It took getting away from Alabama to develop a little perspective on being a fan, and perspective came quickly when I arrived at Columbia University in New York in 1987, coincidentally during what would become, by my sophomore year, the longest losing streak in the history of college football. The Lions lost an astonishing forty-four games in a row, beating Northwestern’s previous record by ten games; an entire class of players graduated without achieving so much as a tie. It was quite an adjustment to go from counting up a record number of wins under the Bear to the inexorable accumulation of a record number of losses at Columbia. And just as disconcerting: no one at Columbia seemed to mind. Columbia was a kind of inverse Alabama; where 90 percent of Alabamians had a favorite team, a similar percentage at Columbia seemed not to know the rules. In Alabama, life more or less came to a halt on football Saturdays; in New York, almost no one went to Columbia games except for their comedic value, or else to witness some sort of losing milestone. Throngs of Columbia students crammed onto a New Jersey Transit local for the 1987 Princeton-Columbia game, just to see what they hoped would be the loss that propelled Columbia past Northwestern’s miserable streak. The Columbia fans, if you can call them that, wore Princeton orange and black and cheered wildly when Princeton scored. Some students unfurled a huge banner that read GO COLUMBIA—BEAT NORTHWESTERN! When Princeton won—as we knew they would—the Columbia students toasted the loss with champagne, celebrating the fact that we were, indisputably, the worst team ever. I can trace my first feelings of self-consciousness about being a sports fan to that cool October Saturday in New Jersey, because here’s the thing: I wanted Columbia to win. Try as I might, I couldn’t hope to lose. I couldn’t mock football. I was not a sports dadaist.

There were other revelations, and usually they came care of some form of public ridicule. I was ribbed for hanging the photograph of the Bear and me on my dorm-room wall. Actually, at first, I wasn’t ribbed at all; no one knew who the old man was—they assumed he was my grandfather. When his identity was discovered, the ridicule began. I don’t remember what was more unsettling, taking endless flak for having a picture of a football coach on my wall or the realization that there were people roaming the world who at close range could not recognize Bear Bryant.

Once I spent three hours listening to an Alabama-Auburn game on the telephone; there was no broadcast of the game in New York, so I called my parents in Alabama and had them lay the receiver next to a radio. When my friends realized what I was doing with a telephone next to my ear for three hours—well, suffice it to say there was more ridicule. And when an undefeated Alabama team lost to Auburn my junior year, I anesthetized myself with a steady drip of keg Budweiser. The next morning I woke up on my dorm-room bed, fully clothed and in the fetal position. My roommates reported that I’d taken refuge there at some point in the fourth quarter and had wept myself to sleep. I wasn’t in any shape to dispute this version of events, but again, was it so strange?

At some point, I began to get the clear impression that it was strange. The problem wasn’t that others thought my behavior was pathological, it was that I myself began to think something was a little . . . off. I’d gone to Columbia to study humanism and the great books—to become a rational being. Crying one’s self to sleep over the failure of a group of people you’ve never met to defeat another group of people against whom you have no legitimate quarrel—in a game you don’t play, no less—is not rational. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself that while I was obsessed over college football, others were obsessed with pro football, baseball, basketball, and soccer. At the time, I failed to grasp how much we had in common.

One of the most comforting experiences for anyone who considers himself weird in some way is to find other people in the world who are, in the same way, weirder. For me, this experience took place, plainly enough, care of the local TV news in Birmingham. Just about the time I was beginning to wonder if I should enroll in some sort of twelve-step sports fan recovery program, I went home from college to visit my family for Thanksgiving—no coincidence, the very week of that year’s Alabama-Auburn game. A few days before kickoff, I was flipping through the channels when I landed on a live broadcast from the parking lot of Legion Field, where the big game was to be played. As part of the week-long coverage that typically precedes that game, a local station was doing a lifestyle piece on people who drive motor homes to Alabama football games. That’s when I saw a scene that would define fan devotion for me for years to come.

A little background: In the early 70s, some mad football fan someplace—a lot of people contend that place was Birmingham—got it in his head to drive a motor home right up to the stadium on game day, probably for the simple reason that motor homes have bathrooms and therefore provided this fan and his beer-drinking buddies the luxury of a place to take a leak during their pregame tailgate party. Whatever the original motivation, the idea caught on; other people got it in their heads to drive their motorized bathrooms right up to the stadium on game day. The more people who did this, the harder it became to get a good parking place, so a few enterprising fans decided to show up not on game day, but a day or two before game day. After all, in addition to bathrooms, motor homes have beds, and kitchens and televisions—in fact, everything you need to squat someplace until the authorities run you off. More and more people came earlier and earlier, forming, over time, a large diesel-powered movable feast, the main course of which was a Saturday football game.

RVs completely changed the fan experience. Before, football games were circumscribed events. They took place inside a stadium on Saturdays and lasted about three hours, after which everyone went home. Logistical problems like traffic, the need for tickets, the need for those bathrooms—set games off from the rest of life. RVs blew open the experience. The event was no longer confined to three hours—it could last three days. In the South, the Midwest, and other pockets of fan mania throughout America, it’s not unheard of these days for fans to arrive in their motor homes a full week before kickoff—to drive directly from one game to the next. Futhermore, games no longer took place simply in a stadium, but in the neighborhoods around the stadium and on the open highways that brought fans together. The people who sought out the scene were necessarily among the most devoted. While there are plenty of obsessive football fans out there who’ve never set foot in an RV, for those whose passion for football was unchecked, the RV offered the possibility of total immersion.

Of all these convoys, Alabama’s is among the largest. This is so for a number of reasons: for starters, because so many Alabamians are football addicts, and because the state’s geographical position—within a half day’s drive of the campuses of most of Alabama’s Southeastern Conference foes—makes RV-ing practical. The weather is a factor too; in the South, it doesn’t get particularly cold until December, so fans cans tailgate comfortably for most of football season. At a typical Alabama game, between 250 and 800 motor homes show up, depending on the opponent and the venue. If you have never seen 800 motor homes in a single place, let me tell you, it is a strangely impressive sight. Consider that a motor home is exactly as big as its name suggests—it’s as though someone put four wheels and a transmission on a standard American two-bedroom ranch dwelling and drove it off the lot. Eight hundred of these things amount to a modest-sized American neighborhood; and here’s the thing—most of the time, these modest-sized neighborhoods are being driven into towns that already have neighborhoods, towns like Oxford, Mississippi; Gainesville, Florida; and Athens, Georgia. When hundreds of motor homes appear in one of these idyllic college towns, well, invasion is just too measured a word. The vehicles cram together in tight little perpendicular clusters, like bacilli in a petri dish, and fill every available empty space. It’s not unheard of for a visiting team’s motor home convoy to shut down an opposing team’s town with a weekend-long traffic jam—totally overwhelming the place, confounding the local police, and causing university officials to abandon their well-conceived parking schemes. (To members of the convoy, this is considered the height of accomplishment.) At big games, motor homes are so tightly packed that a person could nearly circle the entire stadium by walking along their rooftops, although as I learned firsthand, you should never walk along the rooftop of a stranger’s motor home because there’s a decent chance he will shoot you.

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