Redneck Nation (24 page)

Most of him was found there the next day.

And it was an Alabama man who died of rattlesnake bites—the hard way. He and a friend were tossing the poisonous reptile in
a round of that popular southern game Catch the Rattlesnake. The friend was merely hospitalized and therefore is now widely
suspected of being a Yankee.

It was a Knoxville, Tennessee, teenager who read in a porn magazine that a cow’s heart, with its wide valves and suction capacity,
may be converted into an organic sex toy with the proper application of electric current. Unfortunately for the deceased,
110 volts directly out of the wall socket was significantly above the manufacturer’s specifications. Then again, if the goal
of great sex is to “see Jesus,” he succeeded.

And it was a twenty-two-year-old Virginia man with a large supply of accessory straps and plenty of time on his
hands who headed to a seventy-foot-high railroad trestle in Fairfax County. Accessory straps are those little “bungee cords”
used to strap things on top of your car, and the Virginian had the brilliant idea of taping several of the straps together.
Then he wrapped one end around his foot, the other end to the trestle… and jumped. His body was recovered on the pavement
seventy feet below. It was at the end of approximately eighty feet of homemade cord.

Yes, stupidity is America’s true national pastime, and similar stories can be told from Long Beach, California, to Long Island,
New York. But when you read a headline, “Man Killed in Friendly Ax-Catching Contest,” what’s the dateline going to read—above
the Mason-Dixon line or below it? Is the tendency to convert dangerous idiocy into recreational activity a northern trait
or southern?

Simple, savage, and stupid—these are the hallmarks of redneck entertainment. Sure, the drunk guy with the empty Budweiser
on his head yelling, “Go ahead, Silas—shoot!” could be an aberration. But what about the fact that he lives in a place where
the sacred words of the weekend are “rasslin’, racin’, and runnin’ that football”?

It may be impossible to overstate the southern enthusiasm for football. Sportswriter Grantland Rice summed it up, “In the
East, football is a cultural exercise, on the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction, in Texas it’s a big get together, in
the Midwest it’s a slugfest. But in the South, it’s a religion.” In my humble opinion, Mr. Rice may overestimate our devotion
to the southern Baptist Convention. Football a mere religion? Many of my fellow Southerners would convert to Islam and clad
their women in burkas if it meant an NCAA football championship.

Of course, there are plenty of basketball and baseball
fans down South, but football is in a sporting and social class of its own. Thanks to programs like those at Duke and UNC,
folks think basketball is big-time down South, but in fact only two southern states (Tennessee and Kentucky) produce NCAA
basketball players at a per-capita rate higher than the national average.

The same is true of baseball, which is truly stunning given the climatic advantages. Only Florida and Alabama (barely) produce
more than an above-average number of big-time baseball players despite the advantage of year-round baseball weather. This
is analogous to Canada producing the same percentage of hockey players as Cuba, or the San Francisco Bay Area exporting a
below-average number of antiwar protesters.

It is only in football that the South outperforms the nation. As John Shelton Reed points out in
1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South
, “Where else would a house-and-garden magazine like
Southern Living
pick an all-star football team?” America’s three biggest states for per capita production of major college and pro football
players are Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and every southern state is above the national average. They may wear the colors
of Nebraska and Notre Dame, but they grew up under the St. Andrew’s cross.

Football fealty is such a component of southern culture that my lack of it alone was enough to bring my Confederate bona fides
into question. I never cared much for football because I never played much of it. My high school was too small to have a football
team until my senior year. Before that, if a group of eleven black guys was ever spotted in a huddle in my hometown, the local
constabulary would turn the dogs and hoses on them.

Still, I was exposed to enough football fever to break out in an occasional fall sweat. Because I grew up not far from the
University of South Carolina, I am ostensibly a Gamecock fan, which is convenient given that until the arrival of Coach Lou
Holtz, the USC Gamecocks were only ostensibly a football team. After getting married and returning to South Carolina, I started
going to USC football games again, if only to watch tens of thousands of normally inhibited southern ladies shout “Go Cocks!”
in public.

It is very important, by the way, that I identify myself as a Gamecock fan, so that I may be differentiated from our evil,
in-state rivals, the Clemson Tigers. Clemson was founded as South Carolina’s agricultural college, and its fans are illiterate,
thick-necked chaw-spitters who send Father’s Day cards to their brothers. Oh, yeah: Clemson also won some kind of NCAA football
championship or something, but the whole team was later arrested, so who cares?

The Gamecocks, on the other hand, are whiny, limp-wristed frat boys waiting to join their daddy’s law firm. They don’t know
a jockstrap from a training bra and only have a football team so real schools will have someone to play on homecoming weekend.

Almost every southern state has a similar college-sport social divide that separates the white collars and the blue collars
on Saturdays. In Tennessee, the rednecks holler for Tennessee and the bookworms bellow for Vandy. In Georgia, it’s not just
the jerseys that are red at Georgia, while locals with fantasies about MIT wear Georgia Tech jackets of yellow. In Mississippi,
it’s Ole Miss versus State; in North Carolina, it’s Duke versus everyone else; and in
Arkansas, it’s the Razorbacks versus the Little Rock School of Plumbing. You decide which one is for the intellectuals.

From a sociological standpoint, it’s also interesting to note that college football in the South has far more fans than alumni.
The stands are filled, not with graduates, but with locals who have pledged their devotion based on what the decision to support
that specific school says about themselves.

You can see the devoted fan slouched before his morning papers each Sunday, a grown man’s self-worth completely invested in
the ability of some nineteen-year-old kid to kick an oblong ball in a straight line. As the fan’s team goes, so goes his morning,
his week, his life. A pummeling of the home team by in-state rivals leaves him as dejected as a busted Vegas gambler on the
last bus home. A come-from-behind victory, and he is the king of all he surveys.

The result is that the non-alums are far more ferocious in defense of their U. than the students are. Is this hypocritical?
Sure it is. But so is college football. The school administrators and coaching staff all pretend that their football team
consists of “scholar-athletes” playing a little ball between biology labs and philosophy lectures. Meanwhile, the fans know
that the NCAA is just the NFL’s minor league, that most of the grunting, hormonal growths on the field couldn’t make their
way through an issue of
Field & Stream
without tutoring. Northerners who say the South isn’t much on football because we have so few “professional” teams are clearly
unfamiliar with the financial incentive programs at Alabama, Miami, and the now-defunct Southwestern Conference.

I have suggested to many die-hard football fans in the South that we end this charade, stop torturing these poor, dumb kids,
and just let them play ball for the school of their choice at a reasonable salary. The athletes will make a little money,
and the Graduate School of Business can close all those sections of Dilbert as Literature 101.

Southerners reject this notion out of hand. That’s not our vision of “playin’ baw-ull.” We have a sincere desire to honor
the noble efforts of amateurs untouched by the mercenary motives of professionals, and this desire infuses our football loyalties
with great meaning. And the fact that our vision of college football is completely and obviously false shouldn’t stop us.
We’re Southerners: Ignoring the obvious is one of our proudest traditions.

Part of my rejection of my southern roots involved turning my back on football and culturing an affectation for baseball.
I made myself a baseball fan, though I had never been to a professional game and had never even watched a full nine innings
on TV until I was in my late twenties. I did this because baseball was, I thought, the national pastime of the North. It was
the national pastime somewhere, I was repeatedly assured by Bob Costas and others, but it sure wasn’t down South.

When Hollywood made sports movies, the sport of choice was baseball. When politicians waxed poetic upon their youth, they
would recall the Washington Senators or the first time they saw Mickey Mantle play. And when entertainers I admired like Bill
Murray or Billy Crystal talked sports, it was baseball—memories of Yankee Stadium or the Green Monster in Boston or Tiger
Stadium in Detroit (where I saw my first major league game). The only sport
that has tempted me into impassioned fandom as an adult is baseball.

Try to imagine George Will and George Mitchell debating the finer points of hockey. It cannot be done.

If there were passionate baseball fans in South Carolina, they were kept sedated. Pro baseball didn’t come to the Deep South
until the Milwaukee Braves were dragged to Atlanta, and a precious few Southerners even noticed until Ted Turner put their
games on the Superstation. I recall sitting in a bar during the Braves miracle season of 1991 trying to watch a play-off game.
Two of my fellow Southerners kept trying to get the channel changed to pro football. When I suggested politely that a play-off
game and a chance to go to the freakin’ World Series was of some import, one of them replied, “I’m not much of a baseball
fan. Too intellectual.”

Baseball? Intellectual? Intellectuals in America used to be people who debated epistemology and the nature of being. Today,
they contemplate existential issues raised by the infield fly rule.

I have heard this sentiment expressed frequently since then, though never so shamelessly. Baseball requires the spectator
to pay attention, to think ahead. And while there are occasional home plate collisions and wild pitches, there’s little likelihood
of significant bloodshed. Needless to say, it’s not very popular down South. The only reason there is any Major League Baseball
down South at all is that every New Yorker over the age of seventy now lives in Florida.

It should be painfully obvious at this point that I am ignoring two pillars of southern sports, wrestling and NASCAR. I am
ignoring them because, well, that’s been a
policy of mine since achieving adulthood, and it has served me well. But when you grow up in a house within ten minutes of
both a dirt stock car track and a wrestling school/convenience store (I swear to God, on Highway 302 just outside Pelion),
it’s hard to do.

Making fun of pro wrestling today is passé, but back home, mocking Chief Wahoo McDaniel and Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat was
a health hazard. At the time, TV wrestling wasn’t available in many markets up North, and even in the South it was relegated
to Saturday afternoons on UHF stations, but its followers were a devoted lot. They watched every move, they followed every
plot line, and, as I learned from beneath the three-hundred-pound son of one of my dad’s coworkers, they were constantly looking
for someone to practice on.

In my circles, wrestling was more popular than NASCAR, which wasn’t called NASCAR but just “racin’” or “the race.” I remember
my father taking me to Darlington to see Richard Petty (if you have to ask “Where’s Darlington?” you should just skip the
rest of this chapter). I was about seven years old and had never even heard the word “redneck,” but after two hours in that
crowd I was struggling to come up with it. Here were tens of thousands of people who understood the physics of air movement,
the chemistry of fuel ignition, and the algebra of restrictor plates, but who probably could not operate a manual toothbrush.

From my first encounter with car racing, I hated it. I actually met Richard Petty that day and got his autograph on a program,
but I was happy to get back from the speedway alive. The longer I lived in the South and the more popular racing became there,
the more my loathing increased.
One of the many benefits of leaving the South, I thought at the time, was the distance I was putting between me and everyone
who had Charlie Daniels in the tape deck and an artist’s rendition of Calvin urinating on a numeral painted on his or her
truck.

Good-bye, wrasslin’, racin’, and rednecks, I told myself as I headed North, and hello, America! Buy me some peanuts and Cracker
Jacks at the ol’—ball—g-a-a-a-m-e!

Which is why I am so proud to report that America’s fastest-growing and most popular spectator sport today is… NASCAR Winston
Cup stock car racing!
Aaaaggbhh!

Let me get something off my chest right now, my fellow redneck Americans:
NASCAR is not a sport
. It is a game, yes. It’s a contest, a competition of skill, of course. But it is
not
a sport!

A sport is an athletic competition. NASCAR is a skill competition, like bowling or lawn darts… except that in lawn darts there
is little chance your opponent is going to slam into you at 200 mph and burst into a fireball. If he does, I suggest you forfeit
the match.

In an athletic competition, all other factors being equal, athleticism will determine the outcome. Which is why, by the way,
golf is not a sport. Put down the putter, Tiger, and calm down. I’m not saying golf is bad, or that it’s not a worthwhile
game. I’m simply pointing out that any activity in which John Daly can be a champion is clearly not a competition among athletes.