Twenty-five years ago next week is when the shooting started in Kuwait. I’ve written about that weird month before, and it stands out in my memory for more than the geopolitical situation. That was the beginning of a New Yorker subscription which has carried on uninterrupted for twenty-five years, save for the bump in the road transitioning from paper to Kindle (and now it’s a Sunday-night-in-bed thing). It was when the sports itch truly began – when I arrived at college, I was interested in Alabama football and playing Cyberball at the arcade; by the end of calendar 1991 I was all in on the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, college basketball and the NFL in general and starting to immerse in the NBA, as I raced to backfill an enormous gap in my upbringing.
I don’t give it enough credit, but 1991 was a transformative year for me. In 1990, even through that first rough semester of undergrad, I was largely the same person I’d been my senior year: unformed, protean, trying to figure out what i would make of myself now that I was living the dream I’d had since I was five years old., and coming to grips with the fact that this college was nothing like what I’d been led to believe by television and movies and Real Genius. 1991 is when I actually did some regenerating – the wardrobe changed to all sports everything, jackets and hats and Nikes, while Sportscenter completely replaced watching the nightly news. And in the autumn, I first started to conceive of an older world, one where there was an NFL before the Super Bowl era and where big band music had been a thing, and that temporal fugue led me to Glenn Miller and joining the pep and jazz bands with a trombone I hadn’t used in five years.
I was particularly obsessed with the history of the school – I was desperately looking for old traditions, anything I could latch onto and build up the college experience I’d wanted. There were clubs in the 1920s that I wanted to revive (and for the first five years of my relationship, I was interpolating the lyrics of one of those clubs’ songs into California Drinking Song for myself until the disavowal…but that’s for later). I read the old yearbooks voraciously (including the one from 1926, which was hilarious, and the one from 1930, which was drawing parallels between the Reconstruction and the Depression) and managed to get myself let into the school archive, where I could find the gold-fringed Confederate flag that used to sit at one end of the stage. Or the handbooks they used to give to freshmen with cheers and yells (some of which were more racist than others, but Alabama in 1926 wasn’t exactly a progressive bastion on race).
I say all this because I applied twice to join something called the Student-Alumni Association. It was supposed to be – well I’m not even sure what it was supposed to be in retrospect, and it doesn’t appear on the website now, but in theory it was something to do with the history of the school and maintaining relations with alums and blah blah blah. And there was an application and a sort of cocktail party meeting which was…exactly like fraternity rush. And shocker, I didn’t make the cut either time, despite having gone to great lengths to internalize the history and “tradition” of the school. Because the fact of the matter is, there’s only one tradition at Birmingham-Southern, and it’s having smoke blown up your ass, and if you don’t believe me ask the scholarship athletes who were there in 2006. Of which…