A Nick Saban Hoodoo Wink?
December 14th, 2009
Tom Campbell
Saban flashes a knowing smile and wink after Ingram won the Heisman Saturday night…
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Somewhere in the great divide between religion and science there exists the uniquely American game called football — and the practice of voodoo.
Nick Saban knows a thing or two about football, and if there’s any truth to certain urban legends spreading around the “Internets,” he may have learned a thing or two about voodoo during his five-year stint coaching LSU down on the bayou.
You can’t live in that damn swamp without finding out a little about Hoodoo, gris, gris and the rest, as I learned in my four years of living in New Orleans, as did my good friend Rick Bragg, who was there at the same time.
They say college football is a religion in the Deep South, especially in places like Louisiana and Alabama, but according to Bragg, “it’s not. Only religion is religion.”
“Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused,” Bragg wrote in Sports Illustrated when Nick Saban announced he would take the head coaching job at Alabama — after telling the people of Louisiana and Florida he never would.
“If football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Ala.,” Bragg wrote. “And now has come a great revival.”
When the announcement went out Saturday night that running back Mark Ingram had won the University of Alabama’s first Heisman Trophy, the news traveled over the Internets faster than the old church bells could ring across the Old South.
The Alabama faithful sent e-mail messages and text messages to their groups of friends. Bloggers posted news links, photos and comments. And the social Networking sites of Facebook and Twitter lit up like Christmas tree lights with tweets supporting Ingram with the now infamous acronym RTR, short for Roll Tide Roll!
