The games had been played but the parties went on into the night. A rivalry that stretched back for decades was renewed as both the Crimson Tide of Alabama and the Volunteers of Tennessee won their home openers. Even though the two teams have yet to meet for this season’s contest, emotions are running high on both sides. Here in Nashville, there’s a large group of Tide supporters, an oddity attributable to the proximity of the Alabama border, hearing Rocky Top one damn time too many, the futility of being a Vanderbilt fan, and possibly some impurities in the air or the water leading to minor brain damage. Whatever the cause, these Alabama fans are among football's most militant partisans and living in Tennessee territory only makes them that much more fanatical. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the Southern religion of football, Alabama and Tennessee are huge rivals, both on the field and off. The rivalry is so intense that it has been known to end engagements when the wrong allegiance is discovered.
I was out with a small group of friends and family, all big Alabama fans, touring some of the clubs of downtown Nashville. (More about that later.) They’d been partying fairly hard (I was the D.D.) and as the night was winding down, we decided to grab some food, and headed to a nearby IHOP. We’d only been seated for a few minutes when two black Tennessee fans came in. Well, a few words were exchanged and a lively discussion, a few steps shy of a full blown riot, broke out. We did get very loud, but for the most part, it was all in fun and there were smiles all around as both camps supported their teams with tremendous enthusiasm and volume.
Except one man took things a little more seriously. Like most members of both groups, he’d been drinking steadily over the course of the day and night, and suddenly the alcohol began to do the thinking for him. He began to take real offense at the good natured ribbing each side was dishing out, and it began to look like we’d be eating our food on the fly, as it were. In the passing of a few seconds, he went from jovial, to combative, to a brooding sulk. We tried to get him out of his mood and back into the party, but he was too involved in nursing his grudge against the UT heckler to respond.
Tensions eased a bit when our food arrived and it seemed like the crisis was over, but then a new group of people came in from a third school and it all started up again. Once again, it got loud and raucous with several school fight songs filling the air, then my brooding companion stood up and went over to the table of Tennessee fans, and I was afraid a fight was about to begin.
Instead, he looked down at the loudest Tennessee fan and said in a booming voice, ”This is all bullshit! What about our friends and neighbors to the south? Let’s think about them for a minute instead of a stupid game!”
His message was picked up and echoed by others throughout the restaurant, and his Tennessee tormentor jumped up and shook his hand. He told us he was a preacher in his local church, taught Sunday school and wanted to know if we would pray with him for the victims of Katrina. And that’s how, at 3am in a Nashville IHOP, a group of Tennessee and Alabama fans, blacks and whites, joined together in prayer for the folks whose lives had been devastated by the tragedy. All thoughts of rivalries and partisanship evaporated as we all connected over the tragedy in Mississippi and New Orleans.
Wouldn’t it be nice if our political leaders could do the same?