Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Road Trip into the Heart of Fan Mania by Warren St. John

Genre: Non-Fiction
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 272
Challenges: Southern Reading #1, Non-Fiction Five #3

I love college football and we have season tickets to the University of Oregon football games so our fall weekends revolve around tailgating and football. My friend (who is an Alabama fan) sent me a copy of this book a couple of years ago, but for some reason it’s been sitting on the shelf. The Southern Reading challenge was the perfect excuse to read it now, so I decided to substitute it in for the Non-Fiction Five challenge as well. Since we’re somewhere in that dead part of the year between the National Championship game and Opening Kickoff, it was fun to get a desperately needed football fix.

Warren St. John, a reporter for the New York Times, took a leave of absence to spend a football season with the RVers who travel to the Alabama football games. A devoted Alabama fan himself, St. John wrote this book about his experience. This is part travel memoir, part cultural anthropology about sports fans, and mostly just a whole lot of fun.

From the introduction:

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.

You don’t have to be an Alabama fan to enjoy this book. I could relate to so many of the tailgating stories as well as the story of the team and their season. When he tells about being in the stands watching his team’s ridiculously undersized defensive backs trying to keep the ball out of hands of the other teams ridiculously tall wide receivers, I relived several moments of Oregon football. When he mentioned his team going into a prevent defense to hang onto a slim lead I could just hear my husband muttering inside my head “the only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning”. Yes, Alabama lost the game in that story. Although we don’t have an RV and only go to home games, we do tailgate with two other couples and essentially the same large group of fans in our parking area every game. Reading this book made me anxious for football season to start – I can almost smell the grills and hear the beer bottles being opened in the parking lot now.

Go Ducks!!!