Books

A War in Dixie
by Ivan Maisel and Kelly Whiteside/ HarperCollins, $25.00

"The best thing about this game is also the worst thing about this game," says Frank Cox, Jr., the Auburn equipment supervisor. "It's too important to too many people."

This turns out to be one of the few intelligent observations made by anyone in A War in Dixie, an account of the season-long march to last year's Iron Bowl game between Auburn and Alabama. The rivalry between the Tigers and the Crimson Tide is as ferocious as any in sports, and SI senior writer Maisel and USA Today writer Whiteside double-cover it with skill. Still, it doesn't render an enjoyable read because the making of college football teams can be as unappetizing as the making of sausages and laws, especially in the state of Alabama, where nurses in maternity wards throughout the state outfit infants in those teams' colors during Iron Bowl week.

As long as the book's coaches, players and fans are discussing football strategy, they come across as thoughtful and sophisticated—really, you can learn a lot from them. When they try to justify their obsession with football by linking it to important life lessons, however, they sound like goofballs.

Consider Auburn athletic director David Housel. The Tigers' football team, he says, represents "a human spirit at its very, very best." Not only are his players very good, they are "caring people"—not, he hastens to add, "in a sissy, weak way, but in a strong way."

Worse, consider Alabama coach Mike DuBose, who casts a grim shadow over the book, partly because he has such a miserable year and partly because the more he mucks things up, the more he tries to give advice to other people. DuBose hasn't been the same since August 1999, when he was found to have had an affair (or a "mistake," as he called it) with his secretary and lied about it (or "made the situation worse with my response," as he preferred to say). Happily for DuBose, he has found solace in Christianity; unhappily for the book, he fumblingly tries to apply the lessons of Christianity, as he understands them, to each new disaster. By season's end, when the Tide has fallen to 3-8 and DuBose has been sacked, he complains bitterly to anyone who will listen that Alabama's fans "have made football their God."

DuBose may have a point there. Last year's Iron Bowl took place on Nov. 18, during the presidential recount. According to the book, fans were frantic at the prospect that CBS might interrupt the game to tell them the name of their next president—that is, until a reassuring headline in The Birmingham News promised that local TV WON'T INTERRUPT IRON BOWL FOR ELECTION.

Maisel and Whiteside have written well, but their subject might make you a little sick.

Echoes of Notre Dame Football
by Joe Garner/Sourcebooks MediaFusion, $49.95

Here's a book that calls to mind the difference between nostalgia and history. History is an opportunity to learn something, while nostalgia is a collection of inspiring photographs, soothing clich�s and familiar stories that bring a lump to your throat. Echoes of Notre Dame Football is 100% nostalgia. It's intended solely for those who get choked up watching Knute Rockne All American; those who get excited at Touchdown Jesus; and, above all, those who live and the with the Fighting Irish. It also comes with two appropriately hokey CDs, narrated by Regis Philbin (Notre Dame '53), that will leave lovers of the Irish feeling like millionaires.