Seventy-plus seasons in the same stadium. A memory considerably sharper than mine, and stories I could have listened to for another three hours easily.
Spent this afternoon interviewing a genuinely remarkable ninety-one-year-old woman who has attended every single Alabama home football game since 1952, a streak spanning more than seven decades that I was originally assigned to cover in a fairly straightforward five-hundred-word piece for this week’s edition, and left her home three hours later with considerably more material, and considerably more genuine affection for this specific assignment, than any five-hundred-word piece could possibly hold.
She met me at her front door already holding a genuinely well-organized photo album, decades of ticket stubs and game-day photographs carefully preserved and labeled, walking me through specific games with a clarity and detail that put my own memory of games I attended merely last season to genuine shame. She remembered not just scores and outcomes but small, specific human details, the particular way the crowd sounded during one especially tense fourth quarter sometime in the sixties, a specific friend she always sat beside for close to thirty years before that friend passed, the exact seat number she has held, through several stadium renovations and expansions, for the entire span of this remarkable streak.
What struck me most, listening to her talk for these three hours, was not really the football itself, impressive as the raw streak genuinely is, but the entire, accumulated social world she has built and sustained around it across seven decades, a specific community of fellow longtime attendees, several of whom she has outlived, others she still meets for lunch regularly, all connected through this same shared, sustained ritual of showing up, together, to the same stadium, season after season, for longer than most of us reading this piece have been alive.
She told me, with a specific, genuine seriousness that made clear this was not simply a passing comment, that she considers this streak less about the football itself and more about a specific, sustained commitment to showing up consistently for something larger than any single game or any single season, a philosophy I found genuinely moving articulated this plainly by someone who has actually lived it this consistently across seven full decades of her own life.
I asked, near the end of our three hours together, what specifically has kept her coming back for this long, through what must have been genuinely difficult seasons both on the field and in her own personal life across such an enormous span of time, and her answer was considerably simpler and considerably more affecting than I expected walking in, that the stadium and the people in it became, gradually, a genuine second family across these seven decades, one she was not about to simply stop showing up for regardless of how any single season’s record happened to unfold.
I am going to have to cut this piece down considerably to fit our usual word count, and I genuinely do not know yet which specific stories from these three hours I can bear to leave out. I think I am going to ask my editor whether we might run a considerably longer version online, since I do not think a woman who has shown up this consistently for seventy-plus years deserves to have her story compressed down to the same tight word count as our usual game recap coverage.
Before I left, she pulled out one final photograph, considerably older and more faded than the rest of her carefully organized album, from her very first game back in 1952, and told me she still remembers exactly what she wore that day, exactly who she sat beside, exactly how the light looked that particular afternoon, a level of specific, vivid recall spanning more than seventy years that genuinely humbled me sitting there with my own notebook, aware of how much of my own life from even a decade ago has already faded considerably more than her memory of a single Saturday in 1952 apparently ever has.
I think I am going to propose a follow-up piece too, something considerably more expansive than even the longer online version I am already planning, an oral history properly capturing as much of her seven decades of stories as she is willing to share, before that specific, remarkable memory and everything it holds is no longer available to actually ask about. I do not think this is a story that should exist only in whatever form fits neatly into this week’s edition.
I called my own grandmother tonight, driving home from the interview, prompted entirely by everything I had just spent three hours listening to, and asked her some version of the same questions I had just asked this remarkable ninety-one-year-old woman, curious what specific, vivid memories my own grandmother might be quietly holding that I have simply never thought to properly ask about. She had plenty, it turns out, and I think today’s interview has genuinely changed how much attention I plan to actually pay, going forward, to the specific, detailed memories the older people in my own life are still carrying, before those same memories become, as they inevitably eventually do, no longer available to ask about at all.
More from this author at Astrid Holgersson, prat.uk.