1981. A different era. ESPN barely exists. College football games only appear on television on Saturdays. There’s no such thing as commercial Internet. Sports talk radio is in its infancy. The triple-option Wishbone offense is au courant among major programs, not just service academies. The SEC still has ten teams, SMU is still a national power, and Bear Bryant is still alive. Basically, from our standpoint thirty-plus years on, it’s prehistoric college football. No realignment or 12-team conferences or first-week-of-December title games or BCS standings. You know, what I was raised on.
Into this comes one Willie Morris, native of Yazoo City and alumnus of the University of Texas, a Rhodes Scholar in the late 1950s and a famous literary editor who found himself at the University of Mississippi in 1980, just as a young man in Philadelphia, Mississippi was making a name for himself on the high school football field. Apparently that young man’s legend had reached all the way to New York City, which is how Willie Morris found himself spending most of the 1981 high school football season in and around Philadelphia to watch the senior season of a certain Marcus Dupree, the consensus #1 high school player in the country.
The book is widely regarded as a classic of college football literature, and so I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t start reading it until 2013. When I did, though, it was compelling – this, after all, is less than two decades removed from the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia in 1963, more or less contemporary with the Birmingham marches. So reading about Philadelphia in the autumn of 1981 is more or less like reading about my own hometown in the vicinity of 4th grade or so. Combine that with recruiting in an age with no Twitter, no 7-on-7 camps, no Rivals rankings, no national high-school All-American games, no endless hat games broadcast live by ESPN on National Signing Day…
I mean, think about it. This is an era where national sports coverage realistically means Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and ABC’s Wide World of Sports. There’s no SEC Media Days with more credentialed reporters flocking to Hoover than attend the Super Bowl’s media day; instead a bunch of beat writers crammed into a rickety DC-3 and touched down in each of the 10 SEC towns to see the teams and coaches individually (and the SEC Skywriters Tour passed into legend). For a single high school player to rate that kind of national attention was literally without precedent, and The Courting of Marcus Dupree does an amazing job of showing how a small Southern town, still scarred from the civil rights era, finds itself through the looking glass because of one 17-year-old. They had no idea how to handle recruiting mania, because the mania hadn’t existed before.
Really, that’s the appeal: at root, The Courting of Marcus Dupree is about a small isolated Southern community having to adapt to the modern world, one halfback sweep at a time. And yet, for the first time that I can remember, it actually made me a little tiny bit homesick for the idea of a small pastoral town, leaves turning, high school football as the focus of everything, where the “coffee shop” is in fact a diner and the sports talk comes from guys at the counter arguing over what was in the paper and what they hear (the evolution of “What do you hear?” as the greeting of choice is a particularly salient and entertaining point). No social media, no 24-hour cable news and sports, something quiet and manageable.
I’d go crazy inside of a week, I know. At least, I think I know.