The Last Season

July 13, 2015
Stevens (Malaria Dreams), who worked as a lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid and wrote for TV shows such as Northern Exposure and Commander in Chief, explores Mississippi culture and how it has changed (or hasn’t) in the last half-decade—all of which turns out to draw on both his Hollywood side and his political experience. Stevens returns home to attend Ole Miss football games with his 95-year-old father, Phineas, hoping to recapture the feeling he had going to Rebel games with his dad in the 1960s. Phineas is quick as a whip and full of one-liners, and he takes center billing with his son playing the straight man. As for the ghosts of the past—including the Civil Rights movement, racism, segregation—Stevens combines his memories of boyhood with his 60 years of knowledge to show how far America has come and how far we still need to go. Throughout, Stevens captures the spirit of college athletics, and ties it into his foundation of fun and family. B&w photos.

June 15, 2015
A meditative memoir of a son, 60, and father, 95, bonding over college football. As a strategist for the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, veteran political consultant Stevens (The Big Enchilada: Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics, 2001, etc.) felt so devastated by Romney's loss that he had no idea what he might do next. "When was the last time I'd been really happy?" he asked himself. "What was it I really cared about in life?" Family and football, it turns out, would provide the key, allowing the man for whom the fall had become campaign season to revisit the boyhood when Saturday games with his father had been the highlights of his life. The result is an elliptical, evocative narrative that has ambitions beyond his scope, as the author's accounts of the actual games with his spry and beloved father are just signposts in his story. It's when he digs deeper into memory-about the civil rights clashes when he was coming of age with Ole Miss football and how his parents provided such a sterling example for racial equality-that this book about Saturdays with Dad is more than another stop-and-smell-the-roses, Tuesdays with Morrie-esque heart-tugger. Stevens explores his "complicated relationship with my Mississippi identity" and his ambivalence toward the racial privilege that allowed him to achieve his ambitions and toward those whose identity in the North was that of " 'professional southerners, ' those living in New York who tried to define themselves by some pretense that they came from a more genteel and cultured world." What has remained undiminished is his love for football, for his father (and his mother, even with her Barack Obama bumper sticker), and for the time they have left together to enjoy the Ole Miss football experience that defined his boyhood. An affecting tale showing that you can go back home again.

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August 1, 2015

This book concludes with an image of a father and son tossing a football and radiates the common "dads playing catch with sons" male-bonding theme. The twist here is that the father is 95 and the son 60, as they repeat rituals from 50 years before by driving throughout the South to attend a full season's worth of University of Mississippi football games. As they traverse old haunts and revisit the past, the men evaluate changes that have occurred and appreciate the timelessness of both familial and community bonds. Stevens (The Big Enchilada), both the son and the author, comes to have a better understanding of many of the events of his boyhood in the Jim Crow South on this three-month journey as well as the progressive attitudes of his parents throughout that time. As Stevens and his father reinvigorate their relationship through the traditions of college football, they note how significant a unifying role the game played in reversing the segregated racial environment in the region to one where fans of all races cheer on multiracial teams representing fully integrated universities. VERDICT Lyrically written and poignant, this book speaks to football fans and observers of cultural change in America.

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