The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football

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.