Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania Audiobook (Free)
- Michael Kramer
- 9 h 42 min
- Random House (Audio)
- 2004-04-29
Summary:
“Fresh and funny… St. John provides crafter a winner.” -Tony Horwitz, writer of Confederates in the Attic
In the life of each sports fan, there comes a moment of reckoning. It may happen whenever your group wins on a last-second field goal and you instantly end up clenched in a adoring embrace with a large hairy guy you’ve never met . . Or in the long, hormonally depleted days after a loss, when you’re felled by a sensation like the one you 1st experienced following death of a family pet. about Rammer Jammer Yellowish Hammer: A Trip Into the Heart of Fan Mania At such occasions the fan is certainly pressured to confront the question others-spouses, friends, children, and colleagues-have asked for a long time:
Why should i care?
The facts about sports activities that turns in any other case sane, rational people into raving lunatics? How come winning compel people to tear down goalposts, and dropping, to drown themselves in poor keg beer? In short, why do followers care?
Searching for the answers to these questions, Warren St. John seeks out the roving community of RVers who stick to the Alabama Crimson Tide from game to game across the South. A movable feast of Weber grills, Igloo coolers, and die-hard superstition, these are character types who arrive on Wednesday for Saturday’s video game: Freeman and Betty Reese, who skipped their own daughter’s wedding since it coincided with a Bama video game; Ray Pradat, the Episcopalian minister who pieces the games on a tv beside his altar while executing wedding ceremonies; John Ed (pronounced as three syllables, John Ay-ud), the wheeling and coping solution scalper whose usage of good seats provides him power on par with the governor; and Paul Finebaum, the Anti-Fan, a wisecracking sports columnist and talk-radio host who makes his living mocking Alabama fans-and who has to reside in a gated community for all your threats he receives in response.
Very quickly in any way, St. John himself is certainly drawn into the world of full-immersion fandom: he purchases an RV (a $5,500 beater known as The Hawg) and joins the caravan for a football period, chronicling the globe of the intense lover and learning that
in the shadow of the stadium, it could all begin to seem strangely normal.
On the way, St. John will take readers on illuminating forays into the deep origins of humanity’s sports mania (did you know tailgaters could possibly be within eighth-century Greece?), the psychology of crowds, and the surprising neuroscience behind the thrill of victory.
Reminiscent of Confederates in the Attic and the works of Costs Bryson, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer isn’t only a travel story, but a cultural anthropology of followers that goes quite a distance toward demystifying the general urge to take sides also to win.
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