Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

ALUMNI UPDATES

Warren St. John ’91’s Journey
Into the Heart of Fan Mania

By Claire Lui ’00

Columbia’s marching band was doing its normal halftime hijinks at Homecoming 2004 when the head manager, Dan Binder ’05, spotted Warren St. John ’91 in the stands. Within seconds, the whole band yells “Hi, Warren St. John!” complete with brass accompaniment.

It takes a special kind of fan to get a Columbia marching band shout-out, and pretty much everyone turns around to look at St. John. He’s no dilettante football watcher. He’s the fan’s fan, the author of Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania, a chronicle of a year spent with passionate fans of the University of Alabama’s football team. St. John immersed himself in their culture to the point where he bought a used RV, “The Hawg,” to follow the team.

Warren St. John ’91 PHOTO: CHARLES THOMPSON

St. John is not a recent convert to the Crimson Tide. A Birmingham, Ala., native, he has loved Alabama football all his life. As he points out, 90 percent of Alabama citizens describe themselves as college football fans, or as he wryly writes, “nonfans … are outnumbered by atheists.” A photo of him at 13 with Bear Bryant, Alabama’s revered former coach, is one of St. John’s more treasured possessions.

Despite his devotion to Alabama, St. John attended Columbia because he wanted a change. “If I had gone to Alabama, I could see my life 70 years ahead. I knew exactly what it would mean — exactly the same type of friends I had growing up, following a precise track that didn’t have a lot of suspense to it. I picked Columbia because it was the opposite.”

Indeed. When St. John arrived at Columbia, the Lions were in the middle of the longest losing streak in college football history. During St. John’s sophomore year, watching Columbia lose to Princeton to move past Northwestern for the record, St. John had a minor spiritual crisis. He recalls that day in the book: “I can trace my first feelings of self-consciousness about being a sports fan to that cool October Saturday in New Jersey, because here’s the thing: I wanted Columbia to win. Try as I might, I couldn’t hope to lose. I couldn’t mock football.”

Neither New York nor Columbia changed St. John’s devotion to Alabama’s football team, but for a while, his loyalty was restricted to following the team from afar. (But he followed it faithfully; while in college, he listened to an entire Alabama-Auburn game that was not being broadcast in New York by calling his parents and having them place their phone’s mouthpiece next to the radio.) After graduating, St. John worked at The New York Observer and soon began writing “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. After a stint at Wired, St. John was lured away by The New York Times, where he is a reporter for Sunday Styles.

Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer by Warren St. John ’91

While doing his day job, St. John harbored an idea to write about Alabama fans and explore why fandom exists. As his agent shopped his proposal around, one editor rejected the idea by calling it “too speculative.” St. John took it as a personal challenge, and when the book sold, went off happily to spend a year immersed among the madness of the Crimson Tide.

In addition to buying The Hawg, St. John meets and describes devoted fans who are willing to forego heart transplants in order to watch games, who buy $1.4 million RVs, and who basically stake their happiness on the fate of their beloved team. Their unifying motto, “Roll Tide,” which St. John describes as “the ultimate all-purpose phrase … an acceptable substitute for hello, goodbye, nice to meet you and Amen,” peppers the book, and his life, as the season lurches through its ups and downs.

St. John’s devotion has paid off in critical praise. In its June 10 issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education ranks Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer No. 1 on its list of “The 10 Best College Sports Books Ever,” saying “St. John offers an unsurpassed blend of scholarly heft (he’s gathered all of the scattered research on sports fandom), superb reporting (among those we meet is the Alabama fan so full of hate toward Tennessee that he’d root for ‘Notre Dame, Russia, and the University of Hell before the word “rocky top” would ever come out of my mouth’), and gemlike writing (St. John knew Alabama would beat Vanderbilt on a brutally hot day as soon as he saw Vandy’s ‘photon-slurping black jerseys’).” The book recently was released in paperback.

Though St. John describes his emotions during the Alabama season as often being close to hysterical, in real life, he seems relaxed. During Homecoming 2004, with Columbia playing Princeton, St. John was tranquil, though he became more involved with each blow of the whistle and he quietly, but carefully, tried to make sure I understood each nuance of the game. After Columbia lost in overtime and we filed out of Wien Stadium, I commented that he seemed remarkably composed compared to the intense displays of emotions he wrote about in the book. He turned around sharply and said, “I’m actually really upset now.” Having promised himself that he would only root for one team per sport, St. John admitted, “I got emotionally involved in the game.” St. John had mentioned earlier that he inherited his love of Alabama from his father, and when I asked him how he would feel if he had children (St. John’s wife, Nicole Maurer, is not a football fan) who supported another team, such as archrival Tennessee, a look of horror crossed his face as he struggled to formulate an answer. “I guess it would be OK,” he said, before adding gently, “but I would try to persuade them out of it.”

Follow St. John’s diary of ongoing fandom on his blog.

Claire Lui ’00 is a writer based in Queens, N.Y. She roots for the Mets, the San Francisco 49ers, and of course, the Columbia Lions.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next