There was a book that came out a little while after it happened that said kids at Toomer’s Corner that day would remember being at Toomer’s Corner that day. I was one of those kids.
I watched the game at Grandmama’s house. I’d been to ’87. It was my first. Dad and I started the “Hey, Hey, Hey Goodbye” chant you heard on TV. I swear we did.
In ’88, Mom got some tickets from one of her friends, a bigwig at CBS. Someone offered her $300 for them. $300 a piece in 1988. She probably would have sold them had they called back. They didn’t. So I was at ’88, too.
But there was no way a 5th grader was going to ’89. It was Bama’s first time in Auburn. I was 10; I wasn’t an idiot. I knew the significance: Welcome to hell.
Dad and I drove down from Birmingham the night before. I wrote about it in my journal that day in school. (A few weeks later, I used it as the backdrop for a story that ended with me having powers like Jeff Bridges’ character in “Star Man,” if that tells you anything.)
We came 65 / 85, and we rolled into downtown around 7 p.m. It was bangin’. The clock tower glow, the huge beautiful hair, those shiny blue Auburn Dad jackets you try to find on eBay. I sat outside on the rolled down window of the Lincoln Town Car. It was a different time. The law was irrelevant. The law was in a shiny blue Auburn Dad jacket. Dad was letting me blare The New Kids on the Block’s "Hangin' Tough."
We ain’t gonna give anybody any SLACK!—SLACK—“Like Reggie Slack, Dad”—our quarterback!
God, it was awesome.
Dad and Russ, my uncle, got my grandfather’s tickets. There is a picture of us all right before they left for the game: Russ, Josh and Jenny (cousins), Dad and me. And I’m decked out in face paint, Braveheart-style, wearing one of the two Auburn hats that I slept in and occasionally showered in that year and my Auburn boxer shorts outside of my sweatpants, holding a paper shaker in one hand and making a No. 1 sign with the other. And we’ve got some sort of giant “Beat Bama” sign on a freaking picket. We were holding up signs while watching the game on TV in the living room. The way Dad looks in that picture is the way he still looks to me, the way he will always look to me.
Dad and Russ take off. Hours go by.
We were down at the half. Josh and I went outside with the football. I was gagging, gasping, trying to bend spoons with my mind, throwing perfect spirals up to heaven. It was like my body itself was praying. I closed my eyes and believed. And heard the New Kids.
“… and if you try to keep us down we’re gonna come right BACK.”
We come back. Of course we come back. We hold on. Of course we hold on. Reggie Slack, Stacy Danley, James Joseph, Shane Wasden, Alexander Wright, Quentin Riggins, Craig Ogletree, all of them.
There’s something like a minute left. We’re going to win. Granddaddy gets up from the recliner. I remember watching him walk down the hall. He comes back with an arm full of toilet paper and a smile on his face, like he’s watching us at Christmas.
“Let’s go.”
Toomer’s is a ball pit. It’s knee deep. It’s Disney World. Emotional apocalypse.
Where are Dad and Russ? War Eagle! We’ve got to find them! War Eagle! Haaaa!! Oh God… War Eagle!
None of them remember this, but I swear it happened. I heard, “War Eagle! Hey, War Eagle!’ and there they are up on a light pole, on Magnolia, right at the corner.
God cares about football. See you at Toomer’s.
Jeremy Henderson is editor & coach of thewareaglereader.com. You can write to him at jeremy@thewareaglereader.com
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