Southbound Traveler: An Outsider's Journey into the Heart of SEC Fan Culture

Weddings scheduled around a college football team's bye week. Children taken out of school on Fridays so their family can attend away games. Public officials who win or lose elections based on their college affiliation. Welcome to life in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the most fanatical family in college football, if not all of college sports. In the fall of 2014, self-professed Notre Dame super fan James March left his home in Chicago to discover for himself what the SEC was really like. 10,000 miles, eighteen games, and four months later, the result was Southbound Traveler, a candid first-person account from the front lines of a unique American subculture. Along his journey March meets a mix of unforgettable characters including fratty elites with mop top comb-overs; friendly good ol' boys in overalls who use cuss words like punctuation; transplants who swear you don't have to be born in the South to be a real fan; and families so divided by rooting interests that every holiday dinner is a war of attrition. Part memoir and part cultural exploration, Southbound Traveler examines what makes sports fanaticism so alluring in the first place-and why the game of football means so much to so many across the South.

Author: James March
Publisher: Sailor Saint Press
Published: 08/26/2017
Pages: 386
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.86d
ISBN: 9780692932599

About the Author
James March is an English teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada, though he plans to settle in the South someday. He believes this book to be his immortality project, and fears Notre Dame will never win another national championship in his lifetime. More importantly, though, he hopes this story would have pleased his fifteen-year-old self, who was so captivated by Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights. Southbound Traveler is his first book.

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