Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania Audiobook (Free)

“Fresh and funny… St. John offers crafter a winner.” -Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic

In the life of every sports fan, there comes an instant of reckoning. It could happen whenever your team wins on a last-second field objective and you instantly find yourself clenched inside a adoring embrace with a large hairy guy you’ve never fulfilled . . Or in the lengthy, hormonally depleted times after a reduction, when you’re felled by a sensation similar to the one you first experienced following death of the family pet. about Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Center of Lover Mania At such moments the fan is definitely compelled to confront the issue others-spouses, friends, kids, and colleagues-have asked for years:

Why do I care?

The facts about sports activities that turns otherwise sane, rational people into raving lunatics? Why does winning compel visitors to rip down goalposts, and losing, to drown themselves in bad keg beer? In a nutshell, why do supporters care?

In search of the answers to these questions, Warren St. John seeks out the roving community of RVers who adhere to the Alabama Crimson Tide from game to video game over the South. A movable feast of Weber grills, Igloo coolers, and die-hard superstition, these are people who arrive on Thursday for Saturday’s video game: Freeman and Betty Reese, who skipped their personal daughter’s wedding because it coincided using a Bama video game; Ray Pradat, the Episcopalian minister who watches the games on a tv beside his altar while carrying out wedding ceremonies; John Ed (pronounced as three syllables, John Ay-ud), the wheeling and coping ticket scalper whose usage of good seats gives him power on par using the governor; and Paul Finebaum, the Anti-Fan, a wisecracking sports activities columnist and talk-radio host who makes his living mocking Alabama fans-and who has to reside in a gated community for all the dangers he receives in response.

Very quickly at all, St. John himself can be drawn in to the globe of full-immersion fandom: he buys an RV (a $5,500 beater called The Hawg) and joins the caravan for a football period, chronicling the globe of the severe enthusiast and learning that

in the shadow of the stadium, it can all begin to seem strangely normal.

On the way, St. John requires visitors on illuminating forays into the deep root base of humanity’s sports activities mania (did you know that tailgaters could possibly be found in eighth-century Greece?), the mindset of crowds, as well as the surprising neuroscience behind the thrill of victory.

Similar to Confederates in the Attic and the functions of Expenses Bryson, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is not only a travel story, but a cultural anthropology of followers that goes quite a distance toward demystifying the general urge to take sides and to win.