University of Alabama Football Report for 12/4/09: SEC Championship Edition

. . . I with wings as swift
As meditation, or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.

Hamlet, I, v, 29-31

It was too long a time before I realized that woman who cuts my hair was not, in fact, coincidentally wearing the same colorful little print upon each occasion of my visits, but was, rather, tattooed most elaborately and thoroughly, and, furthermore, not wearing much of a shirt at all. Such is life in the big city.

Despite her minimal clothing and maximized body art, I know not much of her. Her parents, immigrants, named her after the city of Hollywood, California. Thinking that America was the place that most people in the world would want to live, and Hollywood, California, was the place that most people in America would want to live. Thus did these new Americans venture.

I posit this would have been around the same time a young Axl Rose and his cohorts were en vogue. It took roughly two summers before her family had seen enough of that. Therefore, she kept the name and the fashion sense, but not much else of her toddling self’s western sojourn.

What does this weekend mean to her? In some order, probably giving my tip money to a dealer, working up a sweat on a dance floor, and waking up in the bed of some new boy—or girl—or both.

And despite the best efforts of the Columbia Broadcasting System and the working press, I cannot imagine she even knows who Tim Tebow is. Much less that he, through some indomitable magic of his will, is expected to make the dive play work against 1200 pounds of lineman tomorrow.

Is the lesson here that even the mightiest heroes can be humbled when out of context? Or that our humbling in inevitable, and we only learn the context afterward? Tomorrow’s game will answer that, along with many other things.

Had I told you, this time last year, that this time next year, we’d be right here again, I would not begrudge you thinking me mad as the Danish prince himself. Or worse than mad, obsessed. For in madness is there some respite of suffering, but obsession, even when slaked, is never extinguished.

How else to explain this rendezvous tomorrow? What simple vengeance could withstand such focus? A hundred years ago, men played football for Alabama and no one remembers their motivation save one: to win.

A hundred years from tomorrow, it will be no different.

Roll Tide.