In the fall of 1984, I was eighteen, nine months removed from Damascus, and the proud owner of a camera and a press pass from The Daily Beacon, the student newspaper at the University of Tennessee. One of my first assignments was the season-opening football game. I went with ample confidence, despite knowing absolutely nothing about football.
In Syria, football meant a round ball, two goals and a referee who blew his whistle if anyone so much as shoved. So when my editor sent me to Neyland Stadium to photograph the game, I pictured something equally gentle.
Instead, I walked into a roar I could feel in my chest.
Ninety-three thousand people had come to watch The Tennessee Volunteers take on Washington State, though I could not have told you then whether Washington State was a team, a city or a state of mind. The coach was a man named Johnny Majors, whom the crowd seemed to regard as somewhere between a general and a prophet. I nodded respectfully. I had grown up under Hafez al-Assad. I knew how to nod at a man everyone else was nodding at.
The air smelled of popcorn, hot dogs and beer, which was not supposed to be in the stadium and was, somehow, everywhere. The band played a song about a mountain called Rocky Top, over and over, and the crowd sang it with the fervor my grandmother saved for prayer. I counted eleven times before halftime.
Then the game began, and twenty-two young men ran at each other at full speed for no reason I could understand.
They collided with the sound of car doors slamming. They fell in piles. They got up, walked back, bent over and did it again. Somebody threw the ball. Somebody caught it. Then everybody jumped on the one who caught it, as if he had stolen it. I kept waiting for a referee to break up the fight. Instead, he just set the ball down and let the players start a new one.
Through my lens, it looked like Rome. The helmets gleamed like armor. The crowd roared like the Colosseum. All that was missing were the lions, and judging by the size of some of these young men, I was not convinced the lions were missing at all.
I spent most of the afternoon on the sideline with my camera, trying to catch it all: the band marching in perfect lines, the cheerleaders flying into the air, the players steaming in the heat, the grass torn up in dark green clumps that smelled like a freshly cut field after rain. I learned the hard way that a sideline is not a safe place to stand. Late in the game, a play swung toward me, and a player the size of a refrigerator came barreling out of bounds. He missed me by inches, but I did feel the wind of him pass. I had survived Damascus taxi drivers, but no one had warned me about Tennessee defensive backs.
Tennessee won, 34 to 27. Everyone around me cheered. I cheered too, mostly because I was still alive.
That night, I lay awake in my dorm room trying to make sense of it all. A whole state had stopped to watch young men crash into each other, and they had done it with joy, with pageantry, with music, and with passion painted on children’s faces. It was primal and beautiful, chaotic and ruled by a thousand rules. It was a tribe and a church and a family reunion at once.
I had thought America, the one I saw on television in Syria, would be simple. Hamburgers, cowboys and Travolta. Instead, I found a country that sang the same song eleven times and meant it, every time, a country that loved its rituals fiercely, a country whose freedom was loud enough to fill a stadium and wide enough to make room for a boy from Damascus.
I did not understand football that day. Forty-two years later, I am still working on it. But I understood something else: America was far more complicated, and far more wonderful, than I had imagined. It still is.
Every September since, when the air begins to cool and the leaves finally catch fire, I think of that afternoon, of the breeze, the roar, and a sea of orange rolling up the bleachers and spilling down to the field, as if autumn had come early and settled in the stands instead of on the branches.
