When Ole Miss beat Alabama last month, I immediately thought of my father. Although he was a graduate of the University of Texas and a proud Longhorn, Willie was still a native of Mississippi, and by default, a lifelong Ole Miss man. Indeed, had it not been at my grandfather’s urging, my father would have surely never left Mississippi.
“I saw no reason to leave,” he wrote in “North Toward Home.” “I had my heart set, at the age of seventeen, on entering Mississippi’s educated landed gentryby taking a degree at Ole Miss, as all my friends planned to do… .”
He lived elsewhere for almost 30 years. By the time he returned, the Mississippi of his youth had changed dramatically, but the old sport rivalries endured.
This Saturday would have been my father’s 80th birthday. I have, of late, frequently contemplated what he might have thought about the annual meeting of Ole Miss and Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl. Ole Miss is trying to reclaim some small bit of glory after painful loses to LSU and Auburn, not to mention last Saturday’s thrashing at the hands of Arkansas. Mississippi State, which fell from No. 1 in the nation to No. 4, is limping from the defeat at Alabama, but is still hoping to dispatch their old rivals and, helped by an Auburn victory, claim the SEC West title and go on to win the national championship.
The media attention has been overwhelming. At times, embarrassing. After State lost to Alabama, a headline in the newspaper in Syracuse, N.Y., proclaimed: “No. 1 Rebels bite the dust.”
While my father was always gracious to his friends who attended Mississippi State, and would even have pulled for them occasionally in important games (that did not involve Ole Miss), there is no doubt about his allegiances. Even though he had never attended the University of Mississippi as a student, he had lived in Oxford for 10 years serving as writer-in-residence.
When he arrived on the Ole Miss campus in 1980, my father lived in a modest house at 16 Faculty Row, described by one writer as “a street of identical white bungalows shaded by lush live oak trees.”
Built into the side of a hill, his was the first house on the left off Jackson Avenue. In the days before multiple stadium expansions, before ESPN or “College GameDay,” before Katy Perry was even born, and before tailgating in the Grove became such a spectacle, Willie and his friends would often gather informally at his house for drinks and food and then walk up the hill, cutting through the parking lot behind the law school, across the Grove and to the stadium.
During his tenure in Oxford, he could often be seen holding court in the South Zone with an eclectic posse of writers, artists, entrepreneurs and PhDs including Larry and Dean Wells, Ronzo, Dees, Semmes, Jane Rule, Barry and Susan Hannah, Ron and Jane Borne, and David and Lib Sansing, to name just a few.
On occasion, he would watch road games on televisions otherwise for sale at Shine Morgan’s on the Square, sharing the recliners with Ed Morgan, Charles Henry, Clyde Goolsby and Red Smith. Or he would listen to Stan Torgerson call the games, describing the action in vivid detailfrom left to right, as you looked at your radio. When Ole Miss scored a touchdown, he would stand up with a giant grin and silently pump one arm in the air.
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A Game of the Heart: Thoughts on Willie's 80th Birthday and the Egg Bowl