Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer - Book Update

Over the summer, I told you about Warren St. John's book Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.

The book is a must read for College Football fans. St. John wanted to understand *why* people become/are fans. What makes the super fan tick? Why is Warren himself a Bama fan? To get to the bottom of it, he spent the 1999 season travelling with Alabama's RV crowd. At the end of his journey, he basically comes to the conclusion:

I am a fan. I love it, and I don't really care why. But I don't ever want to stop being a fan, and I'm more of a fan today than I was before I started travelling with these other super fans.(paraphrase)

Or said more plainly by Brian Cook at MGoBlog....rather than ask "Why am I a fan?" Ask "WHY NOT?"

In the book he writes about a series of characters that he encounters during his trip including the Bices, their dog Larry and John Ed the Ticket Man. The Bices are best known as creators of the now legendary Bama Bomb -- cherries soaked for a period of weeks or months in Golden Grain. Regular readers of this site know that my own bulldog crew created a disasterous version of this drink known as "The Cherrishinski".

Today's Birmingham News catches up with the Bices, Larry the Dog and John Ed to talk about the way their lives have been affected by the book. It's a really cool article for folks who have already read the book. For those that haven't, maybe it will nudge you along into finally reading it.

If we make the SEC Championship game to face Bama, I'm going to try and meet up with the Bices, share a Bama Bomb and tell them about the near miss of the Cherrishinksi.

If you have no idea what Rammer Jammer means, try this FAQ from Warren's site. In short, it's the single greatest rub it in cheer of all-time.

To hear the Bama crowd at their full throated best belting out the Rammer Jammer cheer, try this video.

To read an outstanding review of the book, check out Brian Cook's take on it. I think it says a lot about the book that a Michigan fan with no affinity towards Bama or the SEC would find that it resonated so well with him.

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