Fitting that Los Angeles is no longer an American city; more fitting that Jefferson County -- home to Birmingham -- recently declared bankruptcy. America hasn't been the same since that very day in 1970.
Few eyes will be on the state of Mississippi’s marquee football game this weekend, save those alumni and students from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and Mississippi State.
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| Heroes of another age |
The rivalry game is called the Egg Bowl, and a lame-duck Houston Nutt will lead a limping Ole Miss team (2-9) to combat a Mississippi State (5-6) vying for its 16th bowl game in the university’s history.
Sports Illustrated wrote this about the Egg Bowl in a dismissive article published back in 1991:
If college football is truly allegorical, then here is the title of its harshest lesson: Ole Miss vs. Mis'ippi State. It is perhaps the saddest rivalry in all of Division I, a struggle for pride in a state where pride comes hard, then runs too deep and stays too long.
"Poor old whupped-down Mis'ippi" is what the writer Willie Morris calls his home state. "The last people you want to take a whuppin' from is somebody else from Mis'ippi," says comedian Jerry Clower, a former Mis'ippi State player.
Considering their state's paltry resources, the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University—their formal names—probably shouldn't even be separate institutions, let alone schools that support separate football teams in the high-rent Southeastern Conference. "This state is just too little, in terms of people, and too poor to sustain a major football rivalry," says Morris, who wrote The Courting of Marcus Dupree, a 1983 portrait of the state's sociological relationships with football and black players.
And yet the demographics of Ole Miss and Mis'ippi State—homogenous as they might seem from the outside—are more socially opposite than those of Alabama and Auburn, Florida and Florida State, or Texas and Texas A&M. So Mis'ippi society can't live without what it can't afford.
Ole Miss is the last bastion of the traditions of the old Southern gentry. Its teams are nicknamed Rebels; its fans still wave Confederate flags despite official disavowal of the symbol by the university and its alumni association; its marching band still plays Dixie. The very term Ole Miss is not a contraction of "Old Mississippi," but an old slave term—a plantation owner's daughter was called "the young miss" and his wife "the old miss
Beginning with Kentucky in 1966, the SEC slowly began to admit black football players. In 1972, Georgia, LSU and Ole Miss became the last of the league's teams to integrate. But even as Confederate flags were becoming more emblematic of virulent racism than of valor and mourning, the Rebel faithful continued to cling to their symbols. The school's history, to say nothing of the flags, left talented black football players (on which the other SEC members were loading up) less than eager to play at Ole Miss. The era of coach Johnny Vaught, who for more than two decades enjoyed a recruiting lock on segregated Mississippi—where it had been considered the duty of athletic white youths to play for the glory of the state's "way of life"—had finally ended.
Twenty years later, Ole Miss lays prostrate, her proud traditions rooted in Mississippi’s past removed, considered vestigial organs by an unelected Disingenuous White Liberal power structure trying to make the university respectable in the eyes of Black-Run America (BRA).
No longer does the band play Dixie. No longer does the Confederate Flag wave in the stands (Tommy Tuberville can be thanked for that). No longer is the school even known as the “Rebels,” but as the “Black Bears.”
Were it not for a few years of Eli Manning (son of beloved former Rebel quarterback Archie) quarterbacking the Rebels to bowl games between 2000 – 2003, Ole Miss fans would have few proud memories to savor, save tailgates on the famed Grove.
The band can’t even play Elvis Presley’s Dixie With Love because fans and alumni would chant ‘the South will rise again’ at the conclusion of the song, which – according to the Chancellor of Ole Miss – reeks of “Segregationist Baggage.”
The “Ghosts of Mississippi” will always haunt the state, and though the university recruits almost exclusively Black athletes to represent the school on the football field, recently fired Nutt continues to blame the specter of white racism on the misfortunes he faced:
In an interview with Yahoo Sports Radio, Nutt blamed Mississippi's checkered racial past from stopping him from recruiting more out-of-state athletes, saying that some recruits and their families had questions about racism before they even visited the school.
Fired from his job after back-to-back losing seasons, Nutt has three games left with the team.
"You recruit a young man from out of state and they come to Mississippi, the first thing that hits their mind is, you know, 'I've seen the show "Mississippi Burning."' Or, there are questions from their mom: 'Are there racial problems?' Once they get here, you put that to rest, but that's the perception," Nutt said. "Once recruits visit the campus firsthand, they see it's a safe place that doesn't have racial problems."
Despite the problems that Nutt faced, Ole Miss had no shortage of out-of-state talent because 65 percent of the 115 players on the roster are not from Mississippi.
Sports writer Neal McCready with www.rivals.com said he doesn't think Mississippi's history is a big factor in the Rebels' recruiting.
"I don't know that I've heard any empirical evidence either in the state of Mississippi that, at least not recently, leads me to believe that he lost out on an African-American recruit because of things that happened 50 years ago. I don't really believe that to be the case," McCready said.
Not only that, but Ole Miss is a majority Black football team (though the school is majority white), which completely contradicts Nutt’s idiotic claims. Then again, so is Mississippi State (famously under Jackie Sherrill, MSU success was predicated upon recruiting low- IQ, Black Junior College transfers), one of those programs like Georgia Tech, West Virginia, Oregon, and Virginia Tech that seems to only recruit Black players to play quarterback now.
At least the school got some positive publicity with the 2009 film, The Blind Side. In Michael Lewis book of the same name, we learn that many of Michael Oher’s (the Black inner-city Memphis native adopted by the White Ole Miss alumni family) Black teammates didn’t care about academics or have pride in the school that was providing them a free education that their athletic ability alone justified.
Once Ole Miss had a proud football tradition (only 13 of the 33 bowl game appearances for the school came after the integration of the Rebels in 1972); of course, this was when the team only played white players and actually won Southeastern Conference (SEC) and national championships. There was even a riot on the campus back in the early 1960s to stop the integration of the school.
A mini-Civil War erupted between citizens and students of the Oxford school over James Meredith’s coerced enrollment.
The New York Times reported this back in 1962:
James H. Meredith, a Negro, enrolled in the University of Mississippi today and began classes as Federal troops and federalized units of the Mississippi National Guard quelled a 15-hour riot.
A force of more than 3,000 soldiers and guardsmen and 400 deputy United States marshals fired rifles and hurled tear-gas grenades to stop the violent demonstrations.
Throughout the day more troops streamed into Oxford. Tonight a force approaching 5,000 soldiers and guardsmen, along with the Federal marshals, maintained an uneasy peace in this town of 6,500 in the northern Mississippi hills.
Then, the state actually had pride in her past; now, every tradition of the school has been uprooted so that a team of majority Black players can be recruited and win two or three games a season. Of course, talented white high school players in Mississippi and other contiguous southern states go unnoticed by SEC coaches who only equate “Speed” and “talent” with melanin-enriched individuals. Just ask the Green Bay Packers white receiver Jordy Nelson how many scholarship offers he got.
Back in the late 1960s, Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated published a four-party series that discussed the trials and tribulations facing Black athletes at recently integrated schools and at the professional level.
Looking at how white running back Jacob Hester was treated at Louisiana State University, Peyton Hillis at Arkansas (and in the NFL) and how Tre Smith and Heath Evans were treated at Auburn University, it’s obvious the situation has been inverted; SEC football is predominately Black, meaning that it is the waning number of whites trying to maintain some semblance of integration at schools where the student body population is almost always 90 percent white.
Perhaps inadvertently, Michael Oriard let slip a crucial point in his book Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era in regards to all that was lost in the South when integration hit Ole Miss and other SEC schools. On page 61, he writes:
The integration of SEC football was more momentous for white southerners than for black, resulting in the loss of a bastion of white southern masculinity but bringing a compensating benefit in the national stature of conference teams through the prowess of black athletes.
This quote has some contradictions in it (all-white Auburn, Georgia, Ole Miss, LSU, Tennessee, Georgia Tech – though they left the SEC in the 60s – and especially the University of Alabama, were some of the top programs in the nation that consistently vied for and won national titles without the benefit of having Black athletes on their rosters), but it gets to the heart of why white southerners have allowed their traditions to be trampled on; the perceived and completely artificial belief that only Black athletes can win championships.
Worse, the predominate white student body of SEC schools must lower standards (both academic and moral) to accommodate the Black presence on campus; in the case of Ole Miss, they must remove every last vestige of their heritage.
In an important discussion on race and college football at View from the Right, Lawrence Auster made an invaluable point that gets to the heart of the problem of college athletics:
Southerners put all this energy and collective passion into a school sport, while passively allowing the Hispanicization, Islamization, and de-Europeanization of their country. Either their football mania is a compensation for no longer being allowed to defend their culture, or it's a huge distraction from defending their culture. Either way it seems the height of decadence: all these white people madly cheering on their football teams (whether the players are white or black, it doesn't matter), all these whites being transported by the passions of "football patriotism," even as whites are being steadily degraded into a minority in their own country. These whites don't put one billionth of the energy into defending their threatened culture and civilization that they put into cheering their football teams. That these teams consist largely of black thugs only intensifies the tragedy.
And to think, all this has happened in a state where more than 90 percent of whites voted for John McCain in 2008.
But because we can no longer have an “American Identity” or “Southern Identity” (as James Kirpatrick showed, such a thing would be ‘racist’) we must adopt to having an identity in Ole Miss, which must have any traces of its Confederate past completely expunged, since only Black athletes can provide the key to victory.
Or the key to an embarrassing two win season.
There is a correlation that must be pointed out now: when Ole Miss had an all-white football team, the student body and state leaders were prepared to go to war with the Federal Government over demands for integration.
Now, with a pathetic integrated team consisting of largely unemployable Black thugs, the children and grandchildren of those same proud Mississippians can’t even muster the shouting of “the South will rise again.”
And it is for this reason that America can not rise again, with our future inexplicably tied to a trivial contest.
