George Will on Alabama Football

One of my favorite columnists, George Will, wrote about Warren St. John's new book "Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania." Read the whole column here, but here are the opening paragraphs:

Don Cole, aka the Heart Guy, was ailing and wore a beeper. He was a candidate for a heart transplant and was not supposed to ever be more than a two-hour drive from his Nashville hospital, in case it received a heart that could be transplanted. He said that if the hospital learned that he left the two-hour radius he would be removed from the list of recipients. So why, weekend after weekend, was he three and a half hours from Nashville, in Tuscaloosa, Ala.? "If I can't go to Alabama football games, what's the point in living?"

Then there is the couple whose huge RV resembles the fuselage of a Boeing 737. What sacrifices have they made for their devotion to Alabama football? "Let's see," muses the husband. "We missed our daughter's wedding. We told her, just don't get married on a game day and we'll be there, hundred percent, and she went off and picked the third Saturday in October which everybody knows is when Alabama plays Tennessee, so we told her, hey, we got a ballgame to go to. We made the reception — went there as soon as the game was over."