NONFICTION
‘Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America’
HarperCollins
256 pages, $25.99
“I knew I was a Seminole before I knew I was white or a Presbyterian or even a girl,” Diane Roberts writes in her new book, “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America” (HarperCollins). “I knew I was a Seminole before I knew what a Seminole was. It meant I wasn’t a Gator.”
Roberts, who would readily describe herself as a left-leaning feminist, is a North Florida native from a prominent family, and a tenured English professor at Florida State University, with a PhD from Oxford University.
She’s also a multi-generational Seminole football season ticket holder, who declares her DNA-ingrained love for the team and the game as something akin to crazy romantic obsession: “Me, I’ll still care way too much, even though I know better. This is my tribe. These are my people.”
Full disclosure: Roberts and I became friends more than 30 years ago when we were both at Florida State and writing for the Florida Flambeau, an off-campus daily that covered the university and community in ways that weren’t always appreciated.
In “Tribal,” Roberts describes the Flambeau as a publication “regarded by respectable people and politicians as the fell offspring of the Socialist Worker and Zap Comix.”
That she wrote college football columns for the paper and was often the only woman in the press box at Seminole games was unlikely enough. That she dared drop down to the locker room horrified the regular sports guys: "You can't go in there! There's, you know, nekkid men!"
Those experiences were no doubt the germ of “Tribal,” which exudes Roberts’ satirical Southern sensibility and way of wrapping hard truths in a droll, frequently bawdy and baroque kind of humor that can combine TMZ tabloid shock and Faulknerian literary awe in the same paragraph.
In sections divided like the four quarters of a football game, she explores scholarly questions of religion, race, gender, class, power and brain damage in the context of a sport “predominantly played by African Americans but controlled by white men.”
King Lear and “Star Trek,” Dickens and Marvel Comics join the gridiron drama of “passion, violence and pain” — “a great, messy stew of energy, anger, joy, signs, portents, symbols, athletic feats, madness, and what sports announcers call ‘pageantry.’ ”
Certainly, Roberts’ opinions are not the norm for most college football fans. Nor will they endear her to Seminole boosters back in Tallahassee — especially as she delves into the 2013 controversy surrounding Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy and National Championship-winning FSU quarterback accused of rape.
In a recent phone conversation, Roberts talked about “Tribal” while we shared our mutually conflicted love of college football and worries about the current FSU season.
Roberts told me she started thinking about the ideas behind the book years ago when she was a professor at the University of Alabama.
“The main thing that got me going was when I was invited to go on a trip with the football team to the University of Mississippi game in Oxford,” Roberts recalled. “I could not get over how people would come out along the route and hold their little kids up as the bus rolled through these tiny Alabama towns — as if football was somehow holy or magical. As an amateur anthropologist, I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something up here that I’d never really considered.’ ”
I wondered if Roberts thought readers would buy her Seminole pride, given all the bad things she has to say about it.
“I understand why they might not,” she said. “But just because I love something doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it. Criticism of any kind or just pointing out what goes on is always taken to be an attack. I’m pointing all this out because I do care.
“I wish that it were not so exploitative of young men, many of whom are very poor. And I wish it did not eat up so much of the oxygen at alleged institutes of higher learning. Nevertheless, come game time, I’m howling along with the rest of the mob, shrieking for blood and forgetting that I’m a card-carrying intellectual.”
Because Jameis Winston takes up a good chunk of “Tribal,” I was curious what Roberts thought about Jaboo, now that he’s the starting QB for the Tampa Bay Bucs.
“I think he’s going to be really good,” she said. “He’s big and he seems to have so much natural football intelligence. He’s a joy to watch because he plays with so much grace and beauty and enjoyment.
“Then I think, ‘Oh, but this kid could have done something really terrible.’ We’ll never know, and we’re never going to know, thank you Tallahassee police. So that bothers me. And it bothers me that the young woman involved was treated so badly on campus and in this town, which is always the way.”
Another timely controversy Roberts takes on is the occurrence of traumatic brain injury in football.
“We’re now finding out that it isn’t just a full-on concussion, necessarily,” she said. “It’s getting hit over and over and over, again. Shockingly, your brain comes unattached from stuff it should be attached to. Amazing. But I think we kind of knew that and didn’t want to admit it.
“This is the answer from a person with a family full of lawyers, but I think it’s going to come down to lawsuits. It’s going to take some people suing the NCAA, which is happening, and maybe suing universities or conferences. But the only thing that ever shifts anything is money.”
Needless to say, Roberts loves the crazy side of college football, lamenting the departure of eccentric South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier, and celebrating the colorful commentary of Louisiana State coach Les Miles. And she has a particular place in her heart for Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones, who sent out that wonderful tweet, “We ain’t come here to play school.”
“He, of course, told the truth,” Roberts said. “But it’s a very weird thing. We are the only country on earth that does this kind of spectacle with a supposed amateur sport. This is what interests me, fundamentally.
“When you start looking at your own world, and you find your own world extremely strange, that’s when you can start writing about it. I tell my students, ‘Make the familiar strange. You’ll like it and other people will, too. Except for when they get mad at you.’ ”
About the Author
