Time to Combine Books and Gridiron

University of Florida, my alma mater, has had a fine year in sports. In March, the Gators won the NCAA men's basketball title, surprising everyone in Florida and almost everywhere else. Now the Gators are playing for the 2006 football title. Less of a surprise, unless you're Michigan and stung by being passed over by a team that got beat by Auburn.

I'll be watching the game against Ohio State on Jan. 8 with some Ohio State friends. My wife and I are the only Gators we know in Cheyenne. Fellow writer Andi Hummel is a Gator but she lives way up north in Hulett. My brother Pat and I are the only ones among my eight brothers and sisters who are Florida fans. The others are either FSU fans or don't care. All of them live in Florida, where the frenzy steadily builds toward Jan. 8. Here in WYO, we just hunker down, wait for the next blizzard, and check out the Gator sites on the web.

My UF alumni magazine arrived today. It had this short piece in Florida facts: "The books in the UF libraries -- more than 4 million in all -- could fill the stands in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium with 45 books in each seat."

Makes you think. By my calculation, that means there are 88,889 seats in the stadium named after a citrus robber baron. I think the stadium boasted 70,000-some seats when I was at UF in the mid-seventies. Nobody tried to calculate how then how many books it would take to pack the seats. We were more into reading than stacking. I haunted the library day and night. Sometimes I even got my texts at the library when I was short of cash. I remember reading some glorious work in the UF library: Nelson Algren, John Collier, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Chaucer.

I'd read the latest issues of favorite magazines, such as Esquire, which back then featured a column called "Grits" by Harry Crews, one of my writing teachers. It could have been called "Rednecks I Have Known." Crews grew up in Georgia swamps, served a stint in the Marines, and was the first in his family to go to college. One of his columns was about backpacking the Appalachian Trail and discovering some little-known history and running into some scary good ol' boys with guns. A later article -- this one in Playboy -- was called "The Button-down Terror of David Duke." It was a chilling portrait of the leader of the KKK, a pleasant fellow who wore expensive suits and smiled as he preached hatred. Crews wove in some of his own upbringing in rural Georgia, where the Klan was king (still is in some places).

Books and mags and literary journals. I suppose I read enough material to fill four stadium seats, maybe five. I'm glad that UF still believes in books and now has a new library. Can't say I've been much help as a generous alumnus. Maybe later....

One other thing from the alumni mag. The stadium is under renovation during the off-season as the university creates a "grand football entryway" for fans. I am all for stadium revnovations, especially when they are funded by the UF Athletic Association and private donations. However, I wonder what is entailed in a grand football entryway. Do fans stream into the stadium through a giant football? Do they have to run through some sort of gauntlet of animatronic cheerleaders and rabid alumni? Could be frightening for small children and Liberal Arts majors.

What if the "grand football entryway" was dedicated to those 4 million books in the UF libraries? It could be a colossal sculpture of a book by a Florida writer. Including Crews, there are plenty of worthy authors to choose from: Padgett Powell, William Logan, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Hiaasen, Connie May Fowler, Virgil Suarez, and a host of others. Maybe the sculpture could include a roll call of all of the state's fine writers? With $15 million dollars, UF could commission such a grand piece of art to celebrate its football shrine. It bridges the worlds of sports and academia. Often, academics resent the attention give to football, taking out their wrath in acerbic letters to the Alligator and the Sun. Coaches and athletes are often stung by this criticism and want to beat the crap out of the eggheads. Why not declare a truce and give all of us Gators something to be proud of.

We can even take it further. As fans stream into the stadium from tailgate parties, they would each receive a book by a UF grad or prof. At the Auburn game, fans would receive a signed copy of Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch novel. When Vandy arrives for its shallacking, fans would get the new book of poems by Debora Greger. The authors (especially poets and those fiction writers, like me, who are published by small presses) would welcome to sale of 88,889 copies of their books, purchased from the aforementioned $15 million. Grants could be written to include the writer, who could read a passage before the warbling of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

This is either the wild fantasy of a deranged author. Or the best idea since the forward pass. You decide.