National Champs

Early in the morning of Jan. 8 I was looking out my back door. I’d never been in a blizzard before, but what was happening outside resembled what I thought a blizzard would look like. The wind was blowing hard, the snow was coming down, and the flight I had booked for later in the day to Phoenix through Chicago for the National Championship game looked less likely to happen. So I went to bed. When I woke up, the snow was gone, the weather was clear at about 15 degrees, and pieces of the trip started to fall into place.

Alice and Kelly dropped me off at the Louisville airport. I made my way through security, where the guard noticed my Auburn shirt, and we talked a little about the game while he frisked me. By the time I got to my flight gate I still had 90 minutes to waste, so I went to a nearby food stand and bought a soft drink to nurse for about an hour. On TV was the news story about the Arizona congresswoman who had been shot that morning in Tucson, just south down the interstate from where I’d be staying in Chandler. At the time they were reporting she had been killed.

At some point while I was people-watching from my table in the food stand I noticed a new legwear I’d not seen before. I would see this on women in every airport I went through for the next few days. It was a material that looked like sweat pants, but a little tighter, and yet not as close-fitting as tights. Kelly would later inform me that these were “jeggings,” a cross between jeans and leggings.

In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport I had to change planes, and the walk from my gate to the next ended up being about a two-mile jaunt. Once I found my gate for the Phoenix-bound plane I was pretty sure I was in the right place, since most everyone else had on Auburn gear. There had been two women with a couple of kids on the plane from Louisville dressed in Auburn outfits. This plane was gonna be a little different.

We boarded the plane and I remarked that it looked like the “Auburn express.” I called Alice to let her know I’d made my flight, told her I had looked for some deep-dish pizza in the airport but hadn’t found it, and the guy next to me informed me, “It was good.”

After all the ticketed passengers got on the plane they closed the doors, and a couple of minutes later a crowd of Auburn fans appeared at the window in front of the pilot, banging on the pane and pointing at him. He asked what they wanted and was told they were the standby passengers. Many of them had spent over four hours in Atlanta trying to get out, and were about to miss their connecting flight. The airline had told them they’d put them up in a Chicago hotel, but they responded, “We don’t wanna be in Chicago! We wanna be in Phoenix.” So the pilot let them on the plane, and it went from comfortable to crowded, with about 90 percent of the 280 or so people on the plane being Auburn fans, on a flight from Chicago to Phoenix.

As the plane taxied out onto the runway to depart, a voice from the back of the plane yelled, “Give me an A! Give me a U! Give me a B! Give me a U! Give me an R! Give me an N! What’s it spell?”

We had all yelled each letter along with him and then we shouted, “Auburn!”

“Who’s gonna win?”

“Auburn!”

“Warrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Eagle! Hey!”

A brief silence followed and the stewardess took the opportunity to get on the microphone and announce, “Y’all are gonna hafta hold it down. Federal regulations. If we actually have something important to say, you need to be able to hear us.”

That was it for the community yelling, but the plane was loud all the way, with conversations taking place between Auburn fans who were four or five rows apart. Just in front of me was a co-ed from Cullman (Ala.) who has a bright future in stand-up comedy if she decides to go that route. When the plane landed at Phoenix, we all sang the Auburn fight song, “War Eagle,” because we figured by then all they could do was kick us off the plane, and we were at the site of the big game…

I heard an old man telling the stewardess, “I just wanna get home to some peace and quiet.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him, “but they’re just having fun.” I took a shuttle to the Holiday Inn Express in Chandler and got myself checked in. On the local news I learned that Gabbie Giffords had survived that day’s shooting. Several other people didn’t. It was being called the worst tragedy in Arizona history. I’m sure the reporters didn’t recall the gunfight at the O.K. Corral 130 years earlier.

The next morning I took a walk after eating the hotel’s “free” breakfast. I wanted to familiarize myself with what was within walking distance of the hotel since I hadn’t rented a car. And it was close to 70 degrees in the desert. I was also trying to formulate a plan to get from Chandler to Glendale, about 40 miles across Phoenix, where the game would be played Monday night. I made mental notes of the nearby restaurants, noticed a little barber shop in a shopping center and stopped to read the info at a bus stop. Looked like I could buy an all-day pass for about $5 and would be able to get from where I was to where I wanted to be the next day. I was guessing it might take five hours, but I figured if I left at noon or 1 that would give me plenty of time.

As far as eating, there was a Cracker Barrel two doors down from where I was staying and I wound up eating there four times. I called it the Cracker Barrel diet when I got back home. One meal a day there will fill you up, you don’t need to eat again, and I lost three pounds. Of course I did walk a few miles too. Didn’t have a steak, but I did eat a couple of bacon grilled cheese sandwiches, and I tried the roast beef.

On Monday I got my hair cut at the little Quality Barbershop I’d discovered the previous day. It was owned by a Russian. He shaved my head, then wrapped a hot towel around it. For a while I couldn’t breathe. I figured The Russian did this in case he needed to kill someone in the chair. Of course he had sharp razors with which to finish the job. He spared my life, then gave me a shoulder rub with a wonderful massage machine, but it only lasted a couple of minutes, far less than the back rubs I get from Alice.

About 1:30 I walked down to the bus stop to begin my trek across town. (I would later learn that Phoenix is the nation’s fifth-largest city and is about a hundred miles across.) I had called the bus company and asked how to get from Chandler to the stadium. The bus I needed arrived as soon as I walked up to the bus stop. I bought my all-day pass, which cost me $6 since I didn’t have correct change (would’ve been $5.25). We rode for about 40 minutes, through a seedy looking place called Guadalupe, through Tempe, where Arizona State University is located, to the last stop, where I got off the bus, crossed the street and waited for the “light rail.” Since it went above ground and wasn’t elevated, it wasn’t called a subway or el-train. But it was clean and quick. Wasn’t on the light rail for very long but probably went at least five miles on it.

Once off the light rail I spotted the nearest bus stop about a half-block away. A bus pulled up but I decided I wouldn’t hurry to it, even though it was the one I needed. The driver waited on me. There were a couple of Oregon fans on there who probably told him to wait for me. We went about 90 blocks on this bus but never made a turn that I can remember. Saw a couple of Auburn billboards along the way, likely paid for by Under Armour, the apparel company that outfits the football team. More Oregon fans got on, and even the non-partisan fans were leaning to Oregon. Finally one of the Oregon fans, who I had become friendly with, said, “This is a tough crowd for you.” I just nodded and said, “I’m used to it.” Other fans tend to crow before the games. This Auburn fan reserves his crowing for after the game, when it counts. The ride across Phoenix was about three hours, and not a bad way to see the city…

As for the game, if you didn’t see it you probably don’t care, and if you did see it you know the outcome. For the University of Phoenix Stadium, where the Arizona Cardinals play their home NFL games, it was a record crowd of 78-thousand in a stadium that holds 72K. And that wasn’t enough for a game of this magnitude. That’s one reason the game ticket was the hardest ticket in history to buy. Stub Hub shut down five days before the game because they couldn’t guarantee tickets anymore. Many tickets were double- and triple-sold, and I heard about many fans that got scammed. I insisted the ticket agency send mine to me before I left the Louisville area. At the game, I found out from the guy who sold it to the ticket agency, who was sitting next to me, that he’d gotten twice what I paid for it from them. They took a bath on my ticket, and it was probably a good thing I insisted on delivery before I left for Phoenix. The game had the highest TV ratings in cable (ESPN) history.

I had a good view, enhanced with my “monocular,” which is actually a Cam-ouflage rifle scope just right for Duck hunting. In one of their nine comebacks, Auburn had gone the entire length of the field against Kentucky earlier in the season to win the game at the end. Auburn fans were going to celebrate at the end of the National Championship game anyway, but the fact that it came down to a field goal to win it on the last play of the game, following yet another patented “Kentucky drive,” caused the entire building to erupt in an explosion of noise. I high-fived everybody sitting around me, doing a complete 360 in the process. There were over 50-thousand Auburn fans in the stadium, so even standing on the Oregon side I was surrounded by my people. That’s right, we stood the ENTIRE game, except for halftime. Each play meant that much and we knew it.

After the game, I stayed around and watched the presentation of the crystal football, the National Championship Trophy. While others were leaving I watched Cam Newton go into the stands and hug his father, then run around the stadium slapping every hand on every front-row seat. I watched the post-game press conferences on the stadium’s big screens where Oregon’s coach Chip Kelly vowed they’d be back and Auburn’s national coach of the year, Gene Chizek, proclaimed the Tigers the best football team in the country. The last bus from Glendale into the downtown area had departed hours earlier, and I knew I was gonna have to cough up some big bucks for a cab back to my hotel.

I walked back out to the main road, texting family and friends as I walked. I met Michael Dyer’s uncle along the way. The freshman Auburn running back had been the most valuable player of the national title game. I saw a guy holding a leg up in the air announcing that it belonged to Wes Byrum. The Auburn senior kicker had won the game with a chip-shot field goal with 2 seconds left on the clock. Back at the main road I started looking for a taxi. There were about 50 other people there with the same idea. The cabs were over-charging, naturally, so I quickly accepted an invitation from two other Auburn fans to share a cab back to the light rail, which was still running. The cab driver we hailed told us he’d take us that far for $60. We agreed and hopped in. Along the way the other two guys realized we were near their motel and asked to be dropped off there. When the meter read $41 and change at their stop, they started trying to figure out what that would be divided by three. “How much do we give him?”

I was up front and looked around at them and sharply said, “You give him $20 a piece. That’s what we agreed on.” They quickly pulled out two 20s and handed them to the driver. I also handed him one. I had asked him along the way how much more it would cost to get to Chandler. He was just guessing that it would be another $60, but he reset his meter after dropping the first two guys off and we headed for my hotel. I didn’t really wanna take public transportation after midnight, especially back on the bus that went through Guadalupe.

The meter was approaching $65 by the time we got back to my hotel, but the driver who told me he had moved here from Africa a few years back honored the $60 agreement we had without insisting on the difference. I had, after all, secured him an extra 20 at the last stop.

I spent most of the next day in the lobby of the hotel watching the weather channel. After I had memorized the weather for the whole country, I asked for the remote at the front desk and took control of the TV. It was on sports channels until my shuttle back to the airport arrived early that evening.

The Phoenix airport was already selling National Championship memorabilia with Auburn’s name on it. I considered buying a t-shirt but wanted to get through security first, and there was no store on the other side that I could find selling what I had seen there. I got a Coke at the Burger King across from my gate, and admired the National Championship cap on the head of a fellow Auburn fan in there. Half the folks in BK were Auburn fans. The airline woman at my gate said because of the weather on the east coast they were advising folks to get as far east as they could, whether their planes were connecting or not. She said the crowd and the air-travel problems reminded her of 9/11.

The flight I had from Phoenix to Milwaukee had its share of Auburn fans on it. But I sat next to a 3-year-old boy named Dominique from a Wisconsin farm who, after I showed him a picture of my kitty (Kobe) and he realized I was harmless, wanted to play “Connect Four” all the way across the country. He had his own set of unique rules. And he’d have to get in the floor with his flashlight which looked like a cow and look for the playing pieces every now and then, but we kept each other occupied till he fell asleep in his mother’s arms.

I had to spend the entire night in the Milwaukee airport. We arrived there about midnight and my connecting flight to Louisville wouldn’t leave for another eight hours. I finally finished reading a mystery book I had started years earlier. At 1:30 in the morning I noticed the Milwaukee airport had nothing but a bunch of Auburn fans in it, and one really busy Quizno’s, the only restaurant that was open all night. We all eventually sacked out in a chair, a couch or on the floor. I laid down on the floor and used my carry-on bag as a pillow. There was enough security that they were keeping us safe, and we were all family anyway. About 4:30 the airport started to come alive with other people. I bought a breakfast sandwich at Quizno’s, then went through security again and found my gate. I got X-rayed and frisked. Don’t know what they thought they saw on me. At my gate I was alone, so I watched TV for a little while then went to find a part of the airport that had other people in it while I waited for my flight. By the time I reached home I hadn’t slept at all in 24 hours (I just closed my eyes but didn’t sleep on the airport floor). And I had slept about four hours in the previous 48. I spent the rest of the week catching up on lost sleep. If we had lost the game, I would’ve felt I wasted a lot of time and money. Since we won, I feel it was worth every penny and minute of my time…

War Eagle!