Homesick (9 page)

But the real key to social life in my college days wasn’t dating—it was football. Oh, to be in Denny Stadium on a Saturday afternoon in the fall! Everyone dressed up, as fine as if they were going to church: the guys in jacket and sometimes tie, we girls in dresses. Families came from miles around to join their daughters at the sorority houses for lunch, and then we’d all walk ceremonially over to the stadium. The air would be crisp with autumn and anticipation. For the really big games, we all packed up and headed to Birmingham, which had a larger stadium to accommodate the overflow crowds. Cars and RVs streamed in from all over the state, decorated with crimson and white streamers,
GO BAMA
! scrawled in white shoe polish on the windows.

There was a festival air to these weekends, and for most of the folks who drove overnight to get there I think it was a kind of a pilgrimage, too. Football was like a religion for so many of us, not just in the South but all over the country, and of course today sports is one thing we all still have in common—whether you’re rooting for the Dallas Cowboys, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, or the squad of local boys who scrimmage between the high school bleachers on Friday night.

The boys we were rooting for, of course, were the Crimson Tide. The Tide was a national powerhouse, and being a part of the Alabama football program in the 1970s was like having a box seat at the eye of a hurricane. I’d always loved football; I’d been a cheerleader since forever, because that was the one way I could be a part of it all. And when I got to Alabama I somehow found the courage to try out for the varsity squad, and was lucky enough to be chosen.
Come on,
you’re thinking,
it takes courage to try out for cheerleader?
In those days, at that school, yes, absolutely.

One of the reasons was coach Bear Bryant.

Throughout the South, Coach Bryant was revered in the 1970s as pretty much the second coming of Robert E. Lee. He won more games than any coach in college football history, but that wasn’t really the reason. A child of sharecroppers, Paul Bryant had won a football scholarship to the University of Alabama, and when he returned to forge his winning career he became the best kind of hero—the country boy made good, who rose to the heights of national fame while remaining down-to-earth. Coach Bryant was stoic but feeling, plain but noble. To those of us who attended Alabama in those years he seemed to dwell on Mount Olympus. Yet everyone knew he was one of our own, and we loved him for it. He was as close to a secular saint as any Southerner is ever going to see. When he died in 1983, half a million people—half a million!—lined the road between Tuscaloosa, where his funeral was held, and Birmingham, where he was laid to rest.

I’ll never forget the first time I met him. I had to go into his office all by myself to arrange a pep rally, and I was scared to death. But then he looked up at me and smiled. “If I’da known you were comin’ ovah,” he said, “I’da awduhed us up some frahd chicken.” I melted. It was as if I’d had an audience with the pope.

Another time, a fellow cheerleader and I timidly went up to him on the field, and he jokingly said, “You gulls, you only come t’see me because you wanna get yo’ picture taken.” He probably wasn’t far off. Everyone who met him really wanted to connect with him somehow. He was a living legend. In the South we’re especially romantic and history-conscious, so we’re awfully good at creating these figures. But all across America we have them—favorite teachers, sports figures, even (sometimes) politicians we look to for inspiration. Somehow they help us to understand ourselves and each other; they tell us what home is.

My college sweetheart was Bob Baumhower, one of the star defensive linemen for the Tide. He was everything you could want in a first love: tall and handsome, kind and loving, a big old bear of an Alabama boy. He’d take me out to Lake Tuscaloosa for barbecues, picnics, and band parties, and we’d have sunset cruises on his family’s boat. Now that I have a daughter of my own, I miss those innocent days, when it was okay for a girl to wait until college—when she was better able to handle herself emotionally—to lose her heart to her first real boyfriend. Today things move so fast for kids that it’s hard to imagine most girls could get to college without having their hearts broken by a string of immature bad boys. I hope my Anabella is fortunate enough to have as her first love a fellow as caring and grounded as Bob. (And as handsome!)

On game days we cheerleaders would arrive at the stadium well before the game started, to get some practice in. Bob would be on the field warming up; we’d send flirtatious signals to each other on the sidelines, and I’d get all giddy with those butterfly love rushes. The big game, the roar of the crowd, the Million Dollar Band playing the fight song, my sweetheart in shoulder pads on the field next to me—I didn’t think life could possibly be more exciting than that.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first experience of show business. Most of the important games were televised nationally, and the cameramen never missed the opportunity to get a shot of the cheerleaders. Mama would call and say, “Oh, we saw you on TV!” We started getting fan mail from all over the country; a little posse of younger girls even started standing outside the stadium, waiting for our autographs as we left.

We cheerleaders weren’t only attached to the football team. We traveled with the Alabama basketball squad, too. And one trip we took with them—to the National Invitational Tournament, held in New York’s Madison Square Garden—would change my life forever. I’d been fascinated with the Manhattan skyline since seventh grade, when I first saw it in a photograph. New York City is frightening to a lot of small-town people, and back in the seventies there was good reason to be afraid of it. The jazzy metropolis of Cole Porter, Joe DiMaggio, and so many others had turned into a place of crime, filth, drugs, and chaos, and for every starry-eyed visitor like me there were plenty of born-and-bred New Yorkers who couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.

But I couldn’t see that, or at least I wouldn’t. Sure, there were bums in the streets, hookers on the corners; but there were also fabulous street musicians busking for quarters (dollars if they were lucky), wide avenues choked with yellow cabs migrating uptown to spawn, and energy, everywhere energy, as if the streets themselves were electric cables pulsing with life. Once there, I never wanted to leave. I loved it, just loved it. I’d never seen a place that seemed so exciting and so alive. I don’t remember how Alabama did in that tournament; all I remember was making a vow to myself that someday I’d come back to live there. This skyscrapered island city, about as far away as you can get from bucolic Meridian, was calling me home—home to a place I’d never been.

Was it strange being an art major in this tempest of sorority life, football, and cheerleading? I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I loved both; why should I give up one for the other? Yet at some point in my sophomore year, an art teacher asked me, “Do you really think you’ll pursue art seriously?” I said yes at the time, but I began to wonder if it was true. At that time Pop Art was very much in vogue, and it dominated my classes at Bama. I wasn’t drawn to its ironic, superficial style, and I began to worry that being out of lockstep with the art world would prevent me from doing anything as a professional painter. At some point that year, I decided practicality was the wiser choice, and expanded my major to include communications.

This turned out to be a shrewd move. The year before I graduated, ABC was exploring the idea of having a college-age woman do color commentary from the sidelines. Sportscaster Jim Lampley was covering a Bama game, and he asked if any of us cheerleaders were in the communications school. I was! This was my first big break. I was all of nineteen years old.

It turned out that Jim meant
broadcast
communications, which wasn’t my area. But it didn’t matter. ABC sent a twenty-four-year-old assistant producer to Tuscaloosa to tape me doing color pieces on campus. I must have done pretty well, because they sent the guy back a few months later to tape me summarizing the highlights of a basketball game. Trouble was, I didn’t really care for basketball. Sure, I’d been a cheerleader for the Crimson Tide roundballers, but I was a one-sport girl—and football it was.

Still, what kind of fool would I have been to withdraw from the audition when it just might be my ticket to success, or some new world? The producer and I went to a Bama basketball game, and I just sat there with a blank legal pad on my lap. I was supposed to take notes so I could summarize the game from quarter to quarter. But I didn’t know the difference between a pick-and-roll and a Pic ‘N Save—and halfway through the game, the legal pad remained sadly blank.

The gallant young assistant producer saw my distress. “I’m not supposed to help you,” he leaned over and whispered, “but I’m going to make some notes and you might want to glance over at them.” His notes saved me: they gave me something to read—a script to memorize, you might say—even if I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. In the end, I didn’t get the job; later it went to Phyllis George. But I kept in touch with the assistant producer after I graduated in 1977. We started dating after Bob moved on to play with the Miami Dolphins; he would fly in from New York to see me on the weekends, which I found glamorous and exciting. When Sundays rolled around, I so often wished I could get on the plane with him and move to the city of my dreams. And I did get there eventually—but not before a little detour. Just before I graduated, I was approached by a friend of Coach Bryant’s, who owned a Pepsi-Cola distributor in Memphis. Some Birmingham advertising agency had told him what he really needed was a Pepsi Girl to start making personal appearances representing the drink at golf tournaments and the like. This guy practically hired me off the sidelines: after my “interview,” which consisted of him taking me to some sort of Mardi Gras ball, he gave me a job in his public-relations department. I really think the guy just wanted a date, but he was a perfect gentleman, and I had my first job. I was twenty.

On my first day, the general manager showed me my desk. “You need any help,” he said, “just let us know.” Well, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, none at all. I was a fine-arts and advertising major; I never cracked a book in public relations. All I knew was that one of these days, I was going to have to show up at some damn golf tournament.

I called Mama. “You can always come home, Sela,” she said. “Your friend Patti just got a job at AT&T, with all kinds of benefits. What you have is not a real job.” Maybe Mama was right, but I wasn’t about to come home for supper the first time I was called. So instead I went to the nearest college bookstore and bought a public-relations textbook. I’d hide it in my lap under my desk, reading it as if I were searching for the secret code that would tell me what I was supposed to be doing. I had my head down so much I bet my coworkers thought I was in a constant state of prayer—which, given my desperate straits, I might as well have been.