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WINDONCAPITOLHILL
ROLLTIDE
T
ommy Tuberville, who will face Jeff
Sessions in a March 31st runoff to
be Alabama’s Republican nominee for
the U.S. Senate, has never held public
office, but he did spend ten years as the
coach of the Auburn University football
team, going head to head with Nick
Saban, the legendary coach for the Uni-
versity of Alabama—the Crimson
Tide—a team that Tuberville managed
to beat six times in a row. Tuberville’s
campaign literature proposes that poli-
tics is a lot like coaching. His first TV
ad opened with a clip of him on the field
berating a referee (voice-over: “I’m a
fighter”). He learned some foreign pol-
icy, too, as the coach of Texas Tech, in
Lubbock. (“Somebody asked me, ‘What’s
Lubbock look like?’ It looked like Iraq.”)
His campaign, which employs Sean
Spicer as a consultant, has focussed on
immigration. Tuberville, a devout Chris-
tian who believes that Donald Trump
was sent by God, has been telling voters
that America’s cities are in the grip of
terrorists. “Sharia law has taken over,” he
said recently. “We have more Middle
Easterners coming across that border at
times than we do people from Latin
America.” He added,“They’re coming
over here to tear this country down.”
Tuberville likely doesn’t know that
there’s a neighborhood in the Middle
East that’s often overrun by Alabamians.
There, his rival is not Sessions but Saban.
On David Street, in the Old City of Je-
rusalem—a warren bustling with reli-
gious-souvenir stores, not far from the
Western Wall—is a gift shop run by a
Palestinian named Hani Imam. He took
it over from his father, twenty years ago.
As a young man, Imam spent a decade
in the U.S., where he studied business at
the University of Alabama. At first, he
ran his shop the way his fellow tchotchke
merchants ran theirs, but he felt himselfpining for the American South, land of
open spaces, barbecue, and Southeastern
Conference football. Homesick, he put
up a few photographs of the Crimson
Tide and changed the shop’s name to
Alabama: The Heart of Dixie. Afterward,
he and the other Arab merchants on his
street occasionally found their stalls
mobbed by tourists from Alabama.
Sometimes forty of them come at
once. “We get a lot of people from Bir-
mingham,” Imam said the other day. “But
our best customers are from Tuscaloosa.
They go crazy.” In his shop, wearing an
Alabama cap, he said that the new name
was initially meant only as a tribute, but
he quickly found that there was a mar-
ket for religious artifacts stamped with
Alabama’s logo.
He posted a sign outside that an-
nounces “Welcome to Bama Country.”
In the window is a framed, autographed
photo of Saban. Inside are the custom
items: Crimson Tide shofroth, Crimson
Tide arks of the covenant, Crimson Tide
menorahs and mezuzahs. Tourists like
the coasters stamped with “Shalom Y ’all.”
“Most of the Jewish stuff I sell goes to
Christians,” he said. “But I ordered some
prayer rugs that say ‘Alabama.’” T h e
shop is tiny, accommodating only a few
customers at a time, and the overflow of
waiting Southerners helps the neighbor-
ing merchants. Imam has tried to edu-
cate and convert the other shopkeepers
by showing them highlight reels of the
team. “They think it’s a bunch of big
guys beating the hell out of each other,”
he said. “But a lot of them claim to be
Alabama fans. A lot of my neighbors,
whenever they see Americans, they’ll say,
‘Hey, man, Roll Tide!’”
Imam said that he doesn’t recognize
the Alabama he used to know in Tuber-
ville’s political rhetoric. “The people were
very, very friendly,” he said. “The fact
that I was foreign and had a heavy for-
eign accent, it didn’t bother them any.
They invited me into their homes and
their churches. Of course, the language
is totally different. If you speak English,
it does not mean you can understand
people from Alabama. In the store, I’ll
say, ‘Y ’all come back now, ya hear?’ Just
to get them in the shopping mood.”
Imam gave Tuberville points for run-
ning a solid program at Auburn. But
Tuberville, he thinks, could learn some-
“The vertical lines are very slimming.” thing from the multicultural bonhomiehad to make the job look easy under
strain. “She’s fighting, she’s surviving, but
she’s doing those things with her shoul-
ders completely relaxed, and smiling for
the cameras,” de Waal said.
Royalty, as Markle discovered, comes
with scrutiny, and so does playing the
people’s princess. “I’ve got to ask, Why
the hell would she want to play Princess
Diana?” Arbiter, the former royal aide,
said a few days later, on the phone from
England. “It’s a very brave thing to do.
I hope she pulls it off. If she doesn’t, she
must be prepared.”
—Michael Schulman