Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South
by Ed Southern
Blair, $29.95, hardcover, 308 pages
Publication Date: 7 September 2021
College football is an infestation. There are power brokers who would have you believe otherwise. Most of these power brokers are white and wealthy and proudly male. Among their number, you will find coaches, athletic directors, school presidents, conference commissioners, legislators, and captains of industry. They traffic in lies and half-truths about power, and who holds it; about pain, and who bears it; and about payments, and who should receive them. They would prefer to view the infestation as charming, or worse, necessary. In the South, this is doubly true. Here, the infestation is advanced. It’s in the walls. I’ve loved it all my life.
In Fight Songs, Ed Southern grapples with what it means to love and live with the infestation. His name isn’t the only thing that equips him for the challenge. As a longtime fan of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons—the smallest school to belong to a Power 5 conference—he has a unique perspective on the peculiarities of the country’s most parochial sport (and its weird, reclusive sibling, college basketball). In spite of his attachment to the smallest fish in the sport’s biggest pond, he’s hopelessly attached to two behemoths of modern college football: the Clemson Tigers and the Alabama Crimson Tide. The book, a mixture of memoir and heavily researched nonfiction, is Southern’s attempt to make sense of how these institutions have acted on his life and the life of the region as a whole. This exploration raises questions of identity, virtue, and culpability in the modern South.
From the start, Southern is clear about the goals of his project. His interest is “not professional but personal: intensely personal; haunted by four hundred years upon this land; knotted by birth and raising, love and hate, virtue and sin, speech and even name.” He meets his terms, peppering the text with telling anecdotes and relevant family histories. In one particularly resonant chapter, he tells the story of how he met his wife, an Alabama fan, through a book on Bear Bryant, the houndstooth-happy patriarch of Crimson Tide football. The story showcases Southern’s wit and warmth—two hallmarks of his prose. We come to understand him as a fatestruck son of “Baptist balcony folk,” buffeted by the winds of chance. Where other writers might opt for navel-gazing, Southern takes a different approach. He fuses the outward with the inward, ruminating on the role of fate in formations of identity. He understands just how fraught these formations are: “I wandered off Tobacco Road and got myself tangled, in vines of history and happenstance, with the giant astride the South’s favorite sport.” And he’s unafraid to complicate his own narrative, when necessary; he refers to such “connections” as “the kind that can sucker you into thinking you know who you are.” In Fight Songs, constructions of self are deeply felt, yet never fixed.
Southern’s commitment to fluidity serves him well as he moves across the landscape of college athletics. The book uses college sports to reflect on a wide array of issues: public health, race, masculinity, nationalism, labor, and class, among others. “A Dangerous Game & Predatory Business,” the book’s finest chapter, manages to weave almost all these themes into a fiery indictment of higher education’s exploitative status quo. In the chapter’s inspired final paragraph, he links salient talking points around college sports to larger structural problems in American education: “Lives and health endangered for the sake of capital; the big names protected while the lowly are cast out; a system draped in myths of liberty and self-making whose actual structure is far more sealed and incestuous: Maybe those worried about exploitation on college campuses shouldn’t look only at the playing and practice fields.” This willingness to view college sports within their societal context is refreshing, especially from an author who expresses such clear affection for said sports. Too often, we leave these conversations to cynical, illiberal sycophants with clear agendas (Clay Travis comes to mind) or dull columnists in national newspapers with nothing new to say. Southern is neither. He’s a singular voice.
These tendencies place Southern’s work in direct conversation with sports media’s most urgent voices: Spencer Hall (America’s best sportswriter, for my money) and everyone else within the wonky, delightful orbit of Every Day Should Be Saturday, his long-running, now-defunct college football blog. To his immense credit, Southern holds his own in this company. His writing is packed with sharp analysis, such as his reflection on the death of Harvey Updyke, the Alabama fan who poisoned a collection of semi-sacred oak trees on rival Auburn University’s campus. Instead of positioning Updyke as the “walking, talking dark side” of football fandom, he finds resonance in the undiscussed elements of the man’s story: “That he was not from Alabama, but had adopted the Tide as his team because he saw in [Bear] Bryant the father figure he was missing; and that this man, who had such trouble with rational perspective and proportionate response, had spent his working life in law enforcement as a Texas state trooper.” To Southern, it seems, Updyke isn’t a simple figure of fun; he’s a marker and a product of a certain kind of sickness in Southern culture, and in American culture at large. Though extreme, his unchecked football fandom intertwines with sadder, more banal aspects of his cultural education.
Southern manages to spike these moments of salient analysis with clear-eyed earnestness. His personal narrative gives these points additional credibility; the reader knows he’s speaking in good faith. He locates and loves the infestation, even as he loathes its effects on this old, godforsaken house. And, crucially, he believes we can address the infestation, and perhaps even transform it into something we can live with. At the same time, there is other pressing work to be done, too. In the book’s final pages, we watch as he tills his front lawn, tearing out weeds and planting “better ground cover,” all in that hope that the new roots will “sink” into the soil and “slow and suck the rain that washes like a river down the slope our house sits on, straight at our foundation.” He wants to protect his home, to protect its foundation. Bemused by the obvious parallels, he assures the reader that this story is “true.” I’m inclined to believe him.
