Diane Roberts is a native Floridian who was educated at Florida State University and Oxford University where she was a Marshall Scholar. She’s a political columnist for The Guardian newspaper and The Tampa Bay Times, an essayist for National Public Radio, a commentator for the BBC and a Contributing Editor at the Oxford American magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Best American Essays and Best American Food Writing. She is the author of several scholarly books as well as nonfiction including Dream State, an historical memoir of Florida. Her newest book is Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. Roberts is currently Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at FSU.
Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America will be released October 27, 2015 and is available for preorder.
To tell a story in book form, you must have great longing because of the time and effort and energy that goes into it, so what was at the heart of your need to write this? Where did this book come from? What triggered it? At what point did you say to yourself, “You know what? I’m going to write about football”?
In a way, I’ve been writing this book all my life. I was born into football culture and always loved the game and the rituals that surround it, though the older I get, the more my affection for it is tempered by a knowledge that like so much of what passes for a great American social institution, football’s rotten at its core. The real origin of the book comes from an enormous article I did for the Oxford American in 1998. I’m being serious about the size: The thing was at least 8,000 words long. Since then, I kept a file labeled “BALL” and kept putting cuttings and notes and all kinds of stuff in it with the intention that I’d do a book “some day.” I seem to be incredibly slow. Finally, as a way to avoid another writing project (my writing avoidance techniques are quite sophisticated and effective), I took up the football project and, once I was lucky enough to sell it, wrote the book in 16 months.
As for why I wrote Tribal, the more I looked at football, the stranger it became: all that money, time, love and suffering tangled up over a bunch of 19- and 20-year-old boys running around a green field. As a football lifer—I inherited my father’s season tickets when he died—it finally dawned on me (as I said, I’m slow) that football is about all the things I’m most interested in: race, gender, and history.
Are you a post-adolescent? I couldn’t help but latch on to that word, not in the sports playing context, but more so because I think all sport turns “grown-ups,” the spectators, into post-adolescents as well. Do you agree? Why do you think we transform into our Neanderthal-selves when it comes to sports?
Well, you could argue that post-adolescence lasts a long, long time for some of us, maybe from about 18 to 60. Sports is elemental: We identify with a team as a way of belonging, of being a part of the clan. Me, I have an Inner Barbarian, who glories in the violent overthrow of my enemies, especially the University of Florida, Notre Dame and other miscreants. On second thought, maybe that Inner Barbarian is really an Inner Fascist, chanting and clapping and braying for blood along with 80,000-plus of my people as we watch our champions assert our honor and puissance on the field.
This is demented, I know. But we love contests; we love the proxy-fight on the field to determine superiority; and, of course, we love winning. Humans seem hard-wired to keep score.
To me, Tribal: College Football and The Secret Heart of America is not just a book about football. (The cover is ruddy fantastic.) It is about football, but through this sport your book is talking about so many different things: abstinence, purity, public health programmes, and Puritans. You reference Dickens, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Star Trek, politics, He-Man v. Skeletor, and Marvel Comics. You mention a study about how people’s brains react when they look at images of people they despise and how hate focuses our brain in a more efficient manner as opposed to love. Faulkner makes an appearance, bows, lest we forget pictures of Lane Fenner kept in a Romeo y Julieta cigar box. Stadiums are likened to cathedrals, and you address the idea that the support given to Jameis Winston during the alleged rape allegations can be dressed up as racial progress—white womanhood versus defending an African American football hero. You remind us that women are left out of the game even though so many of us watch it. And there is all that history, not just of how the game was almost outlawed in Georgia but also the many variations of the game cultivated over the centuries in various countries. This is a sprawling book that tackles so many topics, no matter how tightly or loosely connected to football, and I love it for precisely for that reason. OK, so my question is: Why was it necessary for you to write in this manner?
The short answer may be that I just don’t know any better. The longer answer? Football exists within culture, so in order to, well, not explain it, I could not presume to do that, but at least begin to understand it, I try to situate it in history. The Puritans left Britain in part because James I refused to ban football on Sundays. Little did they know, they were landing on a continent where the inhabitants had been playing a football-like game for eons, and where the inhabitants of the future United States would take in the Protestant work ethic and prissiness about sex of the Pilgrim Fathers, but also embrace the game that tainted the Sabbath in the Old Country, bigging it up to gargantuan proportions and watching it all Sunday afternoon and evening, when everyone knows they should be reading the sermons of Cotton Mather. And yes, as an English professor, I do throw my book learning around the way frat boys throw around go-cups of beer: literature explains the world! I am a Faulkner scholar and so I find minimalist prose rather beige. I like a big, baroque, digressive sentence full of subordinate clauses and references and allusions and images all in the service of trying to illuminate, tell the story in a way that, as Horace (I believe he played wideout for LSU back in 30 BC) recommends in Ars Poetica, both “delights and instructs.”
You write, “I knew I was a Seminole before I knew I was white or a Presbyterian or even a girl. I knew I was a Seminole before I knew what a Seminole was.” You also write, “Identity is a vexed business as it ever was.” Could you talk a little more about this?
Well, I’m not sure I can put it any smarter than I did in the book (not that I’m claiming the way I did it was smart). Football punctuated our lives from September to December: My parents got dressed up for Saturday games the way they would for Sunday church: coat and tie, hat, heels, gloves, corsage. They disappeared for hours—sometimes days—leaving my little brother and me with a babysitter. They arrived back either ecstatic or, in the case of my father, sullen and angry. Daddy took the game very seriously. My mother, who graduated from FSU (she was an athlete, an archer, in college), had a healthier attitude, but still, I couldn’t help figuring out that football was a large, large business. My parents would talk of other people—less fortunate, less intelligent, less wonderful people—as “Bulldogs,” “Deacons,” and “Gators.” We were Seminoles. This was identity; this was belonging; this marked us off from them. Identity is formed in contrast with others: We are who we are because we aren’t the people from the mountain or the lake or those assholes in Gainesville.
You have a deep love and an uneasy relationship with football, one that is both hilariously and poignantly documented in the book. In the first few chapters, every time I would begin to get comfortable with your joyous love for football your narrative would slap me in the face by bringing up something horrid about the game whether it’s the twenty-year-old kids on the field risking brain damage or Jameis Winston and the alleged rape. I felt as though your discomfort was mine also. Did you set out to write the book in that manner? Or was the narrative within the book symptomatic of/mimicked your relationship with football?
Ain’t that the way with every deep relationship: love mixed with loathing? The narrative is entirely a product of my trying to deal with my own football problem, my own participation in the Football Industrial Complex. I didn’t set out to write the book in this way; I couldn’t write it any other way. It’s a kind of fraught conversation with myself. My dear friend former FSU quarterback Tommy Warren, now a very distinguished civil rights lawyer, helped to expose some very serious abuses in the Seminole program back in the early 1970s. He does not go to games and does not usually watch on television, though sometimes, say when FSU plays Notre Dame, he’ll sneak a look or two.