This year’s Iron Bowl—the annual game between the University of Alabama and Auburn University—was one for the ages, with Auburn winning on a last-second FG return for a TD. But the story extends much farther back and far beyond the confines of the field. This past Saturday, Alabama’s loss preceded a tragedy—in a parking lot shortly after the game, an Alabama supporter allegedly shot a fellow fan to death for not being upset enough after the loss, proving yet again that for fans of these storied programs the rivalry runs deep.
Last summer, Sportsnet magazine published a feature article about another enraged Alabama fan, Harvey Updyke, who killed the cherished oak trees at Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner after the Crimson Tide lost the 2010 Iron Bowl.
Only one man knows what exactly Harvey Updyke Jr. was thinking on that cool November night almost three years ago. About a week had passed since his beloved University of Alabama Crimson Tide had fallen in the Iron Bowl to their fiercest rivals, the Auburn University Tigers. Updyke had plunked down $275 to cheer the Tide on in their home stadium in Tuscaloosa. He’d gone from elated at his team’s 24–0 halftime lead to wretched at the Tigers’ stunning 28–27 upset, the biggest comeback in Iron Bowl history. He’d seethed when he learned that, after the game, Auburn fans had pinned their QB’s jersey on the statue of legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant. For several days, Updyke stewed in his anger. Finally, he decided to do something about it.
And so, on that dark Alabama night, armed with a healthy dose of Spike 80DF, a powerful herbicide normally sprayed along the fence lines on cattle ranches to control fast-growing weeds, the former highway patrolman proceeded to the 130-year-old live oak trees occupying the busy intersection of Magnolia Avenue and College Street—Toomer’s Corner, the place where town meets gown in Auburn, Ala.
These weren’t just any oaks. For more than a century, Auburn students and residents have gathered under these towering trees to celebrate special occasions—first dates, engagements, weddings—and for the past few decades, Tiger fans have marked big football wins by “rolling the corner,” draping the trees with toilet paper. Updyke poured the Spike 80DF all around their mighty trunks and over their life-giving roots, his intentions clear and unmistakable—he wanted to kill them.
There’s no doubt that sports can make people crazy, from the weekend warrior who gets into fights in beer-league games to the hockey mom who screams incessantly from the stands at her eight-year-old on the blue line. “Competition brings out the worst in some people,” says Peter Jensen, a Toronto-based sports psychologist who has coached more than 40 Olympic medallists. In fact, some are driven to destruction. Harvey Updyke could certainly be placed into the category of the extreme—even he admits that his devotion to the Tide is unusually intense.
“There’s just too much ‘Bama in me,” Updyke said in April 2011. “I don’t have my priorities straight.”
Prosecutors built a significant case against him, charging him with the desecration of a venerated object, criminal mischief and damaging a crop facility, and the 64-year-old faced more than 40 years in prison if convicted on all six counts he faced. It seems beyond belief that a grandfather, recently retired from a respectable career in law enforcement, would risk his reputation, his golden years and his freedom to make a statement in support of a sports team at a university he never even attended.
But the Alabama-Auburn rivalry has been wreaking havoc in this Southern state for more than 100 years, since the two schools first faced each other in Birmingham, the state’s largest city, back in 1893. “Hate” isn’t too strong a word to describe the animosity between the fans of these two football teams—educated people have even compared it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a rivalry that has broken down friendships, split up marriages and even led to the shedding of blood.
“For a long time, the only thing this state had to be proud of was football,” says David Housel, a former Auburn athletic director and the school’s resident sports historian. “It’s about more than just a team. You’re cheering for your family. You’re cheering for your way of life. You’re cheering for your culture and traditions, for your whole way of looking at things.”
Historically, Auburn has been the school of blue-collar families, while Alabama’s students were the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers and state legislators, who, says Housel, directed disproportionate resources toward Tuscaloosa. The Iron Bowl took a 41-year hiatus in the first half of the 20th century, until those same state legislators threatened to pull each school’s funding unless they agreed to play each other on an annual basis.
“There are no neutral people on that Saturday,” says Housel. “And the problem with this game—with this rivalry—is that the fear of losing is greater than the anticipation of winning. That is both negative and unhealthy.”
Housel makes a distinction between players, alumni and fans. While everyone wants to win, he notes that the athletes observe a sort of soldier’s honour on the field, granting their opponents a grudging respect rather than hatred, while those who hold a degree from the university often have professional jobs that are a higher priority in their lives than college football. It’s a group that Housel tactfully calls the “sidewalk alumni” that tends to become unhinged—people with little education, low income and scant opportunity for upward mobility. “A person like that has a deep need to thump his chest and be better than somebody,” he says.
Jensen agrees. “For a person like that, this is his life,” he says. “His whole self-worth is tied up with the team. The minute the team doesn’t do well, he sees that as a reflection of himself.”
When Updyke was just 10 years old, he saw Bear Bryant on television, and from that day forward, he linked his own fortunes to those of the University of Alabama football team. As a kid, he talked about naming his own son after Bear Bryant—and when the day came, that’s exactly what he did. He also named his daughter in the team’s honour—Crimson Tyde. He wanted to name his third child (also a daughter) “Ally Bama,” but his second wife put her foot down.
In the winter of 2008, the recently retired Updyke moved from Texas to Dadeville, Ala., to be closer to his team. He no doubt had high hopes on that November night in 2010—Alabama had won the two previous Iron Bowls and were the reigning BCS champions; perhaps that made the loss even harder. Then, in December, Auburn’s star quarterback, Cam Newton—whom many Alabama fans took to calling “Scam” after he became embroiled in a controversy related to whether his father had solicited cash payments from Div. I schools during the recruiting process—won the Heisman. Adding further salt to the wound, Auburn captured the BCS title in January 2011.
It seems that Updyke had finally had enough. Later that month, he phoned in to the Paul Finebaum Radio Network, a call-in show that serves as the primary battleground for the fans on either side of this rivalry. Using the pseudonym “Al from Dadeville,” Updyke bragged about poisoning Toomer’s oaks, triumphantly noting that they would “definitely die” and signing off his call with an exhortation to “roll damn Tide.” He had placed the call from his home, and a quick trace led investigators right to his doorstep.
Andrew Stanley, Esq., wore a rather weary look (plus khakis and a golf shirt emblazoned with the logo of his alma mater, Auburn) on a rainy morning last April in his law firm’s windowless conference room. It wasn’t his choice to represent Harvey Updyke—the court assigned the case to Stanley and another attorney, Margaret Brown, after the Birmingham lawyers who initially took it on a pro bono basis withdrew from the case as months of legal wrangling dragged on. Stanley and Brown entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. “This act was so outside the realm of even the fringe elements of the fan base that we were prepared to base our defence on it,” Stanley said, flipping his glasses up onto his head and slowly rubbing his eyes. In other words, pouring herbicide all over ancient, beautiful, treasured oak trees in order to steal other people’s joy is so completely and utterly crazy that any reasonable person would conclude the man wasn’t in his right mind when he did it.
Jensen, the Toronto-based sports psychologist, speculates that Updyke so identified with Alabama that he became somewhat deluded. “His vision of what will happen if he does this is that he will be put on a pedestal,” says Jensen. “He’s going to show his allegiance to his team, be this icon, this great figure. When in fact it’s such a narrow focus, he’s so blinded. It’s like the extremes in any situation—including religion. And you combine fundamentalist kind of stuff with the competitive nature of sport, and it’s a ticking bomb.”
Updyke kept on ticking for months after the Iron Bowl. Had he not called in to the Finebaum show as “Al from Dadeville,” he might never have been caught. At the time, no one suspected the trees were dying. Live oaks remain green through the winter, and the two Updyke had poisoned didn’t show signs of disease until July 2011 (the summer after the poisoning). But when the news broke, Auburn fans were devastated. Many gathered at Toomer’s Drugs, across the road from the oaks, a place that has been in operation for 116 years and feels frozen in the 1950s, with ponytailed coeds serving up fresh-squeezed lemonade at a long counter lined with chrome stools. “People just needed to mourn,” says manager Michael Overstreet.
Two months after his initial call, Updyke again phoned Paul Finebaum’s show to make an apology—of sorts. He expressed his regrets to his children and the University of Alabama, and took a little time to feel sorry for himself. “I don’t want my legacy to be the Auburn Tree Poisoner. But I guess it’s too late now,” he said. And then he signed off with one final shot at Tiger Nation. “It’s gonna make some people mad, but I gotta do it, Paul,” he drawled. “Roll damn Tide.”
Despite the best efforts of an ad hoc task force assembled by Auburn’s tenured horticulturists to save the oaks, the trees wasted away. Two and a half years after being poisoned, they appeared to have been scorched by fire, blackened and stunted, a mere shadow of their former selves. Pared and pruned back for the safety of those walking below, their limbs extended only a few feet from the trunk. They were rolled one final time, on April 20, when the Tigers played their spring “A-Day” game—really, just a glorified intra-squad scrimmage that follows the team’s spring practices—in front of more than 83,000 fans.
After the game, a sea of blue and orange flooded across campus to Toomer’s Corner. Fathers hoisted their little girls up on their shoulders and showed them the proper technique for launching a roll of toilet paper into the branches above, and white rolls rained down all around. The oaks were covered so entirely that their withered limbs were almost unrecognizable under layers of white, which fluttered in the late-day sun. The band played and the cheerleaders cheered and people danced in the streets, while community, university and team leaders spoke, quoting Faulkner and promising many wins ahead while they unveiled a plan to redevelop the corner, vowing that it would very soon rise again.
On that day, and on the day soon after when workers took down the lifeless remains of Toomer’s oaks limb by limb, Harvey Updyke sat nearby in a Lee County Jail cell. In the end, on Stanley’s advice, Updyke took a deal, pleading guilty to one charge of damaging a crop facility. He received a 36-month sentence, six months of which he spent locked up. Released last June, he is now serving five years of probation, the conditions of which prohibit him from speaking to the media, attending any college sporting events and setting foot on any Auburn University property. He is also subject to a
7 p.m. curfew. He has left Alabama behind, relocating to Louisiana where his wife, daughter and brand-new granddaughter live. Upon Updyke’s release, Stanley told the media his client “never wants to be heard from again.”
Still, there is reason to believe the experience changed him. At the start of his ordeal, Updyke refused to enter the office of his bail bondsman, Jimmy Henderson, which Henderson describes as “wall-to-wall with Auburn stuff.” Instead, the two met in a NASCAR-themed boardroom. But Henderson and his staff, also Auburn fans, grew attached to Updyke. “You couldn’t help but love Harvey,” says Henderson. “He’s the kind of guy you’d choose to chat with at a barbecue—a down-to-earth old country boy.”
Gradually, Updyke started asking Henderson about Auburn, and genuinely seemed to wish them success as time went on. When Updyke left Henderson’s office for the last time, the bondsman tried to give him a limited-edition plaque framed with wood culled from the dead Toomer trees. “Harvey,” he said, “you paid for the trees, you might as well have this.”
Updyke laughed, but refused to accept it.