Two geeks deconstructing a fertility rite by Sharyn McCrumb

By SHARYN MCCRUMB - 08/28/05 - For the Journal-Constitution

When I was a freshman at North Carolina, football was indeed a religion. Bubble-haired sorority types wore tweed suits and chrysanthemum corsages to attend the game with some carbon-based life form in a navy blazer his identity was not important. Having a date was the point of the exercise.

I'm not sure how I ended up at the Duke-Carolina game with Carlson, the bespectacled genius from my mythology class. I was in training to be an eccentric Southern writer, and Carlson claimed to have won his high school science fair with an anti-matter collector that was really a box of Christmas tree lights programmed to blink randomly. But there we were: two geeks at the Temple of Preppydom, staring politely at the pageantry of the football game, and wondering why everyone else around us cared.

Finally Carlson said, "I believe it's a fertility rite."

"What?"

"This game. Eleven priests one for each month except December. The ball represents the egg of the vernal equinox. If they don't manage to deliver the fertilized egg to the appointed place, spring will not come."

"Fertilized egg?"

"Yeah. Didn't you see the big guy squat on it a minute ago before he handed it off between his legs to the quarterback? A ritual birth. Very symbolic. "

"Ah," I nodded sagely. "So the priests must carry the sacred orb and place it under the letter H in the end zone ..."

"Yes. H for ..."

"Heaven!"

"Or Harvest. And the men in black and white are ..."

"Demons, alternately good or evil, attempting to stop the priests from preserving spring with their ritual."

Carlson pointed to the cheerleaders. "Sacrificial virgins?"

"Harpies," I said.

For the rest of the game, Carlson and I were the most attentive people in Kenan Stadium: two anthropologists from Mars, happily deconstructing the Rite of Autumn. I don't remember who won the game, but spring did come that year.

College football never became my religion, but a few decades later NASCAR did. I accepted Dale Earnhardt as my personal savior, started jumping hills at 100 mph in a Dodge pick-up with Daytona 500 winner Ward Burton, and was really and truly born again.

Sharyn McCrumb, a graduate of the University of North Carolina and Virginia Tech, has written satirical and comic novels as well as short stories.