Stuart Stevens was a political consultant on Mitt Romney's failed bid for the presidency in 2012. He wrote a book about his experience on George W. Bush's campaign in 2000 ("The Big Enchilada"). The strategist is also an extreme-sports enthusiast who once skied 100 miles to the North Pole.
Clearly, the man likes to take on big, arduous projects. But in the wake of a mild existential crisis brought on by the political loss and by turning 60, he envisioned one considerably less taxing: He made plans to spend the 2013 college football season with his 95-year-old father, taking in a full slate of Ole Miss games as they'd done during Stevens's boyhood.
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The book that results is a breezy, intermittently poignant account, a quick read for fathers and sons, sports fanatics, and the people who love them. Stevens, who grew up in Jackson, Miss., didn't go to Ole Miss. But both of his parents did, and he became hooked on the football team's fortunes in 1962, when the Rebels went undefeated and claimed a national championship.
That was also the year when the University of Mississippi campus erupted in "the last battle of the Civil War," as Stevens writes, with federal troops called in during the rioting over James Meredith's integration of the college. "[T]hat perfect season in that most imperfect year," Stevens calls it.
"All Mississippi stories are eventually about race," he writes, "and mine is no exception." He was initially attracted to the Republican Party because, as a young man in the mid-century South, the Democrats seemed to be segregationist good ol' boys. He writes thoughtfully about the discomfort of supporting a team called the Rebels, where the Confederate flag was a point of contention long before the recent controversy over its symbolism.
Still, the Rebels were and remain his Rebels. The games of the team's mediocre 2013 season don't dominate the story so much as give it support, like tent poles at a tailgate.
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In flashbacks, Stevens writes memorably of his youth in Jackson. He and his friends made a game of following the city trucks spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes, running through the mist. When the city closed its public pools rather than integrate them, Stevens's socially-conscious parents built a backyard pool that they opened to teenagers, black and white.
His accounts of the games are a little more clichéd. When a wild shootout with Texas A&M, led by the quarterback Johnny Manziel, ends in dispiriting fashion, Stevens writes, "Dying may feel worse than losing a game like this, but at least with dying there's the comfort of knowing it's unlikely to happen again."
Though "The Last Season" was conceived as a kind of respite for Stevens after the disappointment of Romney's loss, there's very little mention of the campaign. There's also not a great deal about his relationship with his hale-but-aged father (beyond the details of their weekend excursions to the games), though he clearly loves and admires him.
Instead, Stevens reflects broadly on the nature of losing: the South's loss, the inevitable losses of your favorite team and, ultimately, the loss of life.
"Love of sports will always break your heart," he writes, "but in doing so, it reminds us we have one."
As Stevens and his father prepare to head into Oxford for another home game, the old man says, "It's a good day for a game." It's been a ritual since Stevens was a boy, clipping the Ole Miss roster from the local paper and sleeping with a Rebel flag.
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"Great day," he says, answering as he always has.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.