The most hated man in Alabama

Fear? Hope? Fury?

Excitement?

Bewilderment?

Because when he makes his final amble toward the visiting sideline, Fulmer will be the target of a kind of rage and loathing that may not exist anywhere else in college football.

Alabama fans dislike, detest, abhor ... OK, they hate Phillip Fulmer, and try as he has this week to deflect attention from himself, when he walks onto the field, all the emotion and intensity swirling around the UT-Alabama football rivalry will concentrate on him.

"I'm not playing in the game," has been Fulmer's pat response this week, as if his presence on Saturday should somehow be seen as secondary to the proceedings.

"I don't even talk about it until you guys ask about it, honestly," Fulmer also says.

Deep under his thick hide, Fulmer must know he occupies a special spot in the darkest places of many Alabama fans' souls.

They hate that Fulmer and the Vols have licked their beloved Tide in nine of the past 10 games, with Fulmer himself a robust 9-2-1 against Alabama.

They hate that Fulmer came forward as a cooperating witness in the NCAA's investigation of the Alabama program, one that led to hard probation and serious sanctions for, primarily, the buying of a Memphis high school recruit named Albert Means by longtime Alabama booster and Bear Bryant worshipper Logan Young.

They say they hate the way Fulmer looks, the way he talks, the way he refused to appear at Southeastern Conference media days two summers ago, to avoid being issued a subpoena in lawsuits that Alabama fans and former assistants have filed against him (and the NCAA and a recruiting analyst).

"If you asked me what a fan might say about Tennessee or their coach," Alabama defensive back Charlie Peprah told Alabama reporters this week, "all you would hear is bleeps coming out of my mouth."

In something of an irony, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, an Alabama native, is bringing British foreign secretary Jack Straw to the game to, as she put it, "help give (foreign diplomats) a greater appreciation and understanding of the nation."

It's doubtful he'll learn much about diplomacy.

Among the t-shirts the foreign secretary might see from his perch in a Bryant-Denny skybox is one declaring, in bold capital letters, "I HATE ORANGE," floating above crossed-out logos of Tennessee and Auburn.

In large part because of their feelings for Fulmer, many Alabama fans have elevated Tennessee above Auburn in their hierarchy of hate.

"How the fans can dislike someone that much is funny," Peprah says.

Paul Finebaum, Alabama's famously provocative columnist and talk radio host, expressed what many Alabama fans feel when it comes to Tennessee and Fulmer.

"One really can't blame some Tide fans for moving Tennessee ahead of Auburn on the Hit Parade," he wrote. "Frankly, I don't think it's as much the University of Tennessee as it is Phillip Fulmer. Many fans simply can't get over not only Fulmer's mercurial behavior in the Albert Means controversy but his self-righteous and often disingenuous attitude in the aftermath."

Bill Eubank is a 1950 graduate of Alabama who has had season tickets since 1958. He lives in Birmingham, and is a volunteer for the Prince of Peace Catholic church, going around to homes and giving communion to those who cannot make it to church.

Like many Alabama fans, his grudge against the Vols runs deep.

"It's gotten nasty," he says of the rivalry.

"Fulmer's put us through the ringer," he says.

"Auburn's never done what Fulmer did to us," he says.

On Saturday, he'll be in row 13 on the 50-yard line, waiting to heap some abuse on the big man coaching the hated Volunteers.

"It's gonna be something to see," Eubank promises.

Too strong a word?

Rick Bragg is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, best-selling author and son of Alabama, specifically the Appalachian foothills of north Alabama.

Now a professor at Alabama, Bragg is enjoying this season's return to glory -- 'Bama is undefeated and ranked fifth in the country -- as much as any other Alabama fan. He likes to tell a story about the 1992 national championship, when he was relegated to watching the Sugar Bowl alone in an apartment in Cambridge, Mass., while at Harvard on a journalism fellowship.

"I got up and did a little dance on the carpet," Bragg says. "When that happened, I couldn't stop grinning like an idiot."

He grew up among Alabama fans. He lives among them now. And while he said he preferred not to talk about Phillip Fulmer specifically, since the notion of hating a football coach can seem a little silly, he did try to explain why some Tide fans feel so aggrieved.

"When I was growing up, there was so much criticism of who you were and where you lived and you had Paul 'Bear' Bryant and Alabama football and you were second to nobody," Bragg says. "People of my age in particular, where we had such a boiling history all around us and here you have this fella seems to be 8 feet tall and seems cut out of a hickory tree with an axe and got this voice seems to come out of the bottom of a well and he just goes out and beats the hell out of everybody ... that seemed like something to be proud of.

"Any assault or challenge on that, people will take personally and so here we are."

Bragg spent last year teaching and writing at the University of Memphis, where his wife, Dianne, is a member of the school's journalism department. As it happens, two of her sons, by a previous marriage, are Vol fans; one of them is a student in Knoxville.

Bragg learned to have fun with rivalry in the family.

"I came in from the road and looked on the couch and there was this mountain of laundry waiting to be folded and it's all orange," Bragg says. "It just hurts the eyes. It burns the eyes."

Though he isn't quite ready to drop the "hate" bomb in describing the feelings among Alabama fans -- "I grew up in a part of the state where if you talked about hatred, a killing is gonna be involved," he says -- Bragg recognizes how much the dynamic has changed.

"I grew up in a state where you might be upset if you lost to Tennessee, but now it goes beyond walking around grumpy for a few days," Bragg says. "Now, it's pounding your fist into your forehead."

Brodie Croyle, the Tide's quarterback and an Alabama native, is reluctant to use "hate," too, but he's heard from enough fans about the rivalry that nothing else seems strong enough.

"I don't want to say 'hatred,' but I guess that's what both teams' fans feel for each other," Croyle said earlier this week.

Says Peprah, the defensive back: "These fans, I don't think, can sit in the same room together."

Getting personal

In 1999, Birmingham native Warren St. John spent an entire season following the Tide in an RV, and he wrote about it in the 2004 book, "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer." One of the stories in the book involves a couple who skipped their daughter's wedding because she scheduled it on the third Saturday in October, the place on the calendar once reserved for UT-Bama football games.

So St. John, a Style reporter for The New York Times, stipulates that Tide fans weren't exactly predisposed to feeling much affection for the Vols nor any Tennessee coach.

However, the feelings now have an edge to them.

"It was intense (in 1999)," says St. John, "but it had not gotten personal yet."

Now, says St. John, "There is a feeling that Phillip Fulmer has some sort of special animosity toward Alabama and it's returned in kind. It's definitely the case that there's something strangely personal between the fans and Fulmer."

Eubank, like so many Alabama fans, believes Fulmer violated a kind of coaching code of honor by cooperating with the NCAA. Alabama fans as avid as Eubank have read many of the depositions and findings that have resulted from the lawsuits filed against Fulmer and the NCAA. They can talk ceaselessly about the details, and, yes, they do hold it against Fulmer that he went beyond just the recruitment of Albert Means when throwing his net of accusations over Alabama.

"Fulmer and them were sick of losing kids from out of Memphis, and I can understand that, but it could've been handled in a different way," Eubank says. "It could've been handled as Southern gentlemen."

It's hard to say what, if anything, Fulmer could do to alleviate the hard feelings. He certainly feels he owes no apologies.

When he refused to go to Birmingham for the 2004 SEC media day, instead conducting his session via speakerphone from Knoxville, Fulmer was resolute, to say the least.

He said: "The truth is not on their side."

He said: "If we hear a rumor, we report it. It's the NCAA's job to prove it or disprove it."

He said: "I plan to fight every step of the way and give nothing."

This week, the closest anyone could coax Fulmer out of his protective coil came at the end of his his turn on the SEC's Wednesday teleconference.

"In my mind," he said, "most of that was resolved in U.S. District Court in Memphis."

Fulmer was referring to the February conviction of Logan Young, a booster accused of giving Trezevant High coach Lynn Lang $150,000 to get Means to attend Alabama.

Whether Fulmer meant it as a jab, be assured that many Alabama fans will take it as such.

As Bragg points out, Alabama fans, right or wrong, are not feeling tolerant when it comes to this rivalry.

"You hear that old football cliche that this time, it is personal," Bragg says. "You can take that cliche and rivet it into place."

Sore losers?

St. John, for one, is convinced the rivalry will lose some of the personal edge if and when Alabama makes the series more competitive and returns to what its fans consider the Tide's rightful place among the college football elite.

"The main reason people down here feel intensely about the game is because Fulmer has absolutely had Alabama's number," St. John says.

In fact, Alabama has not beaten Tennessee in Alabama since Johnny Majors was the Tennessee coach. That came on Oct. 19, 1991, at Legion Field in Birmingham.

"I think it is basic sociology that when you perceive that someone is on the hierarchy ahead of you," says St. John, "you want to beat them more than the person below you."

Lost in the whirlwind of hate and resentment and righteousness is the fact that Saturday's game contains an enormous amount of significance for both teams.

Tennessee (3-2 overall and 2-2 in the SEC) is trying to avoid its sixth three-loss or worse season in the last seven, and could salvage the 2005 season with a victory.

Alabama (6-0, 4-0) is aiming for its sixth appearance in the SEC Championship Game, but its first since 1999. The Tide is also still in the hunt for a national championship.

"To get to where we want to be this year," says Croyle, the quarterback, "we have to beat Tennessee."

The biggest win of Alabama coach Mike Shula's three seasons came three weeks ago at Bryant-Denny, when the Tide beat a Top 5 team -- Florida -- in Tuscaloosa for the first time ever.

Veteran Tide fans say it was the loudest they had ever heard an Alabama crowd.

With tickets going for more than $500 apiece on the Internet and with emotions at so high a pitch, most expect an even rowdier crowd come Saturday.

Bragg is planning to take one of his stepsons -- one of those orange-wearing Vol fans -- with him to the game.

"The sound that's gonna swell up out of that stadium on Saturday at 2:30 is gonna be the sound no one has ever heard before," Bragg says.

Bragg would like the rivalry to return to the old days, when the game was more about bragging rights and bowl bids than personal grudges.

"I hope that it's civil, I hope that it's a great ballgame," Bragg says.

He pauses.

"No, that's a lie," Bragg says. "I hope Alabama wins by 40 points."

-- Zack McMillin: 529-2564

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tennessee at Alabama

When, where: Saturday, 2:30 p.m., at Tuscaloosa, Ala.

TV: WREG (3)