University of Alabama Football Report for 10/12/07: On the Road to Oxford

Most of the stories you hear about the place don’t involve the place at all but the man who lived there, the man who wrote about the place, and even then not really the place at all but a myth of the place--a story you read all the way through once and then read the first part again, a story that isn’t about the past or about the family or about the mansion or the town or the colonel and the girl, a story that isn’t finished because it’s still being written even though the man’s long dead, or past, or neither.

Let the crudeness of facts include the trip to Hollywood, the bottles left behind, and the pages left unwritten, omitting, of course, the book club, their failed visit to the house, and the porch where he rained down expletives--and worse--on them from above.

So, in a way, in both history and in myth, if such a distinction can still be drawn, the place stomachs ne’er-do-wells fairly well, and that fits their steel-headed coach to the letter, brash and big, who lumbers through their season and is all but an unlatched gate away from his own destruction.

Other coaches, like the French architect over in College Station, have already opened the gate.

See you on the Grove.

Roll Tide.