There are fouls in sports that connote malicious, mean-spirited, taking-it-all-too-personally intent. In baseball it’s the beanball. In boxing it’s the low blow. In soccer it’s the head butt (think Zidane in the ‘06 World Cup). Those types of fouls we can chalk up as negative byproducts of the game. But when fouls are committed by fanatics off the field of play against innocent mascots and icons, that’s when we stand as one with the players and the coaches and the referees and throw down our yellow flags and blow our whistles and jump into the mix to stop the madness.
The disgruntled University of Alabama fan who poisoned the landmark live oaks at Toomer's Corner at Auburn University managed to do the exact opposite of what he intended—he brought the fans together as one.
"I've never felt more strongly bound to people in my state than now," said Erin St. John to CNN, who organized the rally to save the Toomer's Corner live oaks.
Trees, like the wind and the moon and the stars unite humanity; they brook no antipathy, no outrage, and no fouls.
That the trees poisoned were live oaks cuts to the quick of Southern psyches. There is no greater symbol of the lush, delicious, intoxicating life-aroma of the South than the live oak dressed in Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneodies), shading the byways and bayous. John Muir, whose home in Sacramento I visited for SEEDS – and where I had quite an experience - spent a lifetime among the most sublime of earth's great tree specimens and wrote of the Southern live oaks : "... but never since I was allowed to walk the woods have I found so impressive a company of trees as the Tillandsia-draped oaks of Bonaventure [Cemetery, Savannah, Georgia]"- from his classic, Thousand Mile Walk.
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