Ellington

Across the country, college football fans just got started planning their lives around their team's schedule. New York Times reporter Warren St. John, born in Birmingham in 1970 into a University of Alabama football-fan-family, shows in his new book, "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania" (Crown, 2004, $24), that he thoroughly understands that statement. For St. John, there's nothing out-of-the-ordinary about believing that Bear Bryant's a deity, nor is it strange to feel high as a kite when your team wins or so low as to be underneath the abused sod of the field if they don't.

What did intrigue St. John for over a decade was a live TV interview from Legion Field in Birmingham when a fan readily admitted, while being interviewed for a story about the convoy of motor homes that follows the Crimson Tide, that he and his wife had not missed a game in 15 years, but they had missed their daughter's wedding when she scheduled it in conflict with the Alabama-Tennessee game. (They made the reception, though.)

Whether you think the couple or the daughter was in the wrong depends upon what sort of fan you are. "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer" is a great read. Even if you're not a fan at all, just the spouse, significant other, friend of relative of one, you'll find this book to be well written, funny and full of quirky fans.

St. John's firsthand research into RV-ers and the 1999 Alabama football season begins courtesy of Chris and Paula Bice, who give him a ride from their home in South Carolina and a place to sleep—in their Hurricane—for the season opener at Vanderbilt. St. John soon buys a 1978 Allegro, nicknamed The Hawg, so that he, too, can arrive early in the week—complete with his own bed and bath—in Oxford or Tuscaloosa or Birmingham or Gainesville, certain he's found the true path to enlightened fan-dom.

And the fans St. John meets: the Ogles—Mrs. Ogle had her gall-bladder-attack pain dimmed by Demerol and made the Alabama-Ohio State bowl game a few years back; Randy, Donnie, Skipper, the Show Chicken Man, the Chicken Man (not the same guy), the Heart Guy, the Hot Food Man, Bobby and Bobbie, the anti-fan Paul Finebaum, John Ed (say that AY-ud, if you don't mind) Belvin and many others.

Non-fan, read this book, and you'll be a long way toward understanding your fan. Fan, read it even if you hate the Tide—nobody will hold it against you. All of you will want to know the story behind John Ed's statement: "This is a case of someone's alligator mouth overloading his hummingbird #######."

Warren St. John signs "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer" Sept. 9, at 5 p.m. and reads from it at 5:30 p.m. at Lemuria.