Allen Barra

Of course, as the current incarnations of Crockett and Hickok illustrate, the western is very much alive. Though in recent years Sunday arts-section stories on “What Happened to Westerns?” have outnumbered the westerns, the truth is that the frontier West is as much a part of our national consciousness as ever. The great historical theorist of the American frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, knew this when, at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, he introduced his landmark thesis on what came to be called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Historians have argued over Turner’s main points ever since, but his contention that the frontier is the defining element in the American character seems as solid today as it was when Turner first proposed it. And the primary medium for popularizing Turner’s concept was one he couldn’t possibly have envisioned in 1893: the western movie.

The western as a genre is no worse off than the other traditional staples of the Hollywood film industry — the horror story, detective story and sci-fi flick — which is to say they’ve all been turned into action movies. (Occasionally two genres bump, as in “The Mummy,” where cowboys show up out of nowhere for a shootout with Arab bandits, or “Wild Wild West,” where giant robots walk the prairie.)

Westerns go through cycles to match our moods. In the ’50s and ’60s they were seen as stand-ins for everything from McCarthyism (“High Noon”) to America’s Cold War resolve (“Rio Bravo,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” et al); in the late ’60s and ’70s westerns were analogies for our involvement in Vietnam (“Little Big Man”). Early into this century the western has gone east: to Arabia in “Hidalgo,” to Japan in “The Last Samurai,” and to North Africa in “Secondhand Lions.” In a couple of cases the East came west, as in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson movies “Shanghai Noon” and “Shanghai Knights.” (We’ll probably be seeing essays any day now on how these films parallel our “cowboying” of the East.) Whatever we use them for, and however we reinterpret our frontier legends, westerns keep coming back. As a nation, we’ve become like the detective in “Memento”: our memories stop at a certain point in the past and we seem incapable of creating new ones.

Whenever we come back to westerns, we come back to those whom the first western myths were built around. Those who were born around the turn of the 20th century are now old enough to have witnessed the third or perhaps the fourth cinematic turnaround for David (as he preferred to be called) Crockett. As America made its entrance upon the world stage, its most famous frontiersman seemed a fitting symbol of national pride, the folksy face of Manifest Destiny triumphant. The pioneers of the silent film industry naturally chose the opening of the frontier as a subject, and Crockett was featured in at least seven silent films, played on one occasion by Dustin Farnum and on another (according to some film historians) by John Ford’s brother Francis.

Davy became a national craze in late 1954, when Walt Disney Productions, looking to fill the frontier segments of the Disneyland TV series on ABC, opted for Crockett rather than his predecessor Daniel Boone, who, as one consultant phrased it, “was too arcane, too closed-in, and too mysterious” to be easily accessible to audiences, “especially child viewers.”

Crockett, cleaned up and fictionalized and portrayed by a likable James Stewart-like Texas actor named Fess Parker, starred in “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter,” which aired late in ’54, “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” in January 1955, and “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” which debuted a month later. If Disney had had an inkling of the nuttiness that was to follow, it never would have had Crockett killed off so soon. Edited and repackaged for movie theaters, the Crockett films became huge box office hits, propelled “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” sung by Bill Hayes, to No. 1 on the charts, and had hundreds of thousands of American boys wearing phony coonskin hats — including myself, if our home movies are to be trusted — and shooting plastic cap-firing flintlock rifles.

If Crockett was being used by Disney as an unspoken cold warrior, John Wayne put words in his mouth. Wayne’s 1960 epic, “The Alamo,” was self-conscious campaign propaganda for Richard Nixon. A three-page ad for “The Alamo” in Life magazine — on the Fourth of July, no less! — announced that “very soon the two great political parties of the United States will nominate their candidates for president … a man who knows that when our house is in order no man will ever dare to trespass. In short, a Man … There were no ghost writers at the Alamo, only Men.” The “ghost writers” reference was to the rumor that John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” had been ghost-written. Kennedy refused comment.

Wayne would have spun in his grave had he read Paul Andrew Hutton’s 1989 essay “Davy Crockett: An Exposition on Hero Worship,” in which he argued that it was a combination of Crockett and Kennedy that inspired a generation to fight in Vietnam. When Kennedy “issued a clarion call to fight for freedom in a distant land, they eagerly followed him. They knew well what he was talking about, for they had been brought up on those same liberal values by Disney’s Davy Crockett.”

Forty-two years later, when the new Alamo project was announced, Michael Eisner proclaimed that his studio’s film intended to “capture the post-September 11 surge in patriotism.” David Crockett, it seemed, would once again be called on to justify the cause of fighting for the freedom of the downtrodden in a foreign land.

Crockett himself would have been quite amused by all of this, though perhaps a bit bewildered. A Tennessee backwoodsman blessed with considerable hunting skill — he was said to have killed 105 bears in one season — Crockett had parlayed a gaudy if superficial war record (under Andrew Jackson, fighting Indians in Alabama) into a seat in Congress. Tocqueville, writing in 1831, was appalled: “Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett who has no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.” (None of that was true, not even the hunting, which Crockett had given up when he left Tennessee years earlier.)

What Tocqueville and many Eastern politicians had failed to understand was that it was Crockett’s simplicity that endeared him to his constituents — in fact, to an entire nation, so much so that for a few brief mad moments in the 1830s, Crockett’s name was actually bandied about in discussions of presidential candidates. But Crockett was too guileless and too honest to be an effective politician. He ended up alienating both Andrew Jackson and many of his supporters by expressing sympathy for land squatters and, most unforgivable of all, for the Indians — “the poor remnants of a once powerful people,” in his words — who were being evicted by the Jackson administration from their settled homes in the eastern states. His political philosophy, as such, was that government should “at least, occasionally, legislate for the poor.” As one of his biographers, William C. Davis, phrased it, “He could never fail to empathize with anyone who was poor, downtrodden, and helpless.” When Crockett lost his congressional seat, he told his former constituents that they could go to hell and “I will go to Texas,” a line that Billy Bob Thornton repeats with delicious gusto in “The Alamo.”

When he left for the Alamo early in 1836 Crockett was, with the exception of Andrew Jackson, the most famous man in America. He was the country’s first celebrity politician, and, thanks to the Davy Crockett Almanac (inexpensive books filled with sayings popularly attributed to him as well as advice on planting crops and hunting), the godfather, in the words of historian John Myers Myers, of “America’s first purely indigenous literary movement.” Or stated another way, there is a straight line from the Crockett Almanac to Oprah’s O magazine.

In Crockett’s own lifetime, an actor named James Hackett made a living playing a caricature of him on the stage named Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, a cross between Daniel Boone and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo — in other words, the popular image of Crockett. (In “The Alamo,” a frontiersman asks Thornton’s Crockett where his famous coonskin cap is. “I only started wearing that thing,” replies Thornton with a grin, “’cause that feller onstage started wearing one.”)

Simply put, he was our first media star, but one created out of genuine substance, a man characterized by one frontier historian as “a pioneer turned politician who symbolized frontier egalitarianism and the democratic spirit and who came as close as anyone to defining the essential American character.”

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Less than a year after Crockett’s death at the Alamo in 1836, his successor, James Butler Hickok, was born. Within 30 years, Hickok’s fame would officially mark the transition of the western hero from frontiersman to gunfighter.

The medium for Hickok’s ascendancy from Civil War scout, Indian fighter and buffalo hunter to national celebrity can be traced to the trend started by the Crockett Almanac. George Ward Nichols, a former Union Army officer under Sherman and one of the fathers of celebrity journalism, wrote a long, fanciful profile of Hickok for Harper’s new monthly magazine. The story was filled with lurid nonsense. (Sample: “Yes, Wild Bill with his own hands has killed hundreds of men. Of that I have not a doubt. ‘He shoots to kill,’ as they say on the border.”)

But the Eastern audience lapped it up. Somewhere in New York, a crooked political ward boss (or so cited by Herbert Asbury in “The Gangs of New York”) named Edward Z.C. Judson took notice. Within a year, Judson, renamed Ned Buntline, had sought out Hickok and birthed the dime novel, which would make Hickok and his friend, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, internationally famous for killing Confederates, Indians and buffalo. How famous? Henry Stanley, of “Doctor Livingston, I presume?” fame, went out West just to meet him.

The real Wild Bill wasn’t wild. (He wasn’t even a Bill; presumably he got his nickname because it had more of a ring to it than “Wild James.”) A somber, reflective man, he had an extraordinary talent for drawing and shooting the new Colt revolver and not much else. Once he became famous, there wasn’t much else to do but become a celebrity peace officer, a job for which he was temperamentally unsuited. One frontier chronicler estimated that on his own merits Hickok “would have had a hard time getting a job as a dog catcher.”

By 1871, his nerves had begun to give out. In one celebrated gunfight, he killed an unreconstructed Texan named Phil Coe and then accidentally shot his own deputy. It was time to get out of “lawing,” but where could a famous gunfighter go to make a living? Crockett watched an actor play him onstage, but Wild Bill played himself — or at least Ned Buntline’s bowdlerization of him.

Unlike Buffalo Bill, though, he had no flair for the stage, particularly when it came to mouthing such lines (penned by Buntline) as “Fear not, fair maid! By heavens, you are safe at least with Wild Bill, who is ever ready to risk his life in defense of weak and helpless womanhood!” Once in a New York theater he forgot to substitute blanks for live rounds and nearly killed a woman in the audience. His last few pathetic years were spent struggling with poor eyesight — something of a serious handicap for a gunfighter — and his ineptitude at poker, which, in his own words, was “more of a passion than a profession.”

Crockett went to Texas to turn his fortunes around. Hickok went to Deadwood, S.D., the prototype of the wild western mining camps of all Hollywood films, where the inevitable happened: An itinerant gambler named Jack McCall, the spiritual ancestor of would-be assassins Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley Jr., shot Hickok in the back of the head for reasons never determined. Wild Bill was 39 when he passed into legend.

As Clyde Edgerton once noted, “You’re legend a lot longer than you’re fact.” Like Crockett, Hickok was a natural for the early silent screen. In the words of True West magazine editor Bob Boze Bell, Wild Bill was “bigger than life, a strutting peacock crossed with a killer hawk. Now there was a bird to behold on a movie screen.” He was first portrayed by the most popular of early western film stars, William S. Hart, and over the next 80 years he was played most notably by Gary Cooper (“The Plainsman”), Jeff Corey (“Little Big Man”), Jeff Bridges (“Wild Bill”) and Sam Shepard (“Purgatory,” a 1999 TV film). He was even a character in a musical, played by Howard Keel as Doris Day’s secret love in “Calamity Jane.” His ineptitude as a peace officer forgotten, he became, like Crockett, a television hero of grade-school kids in the ’50s. Peddling Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops and played by amiable B-movie actor Guy Madison, Wild Bill became safe enough for the Eisenhower era.

Which was fitting, as Dwight Eisenhower was raised in Abilene, Kan., where Hickok had once been a marshal. Ike once instructed people to “Read more westerns” about Wild Bill. Lyndon Johnson grew up steeped in the mythology of Davy Crockett and the Alamo. One wonders how they would respond to the most recent manifestations of their boyhood heroes.

Keith Carradine’s sad, fading Hickok in “Deadwood” is the Wild Bill Hollywood has never had the courage to put on-screen. (Carradine played Buffalo Bill to Jeff Bridges’ Wild Bill in Walter Hill’s ’96 film, “Wild Bill.”) Likewise Billy Bob Thornton’s Davy Crockett, a man thrust into the impossible task of living up to his own popular image. Stripped of the pulp heroics that inspired children, might their stories now be seen as cautionary tales for adults?

On Fox News, Tebow’s 7-1 record this year is just the latest reason to attack a liberal straw man. “Tim Tebow’s success as the quarterback of the Denver Broncos has done little to silence his critics, who believe that his faith in Jesus Christ has no business on the football field,” writes Todd Starnes. “It doesn’t matter how many touchdown passes he throws or how many games he wins because Tebow will always be a lightning rod for anti-Christian bigots.”

Well, always is a long time, and apologists like Starnes do Tebow no good when they imply that all his critics are anti-Christian bigots. Indeed, on Salon last week, Andrew Leonard made the liberal case for loving Tebow. “Maybe this country would be better off if everyone, left or right, evangelical or atheist, pocket passer or option quarterback, occasionally found room in their hearts to cheer for those who are different,” he wrote.

But why do we need to change our opinions about Tebow at all, either as a person or a football player?

Tebow, after all, wouldn’t be a lightning rod for anything if he were not a football player. So how good is he? First, let’s dispose of the myth currently being taken as gospel by much of the sports press and nearly all Denver Broncos fans: that Tebow as a professional quarterback is simply a winner.  He was in college. In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2008 that “Tim Tebow is on track to become the greatest quarterback in college football history.” That was before I saw Cam Newton play. Still, Tebow was, if he’ll pardon the expression, damned good.

But as a pro, to cite chapter and verse, Tebow has been lousy, or not far north of mediocre at best. Going into this Sunday’s game with the New England Patriots, Tebow has thrown 280 passes, completing just under 49 percent. This season he is the 14th-ranked passer in the 32-team league, and though he has thrown 11 passes for touchdowns with just two interceptions, in the most important single passing stat, yards per throw, he ranks 27th.

Broncos fans, I hear you — the most important stat is winning, not yards per throw. But in only one game during the Broncos’ much publicized six-game winning streak have they scored more than 25 points, and in four of them they’ve scored 17 or less. The Denver defense, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Since their Nov. 6 victory over Oakland, they have given up an average of only 17 points per game, allowing 13 or less in four games. If Denver fans want to shout “Hallelujah,” they should start with the Broncos’ defensive unit.

The 13-10 victory over the Bears this past Sunday was more typical of the 2011 Denver Broncos than not. Tebow and the offensive unit failed to produce any kind of score during their first 11 possessions and survived only because Chicago played with astounding ineptitude. The only reason the Broncos got a chance to win was because Bears running back Marion Barber ran out of bounds near midfield with less than two minutes on the clock. This gave Denver time, when they got the ball on the ensuing punt, to move into field goal range (which, in Denver’s altitude-thinned air, is just any time you cross the 50-yard line). A smiling Tebow told reporters after the game, “I might have thanked the Lord when he [Barber] did that. [Otherwise] we might have only had about 10 seconds left on the game when we got the ball.”

For his part, the Lord tweeted, “Don’t thank me. I didn’t tell that putz to run out of bounds.” Presumably He also didn’t tell Barber to fumble the ball away at the Denver 36 in overtime, thus setting up the Broncos’ game-winning field goal.

I hated Tim Tebow before I knew anything about his religion. Specifically, I hated him from 2006 through 2009 when he was the quarterback for the Florida Gators. I hated him far less when Alabama finally stuffed Florida in the SEC championship game at the end of the 2009 season and he sat on the sidelines bawling like a baby. At first I laughed – “Ha, ha — how do you like it now, Timmy? Why don’t you go up in the stands and hold Mommy and Daddy’s hands?” I even clipped a newspaper photo of him, tears streaming down his cheeks, and hung it on my office wall.

The pros, however, are like the Army – my team right or wrong. If you want your team to win, you root for the guys who wear your uniform, regardless of where they come from or where they went to school. But nothing Tebow does on the football field or off it is going to make me feel any different about abortion — no matter how strongly he comes out against it. And if anything he does makes you feel different about abortion, then you’re neither a believer nor a bigot, you’re an idiot. And I wonder how much preaching Denver fans are going to stand for when the team loses three or four in a row.

I do admire him for his public stance on compensating college athletes for the money they generate for their schools, which reveals more guts than some of his coaches have shown. And I like that Tebow puts his money where his mouth is, helping his parents, who are missionaries, establish and maintain an orphanage in the Philippines.

But a role model? No way. Many of his values are not mine, and I wish he would understand that proclaiming them publicly could create divisions on his own team. As former Denver quarterback Jake Plummer told a reporter, “I wish he’d just shut up after a game and go hug his teammates.” A much stronger reaction occurred just before Tebow’s rookie season at an NFL scouting combine. Tebow suggested the group pray; a player suggested that he “shut the fuck up.”

The suggestion that Tebow tone it down in public seems to anger people like Todd Starnes, who asks rhetorically, “Should Christians enter restaurants through the back door and use separate drinking fountains?”

No, but when they’re in public they might follow the advice of Jesus in Matthew 6:5-7, who instructed that “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret …”

Personally, I want my quarterback to have more of a Joe Namath-type swagger and a little less humility. But in the NFL, God is on the side of the best quarterback.

With the purpose of clarifying the issues, I’m going to do an instant replay on the questions and help Surma with the answers. (The following questions were taken right off the CNN telecast.)

Angry student:  You said Coach Paterno was fired “in the best interests of the university.” Can you define in the best interests of the university?

Surma: I…

Me (putting my hand over the mic): Hold it, John, I got this one.

You ask to define “the best interests of the university”? Let me tell you in as clear language as possible, you arrogant little jerk. Over the past 15 years there were at least eight boys raped by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky — oh, sorry, even though the grand jury has met on this, we still have to say “allegedly raped.” Anyone connected with this, anyone who enabled Sandusky to continue doing what he was doing — oh, sorry, allegedly doing what he was doing — and doing it on the Penn State campus, and anyone who had knowledge of his activities and did not act to stop him deserves to be immediately dismissed.

Angry student: That doesn’t mean …

Me: Shut up. I’m not finished. You asked the question and I’m answering it.

It would have been “in the best interests of the university” if the firings were announced on Sunday morning, the day after the findings of the grand jury were released. That, at least, would have made it appear to the public that somebody at Penn State was treating this matter with the gravity it demands.

Since you don’t seem to get it, let me spell it out for you. On Saturday, March 2, 2002, a then-graduate assistant who is currently an assistant PSU football coach, Mike McQueary — you all remember him, he was also a quarterback here and the one with the shock of red hair that makes him look like Archie in the comics — told the grand jury he saw former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky naked in the shower, raping a young boy McQueary thought to be 10 years of age.

Now, let me be clear about this: I’m wondering why McQueary, a strapping young quarterback, didn’t do something right then and there and stop this boy from being assaulted? Instead, McQueary — who, for some unfathomable reason is not only still on the Penn State coaching staff, but will, as of this writing, be with the team this Saturday in full view of a national TV audience — called not the campus police or the university president, but his father, who didn’t tell his son to go to the campus police or the university president but to the head football coach.

According to testimony Joe Paterno gave the grand jury, Paterno said McQueary was “distraught” and he wasn’t “specific.” This leaves me wondering whether Paterno was, then or now, a liar or merely an idiot. Stop shouting, I’m not finished.

If McQueary was “distraught,” did Paterno not think that he had seen something terrible? And if he thought McQueary wasn’t “specific,” why did he not ask him to be specific?

Instead of calling the police or the university president, Paterno called athletic director Tim Curley, another former assistant coach. Curley brought in Gary Schultz, vice president of finance and business, whose duties included supervision of the campus police.  By the way, Paterno called Curley not the same day he met with McQueary, but waited at least 24 hours. Curley and Schultz met with McQueary eventually — eventually, as in no one is sure how many days passed, but estimates are that it might have been as late as March 27 — and promised to investigate.

No one knows exactly when president Spanier was informed, but it appears to have been after the March 27 meeting.

Are you getting all this? Is it making an impression?

What was done by the Penn State officials between March 2002 and the recent grand jury investigation was …  nothing!  No one went to legal authorities and no action was taken. Oh, I just remembered.  That’s not true.  According to the grand jury report, after the incident in 2002, someone — again, presumably Curley — told Sandusky “not to bring any boys on campus.” And Sandusky did have his keys taken away, though precisely what that means isn’t clear since Sandusky — who, you’ll be interested to know, is walking around today, free on $100,000 bail –  was still using the Penn State facilities as late as 2009, when the last sex abuse charge, the one that got a grand jury involved, was made by the mother of a 12-year old boy.

And do you know why in 2002 Jerry Sandusky was a former assistant coach?  “Officially” he resigned in 1999 after Paterno told him he would not be head football coach. But coincidentally, he resigned soon after a mother confronted him on campus twice and asked him not to shower with boys again. Sandusky refused, and campus police tapped into at least one of their conversations, but the authorities decided not to file charges. Happily for Sandusky, his resignation agreement included a clause that he continued to have an office and full access to the Penn State football facilities.

Even better for Sandusky, he was allowed to retain his position in the Second Mile, a charitable organization for at-risk children, which he helped found.

I should add that it appears that no one at Penn State bothered to inform anyone else associated with the Second Mile about either the 1998 or 2002 incidents involving Sandusky.

Finally, let me also add that there is no conceivable way Joe Paterno could not have known about what happened in 1998, and no way he could have misinterpreted what McQueary related to him in March 2002. Yet he continued to allow his longtime friend Sandusky free rein on campus.

To sum up, what would have been in “the best interests of the university” is for every person who knew about Sandusky and did not contact legal authorities to resign, allowing the university at least some measure of dignity in dealing with this horrible scandal.

Angry student: Why was Coach Paterno informed about his firing over the phone?

Me: Have you been listening to anything said, you air-headed jackass? Joe Paterno enabled Jerry Sandusky. He’s the one who could have stopped him, at least in 2002 and probably back in 1998. He did nothing. And if you don’t understand that, let me say it a different way:  Joe Paterno and his “boss,” Graham Spanier, were fired because they didn’t have the common sense or decency to resign.

Instead of resigning as soon as the grand jury report was made public, until Paterno’s apologies Wednesday night after he was fired, the Paterno family took an indignant and defiant stance. Scott Paterno, Joe’s son and also his attorney, angrily asked reporters: “Do you really think we’d let a rapist walk around on campus?” To which the reply should have been: That’s what you allegedly did.

Angry student:  Was any consideration given as to how his would affect the football program?

Me: The football program? The football program?? Are you serious? A former assistant coach was just indicted for over 40 counts related to sexual assault on a child, your football coach was fired in disgrace, your athletic director has been indicted for perjury, and a current assistant coach will, I’m sure, soon be fired. And the crimes against  humanity — against children — took place in the university’s athletic facilities. Do you think you will even have a football program when the full extent of this becomes known?

Do you even think you’re going to have a university?

What? You think I’m guilty of hyperbole?  Have any of you here tonight, the ones who are going to go out and overturn a news truck — because, of course, it’s all the news media’s fault –  and tear down light posts thought about what’s in Penn State’s future? I’m hearing guesses on CNN and MSNBC that this could cost the school — who knows? — as much as $100 million.  $100 million?  You should be so lucky. Don’t you understand that under no circumstances can Penn State allow any suit to go to court?  Can you imagine a long, protracted trial in which Joe Paterno and who knows how many victims would have to take the stand as witnesses and relate graphic details? There is no way any suit will go to court.  The university will have to settle out of court and will hardly be in any position to negotiate. When legal fees and settlements are all added up, Penn State will be lucky if every building on this campus isn’t rented out to a community college.

So don’t worry about the football team.  Worry about the fact that from now on, whenever the name of Penn State is mentioned, people all over the country — make that all over the world — will be sneering, snickering or spitting. Worry that a long period of penance and healing must begin, and that your actions are delaying this process.

People from Texas understood what he meant; it was like when the University of Texas played Texas A&M or Oklahoma. To Oklahomans, it was like when their Sooners play Texas or Nebraska. People from Michigan and Ohio understood — it was like when Michigan played Ohio State, and they had to pass out fliers to fans of the visiting team advising “Wear jackets over your team colors and don’t take them off until seated.” (The same flier suggested driving across the state line in a rental car with neutral-state license plates.)

In New Jersey, though, there were no ready comparisons, nor, for that matter, in New York, where most fans think college football is something played somewhere west of the Hudson River and most sportswriters see college football as a mere appendage to the pro game. What a shock they would have should they ever cross the river and find out that for the vast majority of Americans, college football is football.

My Jersey cousins would ask, “You mean like when the Eagles and Giants  play?” Not quite, I’d reply. Nobody dies at Eagles-Giants games. The year doesn’t hinge on Eagles-Giants games. People in Philadelphia and New York still get married on the day of Eagles-Giants games.

This Saturday, nobody in Alabama or Louisiana is going to get married, and somebody is going to die.

This year’s Alabama-LSU game is the latest in a college football tradition that falls under the category of the “Game of the Century.” Occasionally you’ll hear football fans argue over which game is superior, college or pro. This is really not a debate to be taken seriously. The only people who think professional football is better than college football are people who don’t follow college football. Put it this way: Pro football exists because of college  football; the college game is the dog — or dawg, as they spell it down South — to which the pro game is the tail.

Don’t tell me about the ratings for this or that Super Bowl. That’s all pro football is to most Americans: a long-running television show. Ask the fans of any major college program in the country — Penn State, Southern Cal, Notre Dame, Arizona State, Florida, Oregon, Boise State, Michigan State or any of four or five other dozen schools –  if they’d rather see their team win their Big Game or have their favorite pro football team win the Super Bowl. You’ll discover very quickly that the pro game takes a seat in the back corner of the end zone. The dean of college football writers, Dan Jenkins, nailed down what makes college football the greater game in his 1970 book “Saturday’s America”: “Tradition and rivalry, words that belong almost exclusively  to the vernacular of college football — old as the two words are, they are irreplaceable, for it is what they suggest that specifically separates the college game from that of the pros. Sophisticates … may not like it, but college football is Michigan playing Minnesota for the Little Brown Jug, a street brawl in downtown Dallas the night before the Texas-Oklahoma game, a thousand white Annapolis caps spraying into the air above Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium, and that annual Wall Street Block Party and Raccoon Coat Parade known as the  Yale-Harvard game.” In pro football, tradition means that some fans can still remember the score of the last Super Bowl.

Rivalry? In the pros, rivalry means whatever teams happen to be winning this season.  If you want to learn the real meaning of the word, watch Alabama and LSU this Saturday night; you’ll experience firsthand the kind of real enthusiasm, a barbaric yawp of the kind that Whitman would have recognized. It’s the lifeblood of college football, a feeling that can only be imitated in pro football stadiums. In the NFL, football players are mercenaries; in college football, they are folk heroes.

The heart of football is college football, and the heart of college football is the Southeastern Conference. Since it was first established in 1933, an SEC team has claimed all or at least part of the national championship 34 times in 77 seasons. An SEC team has the title outright for the last five seasons and almost certainly will take it again this year. Going into this game, LSU is 7-0 and ranked No. 1 while Alabama is also 7-0 and ranked No. 2 (though the Crimson Tide is a five-point betting favorite). The winner will be heavily favored to finish the regular season unbeaten, win the conference championship and then walk over whoever – Stanford, Boise State, Oklahoma or anyone else unlucky enough to have to face them – in the BCS title game in January.

Games of the Century come in several varieties. Some fans like intersectional rivalries that involve the two best teams in the  country. These almost always happen in postseason bowl games such as the Miami-Nebraska Orange Bowl classic on Jan. 2, 1984, in which the once-beaten Miami Hurricanes held off the Nebraska Cornhuskers 31-30, sealing the victory, literally, by stopping Nebraska on the last play of the game.

For some purists, though, The Game must be between undefeated teams, like the Nov. 9, 1946, Army-Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium in which three Heisman Trophy winners – Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard for Army and Johnny Lujack for Notre Dame – failed to produce a single point as the game ended in a 0-0 tie. Twenty seasons later, in 1966, on Nov. 19, 1966, No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan State played to a hugely controversial 10-10 tie at East Lansing, Mich. — controversial because onlookers thought the Fighting Irish should have tried harder near the end of the game to win instead of settling for a tie.

But for the purists of purists, such as myself, the only true Game of the Century can be between teams that are, first, unbeaten; second, ranked No. 1 and 2; third, are traditional rivals; and four, are out to settle the issue in a regular season clash. By those criteria, only the legendary Thanksgiving Day 1971 match between No. 1 Nebraska and No. 2 Oklahoma, won by the Cornhuskers in the final minute, 35-31, qualifies as the real thing. Until this Saturday night, that is. Whatever definition one gives the Game of the Century, though, it must meet one golden standard: It has to be a college game.

Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.

At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”

Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.

Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)

Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.

The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”

“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”

Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.

But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.

(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)

Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.

When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”

What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.

But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.

On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”

Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.

But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.

Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.

For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.

Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.

Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.

Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.

In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.

“In the late 1970s,” says comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who grew up in Las Vegas, “I was in seventh or eighth grade and the Rebels were in the top 10 in the nation, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.’ We didn’t have anything like that. We didn’t have an athlete to rally around.

“The Rebels were showtime before the Lakers were showtime.”

The unlikely creator of the hottest ticket in Vegas for nearly 20 years, Jerry Tarkanian was born of Armenian immigrants in 1930 and had made a name for himself as a basketball coach at several colleges, particularly Long Beach State. When approached about taking the job at UNLV, which was derisively referred to as Tumbleweed Tech, he shrewdly perceived that though the program was unheralded, “They had the resources and they had the potential. I told my wife, ‘Lois, this is gonna be like a college town.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? How could Las Vegas be a college town?’” Within a few short years, says Tarkanian, “It was harder to get a ticket to an UNLV game than it was to get in to see Frank Sinatra.”

His philosophy was simple: Find the best players, whip them into peak condition, and inspire them into near fanatical intensity on both sides of the ball. Often the Runnin’ Rebels used no more than eight players in a game — “The Hard Way Eight,” as they were called — and yet ran opponents into the floorboards. As former UNLV star Reggie Theus put it, “Coach Tark’s motto was: ‘We’re gonna play 40 minutes of nonstop pressure basketball.’ We’d sometimes scored 110 points a game — and that was before they invented the three-point shot.” Tark’s game wasn’t just offense: “A lot of our points were set up by mistakes our defense forced. We were intense on both sides of the ball.”

In his first season, Tarkanian turned a moribund program around, winning 20 of 26 games. Bald and bespectacled, chewing a hand towel, he became perhaps the most recognizable coach in college hoops. UNLV games were Vegas-style events with the theme from “Jaws” greeting the team as they ran out onto the court with an enormous shark — “Tark the Shark” — hanging from the ceiling (with, of course, a towel clenched in its jaws). Wayne Newton, Don Rickles, Suzanne Somers and every celebrity who played the town was welcome courtside. Sinatra made calls to help Tarkanian recruit.

“Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV,” narrated by Liev Schreiber, revives Tarkanian’s greatest teams in all their glory. The 1989-90 Rebels won the NCAA championship in a stunning 30-point drubbing of the Duke Blue Devils, the largest winning margin in Final Four history. The next season they became the first team in 12 years to go unbeaten but lost in the Final Four in a rematch with Duke.

Tarkanian’s greatest battles, however, were fought in the postseason with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, with whom he waged a fierce run-and-shoot war for nearly three decades. Before the start of the 1976-77 season, the NCAA put the Runnin’ Rebels on two years’ probation for what they called “questionable practices,” which occurred in 1971 before Tarkanian even came to UNLV. Nonetheless, the NCAA strong-armed the university into suspending the coach for two years. The feisty Armenian sued and won an injunction that reinstated him; the case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Nevada court’s decision.

The Rebels were slam dunked, though, in 1987 when prize recruit Lloyd Daniels was busted for buying crack cocaine. The incident ruined what might have been Tarkanian’s best team: The Runnin’ Rebels won 26 of 28 games, but were banned from postseason play. Tarkanian fanned the fires by writing articles blasting the NCAA. “You can’t beat the NCAA,” says sportswriter Don Yaeger, author of “Shark Attack,” about Tarkanian’s battles with the NCAA, “but you’ve got to hand it to Tark. He came closer than anyone else to fighting them to a standstill.”

Tarkanian sued the NCAA for “trying to drive me out of college basketball.” In 1998, while coaching for his alma mater, Fresno State, Tarkanian received $2.5 million in an out-of-court settlement.

“The Dynasty in the Desert,” as it came to be known, ended in sensational fashion in 1992 after a photo of two UNLV players relaxing in hot tub with a notorious gambler known as “The Fixer” appeared in a local paper. UNLV president Maxson had had enough.

After a breathtaking 509-105 record under Tarkanian, the Runnin’ Rebels have never made it to the Elite Eight again. But Tark’s teams lit up college basketball with a neon pulse that still shines. Las Vegas historian Mike Green sums it up, “This is part of our image. It was a perfect match and a perfect storm.”

(“Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV” airs on HBO and HBO2 through March 31. The show is also available On Demand through April 11.)