The air was clean that morning. The spit of showers that always accompanied the polar air when it headed south had left its faint dampness on the dry September dust. The air was so clean and clear that distant objects stood out in stark relief against the background with an acuity that almost eliminated any depth perception: everything appeared to be equidistant. There was no atmosphere. We Southerners were used to blue, hazy backgrounds that rendered distant objects mysterious and vague. But here, this morning, each object was stark, definite, independent, and dazzlingly bright. It was as if the tired old summer day had taken a bath, and stood bright and naked and clean. Even the usual smog that soiled the bright blue of the sky with a dirty, gray band across the horizon was gone this morning, and the skyline of the biggest city in the South poked its brilliant glass and steel towers into the pristine ether with pride.
The only sound the boy heard as he walked down the driveway was the faint, deep rumble of a diesel locomotive from the tracks far to the north. It was funny, the boy thought, how one could always hear the trains early in the fall when the first cool, clear air came down from Canada. That was the only time he heard them, too, when the wind was from the north. The boy loved the sound. He didn’t know why, especially, but it seemed that no matter where he had lived, the sound of trains always came from the north. And with the sounds of the trains came the cool, clear air. As he scuffed along the rain-spattered dust of the driveway, he thought about why he loved cool weather so much more than warm weather. He guessed it was because of football. Football was the boy’s first love, and the cool air reminded him of it. No, that wasn’t it exactly. It was more of a negative sort of thing. He hated heat and humidity. He hated heat and humidity because that was what so much of football was—at least in the South. In late summer for the past four years he had suffered on the hard, parched Bermuda grass of a football practice field. The memories of the dust and cotton-mouth and flies and sweat and sore legs and blisters made him sick even now as he thought about it. But once more—like magic—the cool air had come, and with it had come the shorter practices, the rousing marches of the band, the excitement of a new school year, the pretty girls, and the games! The games, he thought. That was it. That is what it was all about. That’s what kept him from quitting the thousand times he had thought about quitting. That is what made all of discomfort worth it—the games. The stadium sits on a plain in the still sparsely-populated area near the community college and a mental hospital. The nearby expressway has carried the suburb-hungry nouveau riche to new and greater monuments to conspicuous consumption, farther and farther away from the old prison farm and its abandoned acres that lie adjacent to the stadium. An occasional deer is to be seen here, and there are still some quail and lots of doves that call this area home. But the resident sentinel of this tranquil flat is the stadium. Through its hollow, eye-like portals it peers over the college and the mental hospital and the old prison farm barns and sheds The bond issue that funded it could only support the construction of a one-sided stadium, so it has only one side, which is much taller than it should be.
Perched against the hill as it is, it resembles an ancient Aztec throne pyramid, resplendent in its imperious serenity. Deserted, though, it looks kind of ridiculous with its gawky long light poles leaning and stretching into the sky.
But that was the way the stadium looked when it was empty, as it was when the team bus pulled into the parking lot before the game. On that night it was a different story. Slowly the cars from the neighborhood clans came, packed full of whole families fresh from McDonald’s. They wound in a long slow line across the expressway, turned in at the corner by the college, went by the mental hospital and pulled into the parking lot. Doors sprang open and pompoms and pennants and blankets and spirit caps bounded forth, announcing the arrival of the fans. They poured through the portals and began to fill up the steps of the giant pyramid. They came from their air-conditioned, color TV-d homes to witness mock warfare between their clan and the clan from the other neighborhood. Their Tigers met the Titans, or the Spartans met the Bears, but no matter the name of the teams, the fans rooted for them with ferocity. There was something primitive about this, it seemed to the boy. All of these people who shop together in the shopping centers and go to the same churches with each other, come out and roar and whoop and scream as their representative armies carry on the oldest of Anglo-Saxon battles—the struggle for possession of land. That was it, the boy thought: that is why they came to the games. The football field was, as Matthew Arnold had said, “. . . a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.” The boy was not so sure about the ignorant part, but football was literally a clashing of armies by night. But somehow it was still a momentous, thrilling, important event to the boy and to these people who came to the games. There was something else of importance to these games. He guessed it was pride. The word itself was used and abused according to who said it, the boy thought. The coaches used pride to prick your ego when your body absolutely refused to move another inch. They appealed to your sense of manhood or shame or family name or something to make you mad enough to go some more. They wanted you to have pride so that you would not quit—ever! The girls at school, though, they used pride a different way. They called it conceit when you felt confident and sure of yourself. They didn’t like that and called you “Mr. Big Shot” and stuff like that. They seemed to like mild guys who were vulnerable and soft-spoken and self-deprecating. The two definitions got confused in the boy’s mind often, and it would be many years before he ever learned to have pride but not show it. But there was still another aspect of pride that seemed more universal and important. It was a feeling—that was for sure, and it was a feeling about yourself. It was an awareness of your own existence to the point that it gave you a good feeling. Not only that; it was a feeling that you knew others were admitting your existence also. When you first discover this feeling, perhaps the immediate tendency is to feel too good about yourself and to be too aware of who you are. The boy guessed that that was what the girls thought pride was. But after a few experiences of recognition, one’s ego began to anticipate recognition and to deny itself gratification, and to work hard to be ready to be successful when it next appeared to the world. He guessed that was what his coaches meant about pride: don’t be sloppy, because when it comes time for your moment of exposure, you’ll be sloppy there. Pride to them was a sort of preparedness that your ego had to maintain. One had to have the confidence to know that he could perform at any given moment and be ashamed to do anything less than the very best. That was the hard kind of pride, the boy knew. But what compelled people to come out and see a high school football game, sometimes even if they did not have a son or daughter performing? Why would they sit up there in the huge concrete stadium and get goose bumps and rant and rave. The boy thought and thought about this, but it did not make much sense. Then, as he looked through the cool, clean air into the trees and the grass and dirt and thought about the stadium and football, he suddenly knew. It was pride, all right, but it was a different sort of pride. It was based on the ancient, traditional code of possession. Boiled down into the simplest thing he could think of it was—land. Land, earth, dirt, nature—call it what you will—it was pride in possession of something tied to the earth, something that one was willing to protect with his life. That was why people came to these games. They loved to see a struggle for land that they could participate in. If their team won, they felt personally victorious in protecting their land, at the same time gaining enemy ground. They could scream and fight and act like savages for an hour and a half, while their teenaged army wrangled about in armor for supremacy of a one hundred yard field. If their team won, they were personally proud of Murphy High or Panthersville or Northside Warner Robins, and would brag about it for a year until the next annual battle. Oh, it was foolish all right, as foolish as the empty stadium, but it was honest and it was human and it would not change—it never did. The boy sniffed the air and felt the cool and grinned. He felt good.