As someone with Tennessee fans in my family and who has followed SEC football for 40 years, it’s my observation that Alabama has been traditionally regarded differently by its rivals than we have by ours. We have long been considered the school in the SWC and Big12 that was the biggest, richest, and most arrogant school in the conference. That we had a manor-born sense of superiority and looked down our noses academically at everyone else besides Rice. Their hatred arose out of a sense of envy for what we had, separate and apart from our football program. Again, Rice and probably SMU excepted.
Alabama’s relationship with the rest of the SEC has always been different because football is really the only thing over which they could claim superiority as to the other schools and their fan bases. The original 10 teams were like brothers from the same family, with only Vanderbilt being set apart as a truly distinguished academic institution, but their football program was so terrible as to make them irrelevant. The other schools had heated rivalries with one another, but there was never the inferiority complex with Alabama as a school or fan base that a Baylor or Iowa State had with us. Auburn and Tennessee, it’s traditional rivals, never thought of Bama as anything like “T-Sippers.” Each fan base though the other were trailer trash, hillbillies, rednecks, jort-wearing crackers, coon-asses, etc. And when it came to the national stage, there was enough vestigial collective “Southern Pride” such that Alabama was considered the standard bearer for the SEC’s football excellence and cheered on by its rivals when one of Bear Bryant’s teams would go play a Northern power like Notre Dame or Penn Stste. I don’t think we ever enjoyed that kind of support from a Tech or Baylor when one of Royal’s or Akers’ teams was in national title contention.
The other good Shatner Twilight Zone episode is an underrated one. “Nick of Time” is a subtle little story about a young couple stuck in a small town with car trouble that get pulled in by a fortune telling machine in a local diner. It’s a Richard Matheson script about free will and the perils of superstition and is sneakily very dark. Not the kind of episode to leave a big impression as a kid like the gremlin on the wing, but more interesting as an adult.
“The Howling Man” is another one of my favorites. A man traveling in Europe gets taken in at a monastery where the monks think they are holding the Devil captive. It’s a Charles Beaumont story, anything by him is usually good. He also wrote the Talky Tina episode (“Living Doll”) with Telly Savalas.
It’s probably the avatar, but I always figured you for a “Robert DeNiro’s Waiting” kind of guy.