From Roll Tide to Bedroll: Crazy 'Bama Fan Finally Hits the Clink

After years of delays, lawyer changes, and just overall craziness, Alabama fan Harvey Updyke is finally going to jail.

Updyke was the overzealous Crimson Tide supporter who stupidly -- yes, stupidly -- called into the Paul Finebaum Show and announced to the world that he poisoned Auburn's beloved trees on Toomer's Corner. In a move that didn't help Updyke's position in court, Auburn released a statement last week that the trees will have to be taken down after the Tigers' spring game. The timing of this news was probably not a coincidence.

The Updyke incident gave him a double dose of what Andy Warhol termed his fifteen minutes of fame -- although Auburn fans would call it infamy -- when he was featured on ESPN's 30-for-30 documentary, Roll Tide/War Eagle, thus memorializing his idiocy for the ages.

Alabama's most notorious sports maniac will now face three years in prison plus five years probation and a 7pm curfew upon his release. Sentencing policy stipulates that he'll probably only spend six months in stir.

But now, for the rest of his life, Updyke must always be looking over his shoulder. Human justice is one thing, but trees never forget.

It's ironic that Updyke basically did all of this for nothing.

Since the incident, Alabama has gone on to win back-to-back national championships in football and has beaten their rival soundly. Meanwhile, Auburn's football program has fallen into mediocrity and the people upon whom Updyke claimed he was heaping revenge -- Gene Chizik and Cam Newton -- are now long departed.

All because, to paraphrase Updyke himself, 'he has too much Alabama in him.'

What a sap.