February 25, 2011

Called Finebaum this afternoon and asked him if he ever thinks that Harvey Updyke will produce his alleged newspaper clipping about Auburn students rolling Toomer's Corner when Coach Bryant passed away. Paul said he didn't think Harvey would ever produce this phantom clipping. In Courtney's column he wrote,"Anyone fool enough to have applauded aloud Paul Bryant's demise in 1983 would have been killed outright. Maybe even with herbicide."
 best,
r http://daybeardied.com

HIS BITE WAS WORSE THAN ITS BARK
by Courtney Haden

The curious case of Harvey Updyke raises pertinent points. For one thing, he’s said to be an Alabama fan, but going on Paul Finebaum’s show to announce your crime on the radio suggests you may have done your undergraduate work at Bryce. For another, if Updyke did indeed commit dendrocide, justice might be better served by pulling the courts off the case and letting Yella Fella extract frontier justice.

Then there’s the bizarre motive for the crime.

The alleged perpetrator is said to have carried a grudge against Auburn since 1983, based on his notion that Toomer’s Corner got rolled to celebrate the death of Bear Bryant. However, Robert Register, on his excellent blog, Zero Northwest Florida, contradicts that via a transcript of a 2006 radio interview with Buddy Buie, composer of the song, “The Day Bear Bryant Died.”

Interviewer Phil Paramore from WOOF was a sports columnist for The Auburn Plainsman in ’83 and remembers well the mood of The Loveliest Village: “On that day it was almost as if a pall fell over even the Auburn campus…[Coach Pat Dye] sort of imparted the message to the Auburn family, ‘Look, there’s nothing good about this. We have lost a true legend and a guy who has been a major influence on me and I, in turn, have tried to impart that wisdom on this program and building

a foundation off what I learned from him, so let’s all be aware.’” Perhaps the alleged tree assailant was confusing Bear Bryant’s passing with that of John F. Kennedy twenty years before, for which there was indeed cheering and celebration in certain benighted parts of the state. Anyone fool enough to have applauded aloud Paul Bryant’s demise in 1983 would have been killed outright. Maybe even with herbicide.

The felony-weight peckerwood who thought killing a tree would be cool did more than poison the root system of historic oaks. Besides his family’s good name, he managed to poison his state’s reputation as well. At a time when the rest of the nation could look to Alabama as the first state with back-to-back national football championships from two different schools, the poison in this guy’s soul now persuades the rest of the nation to look at us as the place where sociopaths unable to differentiate between a football game and real life conduct blood feuds with vegetation.

It’s enough to make one want to curl up in a La-Z-Boy with a liter of Mountain Dew… Courtney Haden is a Birmingham Weekly columnist. Write to courtney@bhamweekly.com.