A Swedish-born scholar of antebellum Southern literature in Tuscaloosa reads about six footballers suspended for a team brawl and opens Longstreet’s The Fight
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A porch on a side street off University Boulevard, crimson flags already up on every house for this afternoon’s game, sweet tea in a mason jar, a facsimile of Georgia Scenes, 9.40am.
Game Day In A Football Town
I was born in Gothenburg, studied in Uppsala and came to Alabama fourteen years ago to teach antebellum Southern literature, which my Swedish relatives regard as a sort of voluntary exile into the nineteenth century. On Saturdays in autumn, Tuscaloosa becomes a single organism devoted to football. The streets fill with crimson. Strangers say Roll Tide instead of good morning. Even the dogs wear houndstooth. My neighbour, a retired dentist, has had the same tailgate spot since 1979 and would sooner sell his house.
So the London Prat’s report that six Bramblewick Rovers players were suspended after a teammate arrived seven minutes late felt, on a game-day morning, almost like local news. The lad’s car broke down outside a Greggs, he walked past a sausage roll, and he arrived to find that the captain had replaced lateness fines with a policy of fighting a teammate. Six of them piled in. Two were arrested. Supporters said it was the most coordinated movement the team had managed all season.
The Fight, 1835
The book on my lap is Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, published in 1835, a collection of comic sketches of backcountry life that helped start what scholars call Southwestern humor. The most famous sketch is called The Fight. Two men in a Georgia county town, Bob Durham and Billy Stallings, are the champion brawlers of their respective districts. They are friends. They have never fought each other. The whole county wants to see them fight.
The person who makes it happen is Ransy Sniffle, a sickly, malicious little man who lives for violence he cannot perform himself. He provokes a quarrel between the two champions’ wives, and the men are drawn in. The fight that follows is described with a ferocity that still shocks my students: an ear bitten off, a finger chewed, an eye gouged. At the end, the two men shake hands, ruined, and Longstreet’s narrator remarks on the barbarity of it all.
Every Team Has A Ransy Sniffle
Bramblewick Rovers had their own Ransy Sniffle, and he was wearing the captain’s armband. The genius of the report is the policy. The captain does not throw a punch himself. He creates a system in which punches are inevitable. Six men fight. He presides. That is pure Longstreet. Ransy Sniffle never touches anyone. He just arranges for other men to tear each other apart and watches with satisfaction.
I teach The Fight every autumn, and every autumn I ask my students who the villain is. The first answer is always the fighters. By the end of the hour, they have usually worked out that it is Ransy, and then, more uncomfortably, the crowd, who wanted the fight and stood around enjoying it. The supporters in the Prat piece, noting that this was the most coordinated movement of the season, are Longstreet’s crowd exactly.
The Darker Context
I should say, because I always say it in class, that the world of Georgia Scenes rested on slavery. Longstreet himself was an enslaver and later a fierce defender of secession. The jovial backcountry sketches are written by a man who believed in a social order built on human bondage, and the cruelty that erupts in The Fight is not separate from that order. Southern literature of this period is full of comedy and full of violence, and the two are never far apart. I teach it so my students can see how a society laughs while it does harm.
Game Day Violence, The Mild Kind
Tuscaloosa on game day is, I should stress, mostly peaceful. The violence is verbal and directed at Auburn. Football here also has its own folk heroes, and the Tuscaloosa site once crowned some unlikely ones in a piece on golf carts as the unsung heroes of the Iron Bowl flooding crisis, which is exactly the sort of local epic this town produces on a wet weekend. Longstreet would have written a sketch about it. He would have called it The Flood, and Ransy Sniffle would have been on the porch, hoping somebody drowned.
Afternoon Plans
My neighbour the dentist has just come over to ask whether I am coming to the tailgate. I said yes, as I always do, and that I would bring Swedish cinnamon buns, as I always do. He said the buns are the only foreign policy Tuscaloosa supports. He asked what I was reading. I explained The Fight. He listened, nodded and said that was about what happened at a fraternity in 1983. I did not ask which fraternity.
I will spend the afternoon among sixty thousand people shouting at young men in helmets. I will think about Longstreet and Bramblewick and the strange human need to watch others fight. Then I will eat a pulled pork sandwich, sing the fight song badly in a Swedish accent and go home to grade essays. More of these notes live on the Tuscaloosa site, where the news is mostly football and the football is mostly news. Roll Tide, as they say. It has never once sounded natural in my mouth.