Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s top political strategist during the 2012 campaign. He knows what it feels like to lose, and he can hardly talk about that loss with anyone who hasn’t experienced a campaign from the inside:
A year after the election, he writes, “there were still long periods when I’d lie in bed reading and trying, never very successfully, not to relive the campaign.” Emotionally adrift, he decided to spend the fall with his 95-year-old father watching the football team they both loved, the University of Mississippi “Ole Miss” Rebels. This memoir of watching those games is a tender and understated meditation on collegiate football, on life in the South, and—especially—on loss.
The book’s narrative moves easily between the 2013 season and Stevens’s boyhood in the early 1960s. The most memorable year was 1962. Stuart was 10. All around, the civil rights movement was turning Mississippi society upside down, the state’s citizens regularly embarrassed by reactionary efforts ranging from stupid to sinister. Stevens remembers Governor Ross Barnett trying to force the halftime crowd at the Ole Miss-Kentucky game to sing a specially rewritten state song. The whole spectacle was so awful—the new song was comically bad: Ross is standing like Gibraltar, he shall never falter—that Stuart’s father left the game.
Real life was not good for Mississippians in 1962, but football made it a magical year: Ole Miss, led by the legendary coach Johnny Vaught, didn’t lose a game, beating the Arkansas Razorbacks in the Sugar Bowl to win the national championship.
The Rebels would never again go undefeated or win a national championship: Traditionally, they’re one of the Southeastern Conference’s good-but-not-great teams, perennially middle-ranked. But Mississippi has changed dramatically for the better during the intervening decades. And much of its progress—this is true in every other Southern state as well—owes itself to high school and college football. Stevens recalls speaking to a man roughly his own age who had been in the stands when LSU first allowed a black player to take the field. “I was just a kid,” he tells Stevens.
To oversimplify, white Southerners slowly discovered they loved winning football games more than they feared racial equality, and over the decades, the old bigotries have softened or expired in ways that no one anticipated.
The Last Season is an efficient and frequently moving account of a son’s admiration for his father, but it avoids sentimentality altogether. Stevens mentions the melancholy irony that, whereas his father once walked slowly to allow his son to keep up, the son now does the same for his father; but he does not dwell on it. At several points, Stevens slightly misjudges his father’s mental and physical capacities in the way busy and preoccupied sons tend to do.
When his father tells him that the Superdome seats fewer people than the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium—more than 100,000 as against the Superdome’s 75,000—Stevens asks, “How do you know that?” as if the old man should have long since forgotten so precise a datum. His father looks at him: “It’s a secret?” A few pages later, at the end of a passage reflecting on the loss of family members and family traditions, the father announces: “I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have reached a conclusion.”
“About?” asks his son.
“Ole Miss will beat Arkansas.”
It’s on that subject of loss—loss in the sense of losing a contest—that this book is at its best. Stevens disavows any attempt to understand football as a metaphor for life. “The football that my father and I loved,” he writes, “was too good to try to look for some usefulness in it any more than you’d go to church really expecting a limp to be healed. It was good because it was good, and that was enough.”
Even so, the fear and regret of loss haunts the author. Southerners, as he rightly notes, can’t help returning to the theme: We are a people who will forever be the losers of our greatest conflict. “To win a war is to be free to move on,” he writes. “To be conquered is to live with the consequences forever.” For Stevens, loss is so painful that victory becomes chiefly a way to avoid it. “I enjoy winning,” he observes at one point, then catches himself: “No, I enjoy not losing. I realized long ago that it hurts more to lose than it feels good to win.”
The fear of losing seems almost to rob him of any joy in winning. When Ole Miss is leading the heavily favored LSU by a score of 17-0 in the third quarter, Stevens wants to leave. “I know there’s pain coming. I don’t want the pain. I reject the pain.” (He was wrong, incidentally. The Rebels held off the Tigers, though only just: 27-24.)
Part of the reason he wanted to spend the fall watching the Ole Miss Rebels, you begin to realize, is that Stevens lost the biggest contest of his career, the 2012 election. He wanted to experience again the loss-avoiding sensation of victory. In sports, of course, losses can be redeemed next week or next year. In a war, or in a life-defining contest such as Stevens’s 2012 election, loss can never quite be redeemed or forgotten or undone. Unlike his fellow Ole Miss fans, Stevens is not likely to get another chance to win the biggest prize.
Of course, if Stevens and his candidate had won that election, he would likely have moved on to other contests—and left this sweetly poignant memoir unwritten.
Barton Swaim is the author, most recently, of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.
