Twelve and Counting

If ever a book was designed with a specific readership in mind, this is it.

Each chapter discusses in loving detail an Alabama football team that won a national championship.

Fans of Alabama football will enjoy it no little and quite some, especially if they are descendants of one or more of the uniformed demigods responsible for the gridiron glory.

Fans of overwrought sports writing will also get a kick out of at least one paragraph of this book. A Nashville newspaperman named Blinky Horn was somewhat inclined to gush over Alabama after the Crimson Tide drowned Vanderbilt in 1930. According to Mr. Horn, his guys were “pulverized by power, struck down by strength, swept aside by speed and crushed by cohesion.”

“Crushed by cohesion” is especially dandy, don’t you think?  A lesser scribe might have stumbled into “smashed into submission by stickiness.”

“These Redmen are roguish people,” Mr. Horn went on to say. “They strike with venom.” (Which would suggest that they are, in fact, roguish snakes.)

Anyway, Alabama has won a lot of football games, though at one point in this book, there is a quiet admission that some of their seasons have been disappointing. Several of those came when the team was coached by J.B. “Ears” Whitworth.

I wonder if “Ears” ever encountered Blinky?