If Newt Gingrich had $10,000, he?d bet it all on LSU to win college football?s BCS National Championship on Monday night.
But since he spent his teens living in Columbus, Ga., right across the state line from Alabama, he?ll be rooting for the Crimson Tide over Louisiana State University.
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?How could I not be for Alabama?? he said. ?Bear Bryant is one of my favorite coaches. And Roll Tide just sounds good.?
Gingrich, a football fan who sometimes compares his campaign to the Green Bay Packers under legendary coach Vince Lombardi, took a few minutes to talk about the gridiron with POLITICO.
He walked a careful line on picking a favorite for Monday night?s national championship game. (After all, Alabama votes in the GOP primary a week before Louisiana and has four more delegates at stake.)
?I have to confess, while I think LSU is a very, very good team. I think it will be a much higher scoring game, my personal feelings, if I were betting $10,000 I would bet on LSU but my heart belongs to Alabama,? he said, in a sly reference to Mitt Romney?s offer to bet Rick Perry that amount during a December debate. He says he will try to catch a few minutes of the game on Monday night at a sports bar in Concord with supporters.
Gingrich, like Obama, thinks the country should move over to a playoff system instead of the current Bowl Championship Series system.
?I think the system now raises really big questions when you have teams that are undefeated that end up because of some computer getting scored seventh and they?re totally undefeated and who knows how good they would be if they went to a playoff,? Gingrich said.
True to form, he offered a history lesson about his own playing days.
?I was a really inadequate tackle,? Gingrich said of his high school football career.
When he was a junior, his family moved and he enrolled in Baker High School, a much larger school than the one he attended his first two years of high school.
?The two first-string tackles weighed 220 [pounds] and 250,? he recalled. ?It was just like being out against college kids. And my job was to be the guy they got to practice against. They?re going, ?Great, there?s this guy who reads all these books and now it?s my turn.? ?
He paused for a moment and laughed, ?It was one of the great experiences of my life.?
One of those lessons came in pre-season training.
?Nothing that has been done to me recently resembles August practice in the Chattahoochee Valley and getting wiped out by these two really good tackles,? he said.
Playing high school football taught him something about losing, he said.
Every year, they would open against Valdosta High School and lose miserably.
?And after 48-0 or whatever the score was that night, it was so demoralizing, it was really terrible to lose that sense of enthusiasm,? he said. ?So a great deal of my high school athletic experience prepared me for running for president in ways I would never have dreamed of until I went through it.?
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/politico_rss/rss_politico_mostpop/http___www_politico_com_news_stories0112_71195_html/44108113/SIG=11mpq4ui2/*http%3A//www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71195.html
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