17th May 2025

Mississippi had occupied a curious corner of my imagination long before I ever crossed its state line. Like many Americans who grew up a long way from the Delta, I knew it through borrowed stories more than lived experience: grainy civil rights photographs in history textbooks, blues records stacked in my father’s collection, and novels that made the state feel as though it carried more ghosts than people. When my editor suggested covering a Premier Development League match between Hattiesburg and Mississippi Brilla, I accepted as much because of the map as because of the fixture. Football was still the assignment. Mississippi was the destination.

I left Kansas City before dawn, aiming south until the interstate gave way to older roads that seemed to move at the pace of the countryside rather than the timetable of freight. Memphis arrived in a wash of brick buildings and music history, and I allowed myself the indulgence every first-time visitor eventually grants himself. Beale Street was still rubbing the sleep from its eyes when I walked it, Sun Studio felt improbably modest for a place that had altered American music, and Graceland possessed the strange quality of somewhere simultaneously ordinary and mythic. From there I picked up stretches of U.S. Route 61, the Blues Highway, letting Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited fill the rental car while forests replaced suburbs and the road began to feel less like infrastructure than invitation.

By the morning of the game I had fallen into the kind of routine road travel encourages. Breakfast came at a Cracker Barrel just outside town, where the waitress insisted I couldn’t leave Mississippi hungry and somehow persuaded me that a slice of Mississippi mud pie belonged alongside eggs, biscuits and coffee. It felt gloriously excessive before nine in the morning, the sort of meal that politely ignored every nutritional guideline ever written. Nobody else in the restaurant seemed remotely surprised. Outside, pickup trucks came and went beneath a sky that promised another warm Southern afternoon.

Curiosity led me into a small gospel church not far from the university campus, where the congregation welcomed a stranger with the kind of warmth that never quite stops feeling disarming. After the service the pastor asked what had brought me to Hattiesburg. When I explained I was driving across the South writing about soccer, he smiled for a moment before replying, “The Lord has funny ways of getting us where we’re meant to be. Just don’t stop following what brought you here.” It wasn’t advice delivered with theatrical conviction or the expectation that it might change a life. It sounded more like something he had spent years reminding himself.

Hattiesburg itself resisted almost everything I had expected. I had imagined somewhere harsher, flatter, perhaps quieter, shaped entirely by the weight of its own history. Instead I found trees everywhere, neighbourhoods tucked into forests, university buildings humming with students finishing the semester, and a town that seemed entirely comfortable carrying both its past and its present without forcing either to dominate the other. It felt lived in rather than preserved, proud without becoming performative, and considerably more diverse than the picture I had unconsciously assembled from books and documentaries.

The football ground shared that same modest confidence. MM Roberts Stadium was preparing for an evening that mattered deeply to the people inside it, even if few outside southern Mississippi would ever notice. Before kick-off I watched coaches unloading portable goals from pickup trucks, parents carrying coolers filled with drinks for the players, and volunteers making sure everything was ready long before spectators drifted through the gates. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been thinking about the scale of Major League Soccer, about enormous crowds disappearing into vast concourses beneath retractable roofs. Here, football seemed to exist because enough people cared to build it themselves every weekend.

One man leaning against the rail noticed my notebook and wandered over without introduction. We talked about football for a while, though before long the conversation drifted, as conversations in the South often do, towards high school football, college football and the rhythms of local life. “Soccer ain’t replacing football,” he said with a shrug that carried no defensiveness whatsoever. “It’s just found a little corner.” He smiled afterwards, as though the thought required no further explanation. Looking around the ground, at children chasing balls behind one goal while grandparents unfolded camping chairs, I realised he probably wasn’t trying to make one.

The match itself suited the heavy Mississippi evening. Neither side hurried unnecessarily, and the humidity seemed to pull every sprint back towards the earth before it had properly begun. It lacked the frantic energy I had seen elsewhere that spring, yet it possessed its own rhythm, one built on patience rather than spectacle. Hattiesburg eventually found the only goal of the afternoon, though by then I was watching as much beyond the touchline as upon it, noticing how every successful tackle earned cheers from people who appeared to know the players personally, and how defeat never prevented neighbours from shaking hands afterwards. Football, at this level, felt less like entertainment than another weekly gathering.

As dusk settled over the stadium, a freight train rolled slowly beyond the far side of the ground, its horn carrying across the evening air before disappearing into the pines. Nobody around me seemed to acknowledge it. The conversation continued uninterrupted, children kept kicking footballs across the grass banks, and the game simply folded into the sounds of the town around it. That image has stayed with me ever since: football beneath the floodlights while a train slipped quietly through Mississippi, as though both had been sharing the same evening for generations.

The journey home refused to end neatly. Somewhere outside town the rental car developed a stubborn mechanical problem that left me limping into a small gas station just before closing time. The owner disappeared beneath the hood for less than a minute before shouting something through the open garage door, and within moments his wife, his son and, judging by appearances, two cousins had wandered over carrying tools and offering opinions. Nobody mentioned payment until the problem had been solved. They seemed more offended by the thought of leaving someone stranded than concerned about losing an hour of their evening.

By the time I pulled back onto the highway, darkness had settled completely over southern Mississippi. The dashboard glowed softly, Dylan had long since given way to local radio, and the forests beyond the headlights were invisible again. It struck me that the football match I had travelled hundreds of miles to cover would occupy only a fraction of my notebook, squeezed between conversations in a church, breakfast pie, freight trains and strangers repairing a journalist’s rental car without expecting anything in return. Somehow that felt entirely appropriate. The football had found its corner here, and in doing so it had become part of everything else that made Hattiesburg feel like Hattiesburg.