Tree Killer

   CBS Sunday Morning contributor Mo Rocca does a podcast each week. Every Sunday he offers a teaser for the next week's podcast. The teaser from last Sunday intrigued me. Since I'm not patient enough to sit through an entire podcast (I've tried, keep getting interrupted to many times.) I took to the trusty internet to get the story.
  Toomer's Corner is a landmark in the city of Auburn Alabama. Auburn fans gather at the corner to celebrate wins by various sports teams by covering the two oak trees with toilet paper. Some date this tradition back to the days when news of away game wins would come by telegraph. The employees of a drugstore near the corner would signal the win by throwing ticker tape over power lines near the corner. The more modern throwing of toilet paper started in about 1972.
  The trees were poisoned in 2010 by a fan of the University of Alabama which is Auburn's main rival. There were several reasons for Alabama fans to be disgruntled that year. In the Iron Bowl, the game played between the two schools every year, Auburn won after being 24 points behind during the game. There was also some controversy surrounding the Auburn quarterback, Cam Newton. There was evidence that Newton's father may have been soliciting payments from schools wishing to recruit his son to their teams. Further investigation showed that Auburn and Cam himself were not aware of the actions of Cam's father and the quarterback was ruled eligible to play in the 2010 championship game which Auburn won.
   After the Iron Bowl loss in 2010, a fan who was angry over the loss drove to Auburn and poisoned the trees with an herbicide. He used a dose many times more than would be needed to make sure the trees would die. He was caught when he called into a radio show admitting what he had done. He also left a phone message  to an Auburn professor. He wound up with some jail time, a large fine and five years of probation that recently ended.
  Why? In the podcast, the fan said,"I wanted Auburn people to hate me as much as I hate them. I just don't like Auburn. You know, there are several things in this world that I really and truly don't like, and Auburn is one of them." In the phone call where he confessed his actions, he claimed that  Auburn fans put a Cam Newton jersey on a statue of Bear Bryant, the legendary Alabama coach and that Auburn fans celebrated when the coach died in 1983.
    I know that people from the south take their sports, especially football, seriously. This is something I truly cannot understand. I can't imagine disliking something so much that I would be willing to risk a felony conviction over it.
   I know what it feels like when your favourite teams gets beaten badly by a rival. It doesn't feel good, but it's a game. It's not life and when it's over it's over. Why someone thinks that this is so important that serious vandalizing is warranted is beyond me.
  I'm still shaking my head......
   Information for this column taken from Wikipedia and other articles on the internet.