Pub Day: Jay Busbee, IRON IN THE BLOOD
A comprehensive look at the most hateful rivalry in sports
We’re back with the second installment of our Pub Day series, where I’ll be featuring new books from friends and colleagues on their publication day. Today’s book is perfectly timed for college football season, which starts in earnest this weekend. Jay Busbee’s IRON IN THE BLOOD digs into every corner of the football war between Alabama and and Auburn—not just the most intense rivalry in college football, but the most intense in all of American sports. (Maybe in sports, period? I’m leaving room here for some monumental soccer rivalry I don’t know about.)
What makes Alabama-Auburn stand out for me is its claustrophobia. Two fanbases in the same state, people who live side by side, eat at the same catfish joints, go to the same churches, yet hate each other’s schools with the heat of molten steel. They can’t get away from one another. And at the end of every regular season, they play a game called the Iron Bowl that sets the mood for the entire state for the next 364 days.
The Iron Bowl has produced some of the wildest moments in sports history, both on the field and off. I would be remiss if I did not take a moment here to revel in the glory and insanity of what will always be remembered as the Kick Six. Bama fans, avert your eyes.
So, yeah, Jay had a lot to tackle in this book. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions about it.
1. Sports fans are going to eat this book up. But let's assume I don't care about sports. Why should I still be interested in the Auburn-Alabama rivalry?
The sports rivalry is the purest distillation of fandom, of tribalism, of generational love and connection that we have in American society, and Auburn-Alabama is the purest distillation of a rivalry. There are no mild feelings about this rivalry in Alabama; you are born into a crimson or a blue-and-orange family, you grow up with that family, and you risk excommunication if you decide to deviate from your family.
The Alabama-Auburn rivalry hits on so many elements of American culture — white collar vs. blue collar, management vs. labor, elitism vs. earthiness. The old primary colors don’t really apply anymore — you can’t really call Auburn a “cow college” when it’s produced Apple CEO Tim Cook — but then nobody lets facts get in the way of a good rivalry.
You can trace so many elements that thread through American culture within this rivalry. There’s the joy that comes from finding your people and cheering for a common cause, and then there’s the darker, arrogant, xenophobic side of hostility to outsiders and progress. If you want to understand America – and more to the point, if you want to understand the South — find your way to an Iron Bowl tailgate and observe all its glory.
2. Do you think the coaches and players see the rivalry differently than the fans?
For most of the rivalry, no. Coaches know that it’s a way to guarantee employment for at least another year — and, if you handle your business well enough, election to the U.S. Senate. Players, particularly those raised in Alabama, grew up anticipating the Iron Bowl, and then live the rest of their lives with the memory of it. One of my favorite quotes in the book came from Alabama’s Randy Edwards in 1983, after the Tide lost to Bo and the Tigers: “This is something that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. Today was my last chance to hit somebody from Auburn and not go to jail for it.”
Now, though? The transfer portal has turned both schools into interstate terminals. The last six Alabama starting quarterbacks, for instance, were from Texas, Hawaii, Florida, California, Texas and now Tennessee. You might create a more talented roster that way, but that home-state feel has been lost. They’re joining the rivalry in the same way an SEC player might join the Packers-Bears rivalry — they want to win, but they don’t need to win.
3. Even casual sports fans are going to know the big names in this book--Cam and Bo, Broadway Joe and Saban. Who are a couple of lesser-known characters you enjoyed writing about?
Alabama’s Jeremiah Castille is a fascinating individual — he was a member of Bear Bryant’s last team, he spoke in the locker room before Bryant’s final game, and he was a pallbearer at Bryant’s funeral. After a stint in the NFL, he’s turned to the ministry, and he credits the lessons Bryant gave him four decades ago with charting the course of his life since then. He was a joy to talk to, one of those interviews where you’re pumping your fist as the source talks because you know it’s so good.
I wasn’t able to interview former Auburn president Spright Dowell, since he oversaw the university back in the 1920s and has been gone from The Plains for quite some time, but his actions still resonate. At a time when Auburn was one of the finest football squads in the country — and Alabama was middling at best — Dowell decided that football had too tight of a hold on the university’s consciousness. He deemphasized football at the exact moment when Alabama began ascending, and the rest is quite literally history.
4. Can either Kalen DeBoer (the Alabama coach) or Hugh Freeze (the Auburn coach) survive a subpar season this year? And what would count as subpar?
DeBoer’s got one more honeymoon post-Saban year — but one of those really uncomfortable honeymoons where they lost your luggage and don’t have your reservation. If he doesn’t crack double-digit wins, the Alabama boosters’ eyes will start looking elsewhere. Freeze is out of chances; if he can’t at least hit eight wins this year, he’s going to have to do some fast talking and faster recruiting to save his job.
Both are expected to produce this year, and with 12 playoff spots available, both will need to be in the conversation for a berth — Alabama simply must get in — to keep the wolves from the door.
5. Here's a hypothetical: Let's say Alabama lost that 1926 Rose Bowl game that put Southern football on the map. Would Alabama (and maybe the whole South) be a different place today?
Absolutely. Football allowed the South — or at least the then-dominant white part of it — to feel the equal of the rest of the country in the wake of the Civil War. You may be smarter, you may be richer, but you come on down here and we’ll whip your ass. Without that, the South would have had to find some other way to excel, or would have sent another champion — maybe your Georgia Bulldogs — into battle five or 10 long years later. Football already had such a hold on the American consciousness that it’s tough to imagine the South abandoning it entirely, but I could see a scenario where the South turns instead to baseball or basketball, and treats college football the way that the Northeast does now — as a pursuit, not a religion.
Bonus question: You've covered everything from the Super Bowl to the Kentucky Derby to the Olympics to the Masters ... what's the moment that thrilled you the most to see it live?
I’m going to go with two answers here, for two very different reasons. First, I was one of the very few people fortunate enough to be on the grounds for the 2020 pandemic Masters, which was held in the fall. Seeing such a familiar locale in the colors of autumn, and absolutely silent and empty — I nearly got tattooed by a Xander Schauffele shot because there were no ropes up anywhere — was a sobering and solemn experience, and I’ve never had that kind of feeling before or since. Thankfully.
As for “thrilling” — I’ll go with Gravedigger, Alabama’s 4th-and-31 victory over Auburn in the 2023 Iron Bowl, for the simple reason that my son, an Alabama student, was in the stadium too, and he and I were texting in the seconds before it happened. He’d dropped $200 on the ticket — which is a monumental expense when you’re a college kid — and he was despondent. You can see on the text chain where I tried to tell him, “This is the Iron Bowl, strange things happen…“ and then, lo and behold, it did.
I remember being so thrilled for him … and for myself, too, because I realized I had the intro to my book right there in front of me!
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You can buy Jay’s book pretty much anywhere books are sold … a few links:
Bookshop (you can choose which independent bookstore you want to use)
And a little supplemental reading, if you’re interested:
—Jay spends a good bit of time in his book on the poisoning of the Toomer’s Oaks in Auburn by Alabama fan Harvey Updyke. Back in 2011, I wrote a story for Sports Illustrated about Updyke and the oaks and what Auburn-Alabama means. (For some reason, the archived version has an extra line from an earlier draft… just ignore the very last line of the story. The one before it is the real ending.)
—A couple of years later, I went back to Auburn to write about the last days of the old oaks for Sports on Earth.
Back with another installment of Pub Day soon … I know we’re doing Beth Macy’s tremendous memoir PAPER GIRL in October, and we’ve got some others in the works as well. Keep reading!
—TT