At some point in the life of every sports fan there comes a moment of reckoning. It may happen when your team wins on a last-second field goal or three-point basket and you suddenly find yourself clenched in a loving embrace with a large hairy man you’ve never met and with whom you have nothing in common except allegiance to the same team. Or it may come in the long, hormonally depleted days after a loss, when you’re felled by a sensation oddly similar to the one you felt when you first experienced the death of a pet. In such moments, even the fan who rigorously avoids anything approaching self-awareness is sometimes forced to confront a version of the question others—spouses, friends, children, and colleagues—have asked for years: “Why do I care?” In very general terms that’s what this book is about—the human obsession with contests.

I grew up in Alabama—possibly the worst place on earth to acquire a healthy perspective on the importance of spectator sports. If you were a scientist hoping to isolate the fan gene, Alabama would make the perfect laboratory. People in Alabama have a general interest in almost all sports—the state is second only to Nevada in the amount of money that its citizens bet on sports, despite the fact that in Alabama, unlike Nevada, sports gambling is illegal. But the sport that inspires true fervor—the one that compels people there to name their children after a popular coach and to heave bricks through the windows of an unpopular one—is college football. A recent poll by the Mobile Register found that 90 percent of the state’s citizens describe themselves as college football fans. Eighty-six percent of them pull for one of the two major football powers there, Alabama or Auburn, and 4 percent pull for other teams—Florida, Notre Dame, Georgia, Tennessee, and Michigan, or smaller schools like Alabama A&M or Alabama State. To understand what an absolute minority nonfans are in Alabama, consider this: they are outnumbered there by atheists.

My team is the Alabama Crimson Tide. Growing up a Tide fan in the 1970s gave me an unrealistic sense of what it means to be a fan, for the simple reason that in the 1970s Alabama won, and being a sports fan is largely about learning to cope with losing. In most sports there is just one champion per year—every four years if you’re into a sport like World Cup soccer—so for the overwhelming majority of fans, losing at least once a season is a near certainty. In my childhood, this small kink in the works of the fan’s life went more or less unexposed.

The primary agent of this obfuscation was a man named Paul “Bear” Bryant, the gravelly voiced football coach with an old-growth frame who coached Alabama to six national championships and who, when I was eleven, set the record for the most wins of any college football coach in history. Along the way, the Bear, as he was called for taking up a childhood dare to wrestle a bear at a local fair, became a populist hero who hovered over the consciousness not just of every little kid in the state but of nearly every adult as well; his photograph, usually in his houndstooth fedora, hung on the wall of every barbecue and burger joint from Mobile to Muscle Shoals. His exalted status was proclaimed on thousands of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and home-made shrines. Socially and historically, the Bear was a complicated figure; he waited until 1970 to integrate the Alabama football team, and on matters of race Bryant was more or less silent. Given his stature in Alabama at the time of the civil rights struggle, that silence could only be interpreted as a tacit, if not wholehearted, endorsement of the status quo. But to a kid who didn’t yet understand the connection of sports to culture and politics, these were incomprehensible complexities at the time. To me back then, the Bear was just a football coach.

Early in the morning of October 17, 1982, a Sunday and my thirteenth birthday, my father woke me and told me to put on a sweater and some khakis, to tuck my shirt in, and to get a move on. He had a friend who owned a local lawnmower dealership that sponsored The Bear Bryant Show, the Sunday morning postgame recap that enthralled Tide fans the way televised papal sermons seize the attention of devout Catholics, and the friend had managed to get me invited on the set. I didn’t know this at the time, but I had an inkling where we might be headed—besides church, little else of importance happened early on Sunday mornings in Birmingham, and I was fairly sure that my birthday present wasn’t going to consist of a morning of hymn singing at Independent Presbyterian. But the other possibility—that I was going to stand face to face with the most revered man in the state of Alabama and the architect of more joyful Saturdays in my young life than I could count—was too terrifying to contemplate. I had an exaggerated view of the man; once in grade school I looked at a picture of Mt. Rushmore and noted what a poor job the sculptor had done of capturing the Bear’s likeness, and that he’d forgotten the hat.

We rode in silence through the empty streets, past the Tudor and clapboard houses with lawns like swatches of green felt, past the red clay outcroppings near Birmingham’s iron ore seam, and up the winding road to the television studios, where Bryant taped his show for broadcast that afternoon. The parking lot, which overlooked downtown Birmingham, was empty save a few cars and some smashed soda cans. As soon as I got out of the car, I spotted Bryant’s bodyguard, a black university policeman named Billy Varner, who was sitting at the door in front of the studio, a wide-brimmed trooper’s hat low over his eyes. I’d seen him standing on the sideline of every Alabama game I’d been to, and in almost every television shot or photograph I’d ever seen of Bryant. The Bear couldn’t be more than a few feet away.

“How’s the Coach?” my father asked as we walked by, using the man’s proper title, as all Tide fans knew to do.

“Not too good,” Varner replied.

The day before, Alabama had lost to Tennessee, something that hadn’t happened since my first birthday, in 1970. Varner had the Sunday morning Birmingham News at his feet; the outcome of the game was front-page news. Bryant was sixty-nine, and even as a kid, I sensed something ominous about the loss. It broached the unspeakable possibility that perhaps the old coach was losing his stuff. I walked through two sets of large steel doors, and there he was: a glowering hulk of a man with a voice so deep it seemed to vibrate the floor. He was sitting behind a desk like a news anchor, on a sky blue soundstage hung with signs advertising Coca-Cola and Golden Flake potato chips. His gray hair was slicked back, his cheeks were still red from the game-day sun. But his face was fixed in a steely grimace, and his eyes were bloodshot and wet, as though he hadn’t slept. The Bear looked like he was grieving. I felt a pang of resignation: my one chance to meet the Bear and his mood was positively black.

I sat on a stool behind the cameraman as Bryant mumbled gravely through the show and took the blame for each fumble, each missed tackle, and each dropped ball. This was the Bear’s way, and it bothered me tremendously. I knew exactly who had fumbled, and it hadn’t been Bear Bryant. The captain was trying to go down with the ship, but at least one passenger wouldn’t let him.

After the taping, Bryant got up slowly from his chair and stood on the set looking dour and preoccupied. He turned around and noticed me, then approached and stuck out his hand in a distracted, obligatory way. We shook, and his pillowy palm seemed to engulf my arm.

“I wanna play football,” was all I could think to say.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine at it, son,” he said, and that was all. This wasn’t going to be the day to get motivational platitudes from the Bear. I wasn’t even disappointed; at the age of thirteen I knew enough about football and human emotions to feel badly for the old man. Losing to Tennessee, I figured, was hell on all of us.

My father asked Bryant if he wouldn’t mind posing with me for a picture. Without so much as a word, the Bear put his arm around my shoulder and forced an unconvincing smile. We stood there in front of the Coca-Cola sign in this uncomfortable pose as my father fiddled with his camera, stalling in the hope that Bryant might loosen up. After forty-five nerve-fraying seconds, the Bear leaned over to me and thundered, “Son, I don’t think your father knows what the hell he’s doing.” We both laughed and in the photo that now hangs on my office wall we look like old cronies sharing an inside joke.

Two months later, Bryant retired, and fulfilling his prophecy that he’d die without football, he succumbed to a heart attack a month later. I skipped school the day of his funeral and made my mother drive me to Elmwood Cemetery for the burial. Thousands of Alabamians lined the forty-five-mile stretch of interstate between the university campus in Tuscaloosa and the cemetery in Birmingham. Bryant’s hearse and the three-mile procession of cars and buses behind took farewell laps around Bryant-Denny Stadium on campus in Tuscaloosa and Legion Field in Birmingham before heading to the cemetery, where I stood with ten thousand other mourners. Each Alabama win had served as a kind of temporal hash mark on the green turf of my youth, and after Bryant died I felt that field had turned brown.

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