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Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
Unavailable
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
Unavailable
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
Audiobook9 hours

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania

Written by Warren St. John

Narrated by Michael Kramer

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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

In the life of every sports fan, there comes a moment of reckoning. It may happen when your team wins on a last-second field goal and you suddenly find yourself clenched in a loving embrace with a large hairy man you've never met. . . . Or in the long, hormonally depleted days after a loss, when you're felled by a sensation similar to the one you first experienced following the death of a pet. At such moments the fan is forced to confront the question others-spouses, friends, children, and colleagues-have asked for years:

Why do I care?

What is it about sports that turns otherwise sane, rational people into raving lunatics? Why does winning compel people to tear down goalposts, and losing, to drown themselves in bad keg beer? In short, why do fans care?

In search of the answers to these questions, Warren St. John seeks out the roving community of RVers who follow 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 characters who arrive on Wednesday for Saturday's game: Freeman and Betty Reese, who skipped their own daughter's wedding because it coincided with a Bama game; Ray Pradat, the Episcopalian minister who watches the games on a television set beside his altar while performing weddings; John Ed (pronounced as three syllables, John Ay-ud), the wheeling and dealing ticket scalper whose access to good seats gives 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 live in a gated community for all the threats he receives in response.

In no time at all, St. John himself is drawn into the world of full-immersion fandom: he buys an RV (a $5,500 beater called The Hawg) and joins the caravan for a football season, chronicling the world of the extreme fan and learning that
in the shadow of the stadium, it can all begin to seem strangely normal.

Along the way, St. John takes readers on illuminating forays into the deep roots of humanity's sports mania (did you know that tailgaters could be found in 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 Bill Bryson, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is not only a travel story, but a cultural anthropology of fans that goes a long way toward demystifying the universal urge to take sides and to win.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 29, 2004
ISBN9781415916148
Unavailable
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
Author

Warren St. John

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Warren St John is currently a reporter for the New York Times. He has also written extensively for The New Yorker, the New York Observer and Wired. He studied at Columbia University and lives in New York.

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Reviews for Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer

Rating: 4.112068965517241 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I should preface this review by saying that I am not a sports fan and not a football fan, and I was not looking forward to reading this book, which was recommended to me. So with all that in mind, no one is more shocked than I am by how much I loved this book. The book is essentially an Alabamian-turned-New Yorker's experience taking a leave of absence from his job to follow the Alabama Crimson Tide football team in an RV. It is a funny and sometimes surprisingly poignant account of his time at home and away games. He introduces us to the people he met along the way, many of whom start out as comical caricatures and then surprise us with their complexity. Somewhat critical to the story is the fact that, even though the author is from Alabama and grew up following the Tide, he is almost universally viewed as an outsider because he lives in New York and introduces himself as a reporter, which affects many of his interactions. If you do not like reading accounts of sporting events with mind-numbing detail about fumbles and touchdowns and interceptions (I do not), you will actually be OK with this book. The discussion of what actually happened in the games was limited to a few pages at most per game, and for the most part, you can skip ahead to find out whether the team won or lost without missing anything. The book is about southern football culture (which is basically a religion), and the games themselves are not actually all that relevant to the broader story. A couple of things I do feel inclined to mention. First, the author can be a little bit sexist, occasionally expressing shock when good-looking college women are drunk or screaming profanities at the games. He is young enough to know that being obnoxious is not the exclusive provenance of 20-something frat boys, and I found these passages annoying. Also, the author does occasionally touch on issues of racism among the fans, and while the book is obviously meant to be a mostly lighthearted account of his experience, he could've broached this subject with a little more introspection. He does talk about the incongruous logic of the racist fan, but he doesn't ever really touch on the exploitative nature of college sports or the deeply entrenched racism at some of the institutions featured in this book. I don't think this type of book demands an in-depth study of the issue, but I felt distinctly as though the author was intentionally giving a very big issue only the most perfunctory mention.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer; A Road Trip into the Heart of Fan Mania. Warren St. John. 2004. Two sports books within a couple of months of each other! Have I lost my mind!? No, My Losing Season was a marvelous book and so is this one. St.John is a life-long Alabama football fan who had his picture taken with The Bear when he was a child. He is fascinated with “fandom” and wanted to find out, if he could why fans, especially Alabama fans are so rabid. He decides to follow the Crimson Tide for a year and he decides to make this trek with the RVers, those fans who travel from game to game, in RVs of all sizes. This is one of the funniest books I have ever read! St.John is a great writer and he has a marvelous ear for language. You don’t have to be an Alabama fan (in fact, some Alabama fans might not like the way they’re portrayed) to appreciate this funny, intelligent book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As an Alabama student and fan, I felt a connection to Warren St. John. In fact, I met him in September 2008 at UA, where he gave a speech on this book. I remembered most of his speech, so the book was nothing new. However, I enjoyed some of the mature language and the cocktail 'recipes' in Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer. St. John uses an easy writing style, so this book should take 1 or 2 hours to knock out. This is a must read for Alabama fans.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love the way this book is written. St. John describes his adventures with the Roll Tide crazies (in the nicest way possible) beautifully. Great side stories. College football unites the most unlikely through its fan base, and this story is about the Alabama fans who tailgate in RVs to the games.I liken the style of this book to John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good And Evil. You are pulled through by the little stories of ordinary people who do not so ordinary things.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There is a whole separate culture in this country that encompasses the college football fan, and it can be further divided by conference, school, and the way you watch the games. Warren St. John isn't content to demonstrate how insane SEC football fans or Alabama football fans are. He takes it further, to the RV culture, the folks who may or may not have gone to Tuscaloosa for school but who go every weekend there's a home game. He captures perfectly the interaction of fans and media, fans and university, fans and football coaches. While the book was well-written and the story alternately hilarious and too true for comfort, I was left wanting something more. I haven't been able to put my finger on it. The story follows the arc of a football season... maybe I wanted it to follow two. St. John hit the road himself, and I know there was only so much time he could devote to this, but the real story lies not just in the doing but in the doing and doing and doing. Which he gets at, but doesn't capture as perfectly as he does some of the other nuances.But that's a nitpick. I read it during football season, Nick Saban's second one as coach of the Tide, and it was a terrific counterpoint to a terrific season. Would a non-Alabama fan care? Possibly, if a fan of another big state school with a successful football program. Would someone who didn't like college football care? It would probably just reinforce their wrongheaded ideas about who does like the sport. So, recommended highly for the Alabama fan, recommended for the football fan, and not recommended for the Philistine who doesn't see the point of the pigskin.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hilarious but truthful look at a season with the RV caravan of Alabama Football. Couldn't think of a better primer for College football season. Even if your not a Bama fan you'll still get a kick out of this. And I met St. John as well - and he really is one of those Alabama crazies true and true.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In a lot of ways, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is a fitting companion piece to Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? New York Times reporter, Alabama native, and devoted Crimson Tide fan Warren St. John spends an entire football season as a member of one of the infamous RV caravans that follow college football teams across the South. Along the way we encounter a man who is on the waiting list for a heart transplant but puts his life at risk each week by leaving the proscribed forty minute radius around the hospital just to attend football games, a couple who missed their daughter's wedding for a Bama game, as well as countless similarly obsessed football fans. The RVers themselves are, predictably, the nuttiest type of football nut available. The book is never short on the theater of the absurd. The social phenomenon St. John investigates, the irrational passion of certain stereotypical "red staters", is obviously parallel to Frank's book. St. John's success, like Frank's, derives, yes, partly from his ironic sense of humor aimed at absurd and easy targets, but is sold by his genuine affection and sense of camaraderie with his subjects. A fan himself, St. John shares the RVers' apprehensions, their superstitions, and their moments of agony and ecstasy as the Crimson Tide recover from a humiliating early season loss to LA Tech and go on to win the SEC championship. Throughout I was continually impressed with St. John as a talented descriptive writer. Sports fan or no, everyone should try this one out.