I’m a bloom-where-you’re-planted guy so I would be content pretty much anywhere.
I’ve been to a lot of places and enjoyed visiting, but I’d rather be in Alabama.
We have our warts of course, but there are a lot of great things about living here, especially if you like college football.
We’re a little cuckoo about it, to be honest. People have shot friends and family over the big game between Alabama and Auburn. At least one man reasoned that poisoning a tree beloved by the other fan base was completely warranted after a perceived insult.
For most of us, however, we’re just really passionate about it.
Take Rodney Orr. Rodney was born in Mobile but moved to Texas at an early age. His family revolved around Alabama football. He went to school at the University of Alabama and wanted to find a way to make a living through Bama football.
So, in the mid- to late-1990s, Rodney got ahead of everybody else and created an Internet presence for Alabama football fans called TiderInsider.
Rodney provided some inside information about Bama and created a virtual watering hole where average fans could post anything they wanted (within reason) about the Crimson Tide for a nominal fee.
He tried to run TiderInsider from his home in Corpus Christi, but soon realized he needed to be in Tuscaloosa to make it work.
So he moved and joined the rest of us newspaper and television types on the Bama beat.
In the beginning, Rodney lived the dream of almost any passionate Alabama football fan. He spent all day, every day consuming Bama football and made a living doing it.
He believed he had found what he had long sought.
He wound up losing almost everything.
Instead of consuming all things Bama, all things Bama consumed him. Rodney quickly became obsessed with getting the next morsel of Bama news to provide to his customers. It was the first thing he thought about when he woke up and the last thing he thought about when he went to bed.
While he pursued Bama, he let his family drift.
Things like this rarely happen in a moment. Over time, Rodney simply had little time left for anything else but Bama.
Rodney’s wife tried to be the family’s center, a burden she was never meant to carry.
One day, she shocked her husband when she admitted forging a prescription for anxiety medicine.
Rodney Orr, who could tell you about the practice habits of the third-string guard, the office politics between assistant coaches and the under-the-radar high school sophomore who could become the next big thing, had no idea his wife was an addict — and in bigger trouble than the minor consequences of forging a prescription.
Rodney lived hell on earth over the next few years. Multiple family members were spiraling out of control and his wife was the worst of all.
Then, on a single day in 2007, Rodney lost his wife and his stepdaughter’s husband to separate fatal car accidents two hours apart.
“I’m just standing there in the kitchen and I said this … I said ‘Lord, I can’t do this, but you can,’” he said during a recent interview on my radio show. “It was like an EF-5 tornado ran right through our home and I’m standing in the midst of all the debris. I mean, how do you start picking up the pieces in that? It seems like a hopeless situation. I can’t tell you that our circumstances changed immediately, but what I can say is that in the process of our circumstances changing, our hearts were changed.”
Over time, Rodney’s relationship with God strengthened and it became evident in the way he lived. His family noticed. Those struggling family members then began to work on their relationship with God and they began to see their circumstances through a different lens.
Rodney still loves Alabama football, but his identity isn’t wrapped around it. His identity is found in something much more substantial.
I often joked when covering Alabama football that I needed to carry my own podium because covering Alabama football attracts a crowd. It’s what everyone wants to talk about. For several years, I wrapped my identity around my job and it took me a while to realize that football is a great sport, but a terrible God (hat tip, Rick Burgess). It is by grace that I didn’t have to walk through an inferno of disaster to realize it.
Rodney Orr has written a book called Bigger than Bama. You can order a copy here or here.
You’ll hear some fun stories about what it was like to blaze an Internet trail with Bama football. More importantly, you’ll hear about God’s incredible message of redemption that is there for us all.
Wow. Powerful. My first intro to Bama football was as a Pacific NW 19 year old Navy guy stationed on a submarine in Charleston, SC in 1980. A new guy on board was saying things like “the Bear”, “Roll Tide”, and “National Champions”. I had no idea what he was talking about. No one else on board coming from the four corners of the US were as consumed with their hometown college football teams. I since moved to Alabama and learned firsthand how idolatry can creep into fandom, and then take over if we let it. Great article, Lance. Thanks for sharing.