony, producing the raw materials—Cobb, Dean, Mays, Aaron—to be shipped North. Southern fans chose a favorite team from above the Potomac and Ohio, sometimes (particularly at World Series time) the Yankees or Dodgers or Giants, but more often either those teams who owned the nearest Southern farm club or those teams geographically closest to the South—often the St. Louis Cardinals or the Cincinnati Reds.

It was not so much that the South lacked the population to attract major league baseball—Atlanta was bigger than Milwaukee. But it was a colony, and besides it was segregated. The Dodgers with Robinson, Campanella, Gilliam, and Newcombe could hardly come to Atlanta first-class. Until 1966, that is, by which time an integration of sorts had come South, and the Braves moved down from Milwaukee. The football Falcons and the basketball Hawks soon followed to Atlanta, and other major league teams came to Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, and Houston.

Since then, other Southern cities—Birmingham, Charlotte, and Memphis among them—have strived mightily to become major league cities, but they’ve never become quite legitimate. Birmingham’s fate was sealed in the sixties when it lost its long-contested battle with Atlanta for Deep South economic supremacy. To the nation in the sixties Birmingham meant Bull Connor and firehoses and bombed churches; Atlanta, cleverly, billed itself “The City Too Busy to Hate.” It got Northern businesses, national air routes—and major league teams. Birmingham—for a time—got nothing. Since then, Birmingham (“the city too busy too late”?) has overcome much of its negative image, but it has never—like Atlanta—become truly big-league.

Will success spoil the Spirit of Moro Bottom?

But even of that newest of New Souths that arose in Atlanta and Dallas and Houston, a question or two might be asked. What was the cost of its progress? What was lost in the process? In one sense, what has happened to major league baseball in the past quarter-century is what has happened to the South: it has been cleaned up, homogenized, gone from cotton and wool to double knit. Baseball is now a slick game, with ladies’ nights, scoreboards flashing, air-conditioned dugouts, and pitchers riding in from the bullpen. Most of the dirt is gone: the in-fields are now grass, and not even real grass but synthetic. The regional identity is gone as well. The Atlanta Crackers were a team with a Southern accent; they were of Georgia. But what is Southern about the Braves, the Falcons, the Hawks? They could as easily be—might be any day—in Des Moines.

But lest this turn into a treatise on Southern identity, I return to my original thought: sport is most passionate in Dixie, and most successful, when it is organic, indigenous, a kind of civil religion—which means, again, primarily high school and college sport. What has been truly notable about Southern sports, or rather the style of individual sports—whether football, basketball, or stock car racing—is that they have been, just like the old Atlanta Crackers, of the South. The style of Southern football, for example, has been distinctively Southern—that is to say, not too far removed from the style of Southern warfare in the Civil War. The Yankees in the war tried to overwhelm the Confederates with mass—just as large, plodding Big Ten teams have attempted to do in football. But the South, at least under the Bear in his heyday, played football as it had fought a war—with tough, scrawny recruits, a swarming defense, a fighting spirit, a certain provincial dedication, guerrilla tactics (a tackle-eligible pass!), and with a disregard for odds.

But can it be that way any more? Bear Bryant, in another of his famous pronouncements in the 1970s, said that Southern boys—at least white Southern boys—had gotten too soft. They didn’t want it enough any more, they wouldn’t bust a gut for him. If that was true in 1975, is it becoming more true all the time, as more and more Southerners, white and black, move into the pampered middle class? Can players from that slothful realm of VCRs and jam boxes, cars-on-demand, and cradle-to-grave comfort be nearly as hungry or as colorful as those earlier products of cotton fields, sawmill villages, and piney woods? Will success spoil the Spirit of Moro Bottom?

It is hardly, as such matters go, a cosmic question—but to those of us who constantly battle the feeling that the outcome of a particular football or basketball game is at least as important as a summit conference or the hostages coming home, it is a matter worth considering.

About the Author

In his essay, “The Sporting Life,” Fred Hobson, a native North Carolinian, brings together two of his lifelong passions—sports (a subject on which he rarely writes) and the South (a subject he writes about frequently). Hobson began his writing career on the editorial staff of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, where he and his fellow editorial writers shared the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service for a series of editorials. After completing a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in 1972, Hobson joined the English faculty at the University of Alabama, where, in 1985, he received the Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award for excellence in research and teaching.

Biographical Update (August 2006): Currently Dr. Fred Hobson is the Lineberger Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. He is editor of the Southern Literary Studies series of the Louisiana State University Press and co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal.

Addtitional Information

For more information on the history of American sport and popular culture, see:

• Fred C. Hobson, Jr., Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood (Univiversity of Missouri Press, 2006)

• Steven A. Riess, The American Sporting Experience: A Historical Anthology of Sport in America (New York: Leisure Press, 1984).

For more on Hobson’s views on the South, see:

• Fred C. Hobson, Jr., The Silencing of Emiy Mullen and Other Essays (LSU Press, 2005)

• Fred C. Hobson, Jr., Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974).

• Fred C. Hobson, Jr., Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Winner of the 1983 Jules F. Landry Award for Southern history, literature, and biography.

• Fred Hobson, ed., South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Winner of the Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction.

• Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson, eds., Literature at the Barricades: Essays on the American Writer in the 1930s (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982).

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