Despite everything, Love believes her predicament is the result of a coordinated financial, legal and personal smear campaign. In a recent interview with London's Sunday Telegraph, she was asked if she bears any responsibility for her current problems. "The last thing I want to say is, 'I'm a victim', but I am. I believe it's a trickledown from Bush ... I should have done an audit. I should have done face-time with people. That is true. But did I bring it on myself? I don't think so."

From an obscure entertainment writer to outrageous and reviled lampooner of Greek Life to wildly popular sports pundit, Steven Godfrey has held a panoply of titles and roles in his half decade as a writer for The University of Mississippi’s campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian.

Now, this famous or infamous (depending on you ask) veteran campus journalist, approaching the twilight of his career at The DM, talks with Drew Snyder in the first Interview with SNN,sharing moments from his childhood, discussing the peaks and valleys from his years at The DM, and imparting his unique wit and wisdom on college life, Ole Miss, handling criticism, student government, and Alex Blagg. And he even reveals to us his shocking new project.


DS: Thank you for your willingness to do the interview. I think it's going to really resonate with readers. This snydernews.net crowd is primarily a bunch of washed up Ole Miss graduates who would love to be back in Oxford reading your column in class or at the fraternity lunch table. To get started, I’ll ask a real simple one – where are your working these days? And as alumnus who occasionally longs for the halcyon days of college, what am I missing in Oxford right now?

GODFREY: There's nobody scarier than that guy who longs for the days of college. Do you remember college? As someone who's on the nine year track to get out of Oxford, I beg you not to miss a thing. It's a wonderful, responsibility-free subculture, but it can't be contained. You have to let go. Everything in la-la land is more or less the same, except when you wake up in the morning a new chain pharmacy or video store has appeared out of thin air. And because I’m 23, I now spend my days feeling like the one really old cast member on a soap opera that’s been filled with newer, younger, dumber talent. As for my employment - if you can call it that - I'm still in charge of the DM's funny farm. I freelance on the side, bartend on the weekends and shake it like a sexy motherfucker every change I get. But the pay sucks.

DS: Steven, in Lafayette County, you are a celebrity. Your name is probably the most
recognizable of any student who is not an athlete. At 23, you’re already famous. Outside of Eli Manning, Britney Spears, and Granville, you’re the most notable Mississippian of our age. How do you handle stardom?

GODFREY: To be completely serious, it scares the shit out of me. Fame, even my very minor brand, is like a hitman that's always after you. It just pops up randomly and terrifies you. Taking a piss at City Grocery: "Aren't you Godfrey? Fuck the Falcons!" I don't know about anyone else, but I write to audience of one (myself) and don't really keep the image of "readership" my your head while I do it. I just try and make myself laugh and stay interested through 900 words. I seem to always forget a town of 12,000, a school of 13,000 and an entire other world (the net) will read what I hammer out in my apartment on Sunday morning. So the effect is strange, because Oxford is a kind of bubble. 30 miles in any other direction and I'm nobody. But in town I get this strange reverence from readers, usually when I'm working in the bar. I work three jobs, my GPA is at retard level, and I'm signing autographs to BMW trust fund babies. Only in Oxford Mississippi am I signing autographs. I appreciate all the attention (who wouldn't?), but it's so bizarre. I have
noticed a considerable lack of attractive female fans, though.

DS: Talk about your career at the DM. And I’m serious when I say career. You’re about to enter
your 6th season. You’re kind of like The Sopranos. We always expect the next season to be the
last, but like the Sopranos, you keep on going, and we keep tuned in. You’ve written in the Arts
& Life section. You’ve edited the Arts & Life section. You’ve written scathing opinion columns,
and now you’re the DM’s top sports beat writer. You’ve seen an era of DM staffers come and go.
Tell us about your progression at the paper, and how you’ve seen the newspaper change during
the time you’ve been there.

GODFREY: Much like your Sopranos angle, I do expect to be called in to a meeting one day and suddenly shot in the back of the head. I don't think they can get rid of me without a snub nosed revolver, a pillow and a bathtub filled with acid. My career path loosely followed what I thought would be my grown up career at the time. I had a vested interested in entertainment writing, so that culminated with the Maxim job in 2002. After that, I was both satiated and disillusioned with
that kind of work, so sports seemed like a logical next step. I had to keep myself interested. The paper itself is doing fine; ultimately it’s hard to really screw it up. But room for improvement is neverending. That’s why I like the job.

DS: What have been your best moment and your worst moment during your years at the DM?

GODFREY: I think the best was when I realized that the 5,000 or so campus Greeks that loathed my being for so many years were now in love with me over the sports column – at that time it was the Tight End – and that I could pretty much bend people’s opinions at will. The worst is getting manifesto length hate mail from wacked out morons. It doesn’t bother me, it just really reinstates a sense of sadness I have for society in general. I used to send them really, overly sweet messages in response. Now I forward them to Rehab Ashley, and he handles it wonderfully.

DS: Do you have a favorite editor?

GODFREY: They're like snowflakes, each unique in their own values. Wonderful, nitpicking, sarcastic, pale skinned editors who live in the basement of an educational hall. Julie will always stand out. She served two terms and was my exact age. It was a fun sibling thing. And she put up with so much shit.

DS: Why was the Ole Miss community never able to enjoy a year of Godfrey as DM Editor?

GODFREY: I could joke about them never handing the keys to the asylum over to the patient, but the only real reason I wasn't Editor-In-Chief was because I was too much of a drunk fuck up for so long. My concern was never about the paper as an institution, or where journalism was going. I had (and have) a hack's theory of shock value, popularity and attention.

DS: The first time I met you was in the DM dungeon in Farley Hall. I gave you props about one of your wrestling stories. As a diehard since the late 1980s, I appreciate your knowledge of the sport. And like you, I am disgusted with the lousy product they put on the TV today. Who are your favorite wrestlers of all-time? What do you consider the best era of wrestling? If you were hired as a WWE writer, what would you do to salvage the product and boost ratings?

GODFREY: What a question. I would point out that every time someone lets Eric Bischoff run a league, it goes to shit. As for product enhancements, we need heroes and villains again. On the off chance I turn on wrestling, all I see are tattooed bad-asses. It's all a blur, and their target audience is lost. Give me the classic angles again. Triple H is still a bad ass though.

DS: I often hear the cliche “the man you become in college is the man you become the rest of your life.” But our high school days also have such a profound effect on the people we become. Talk about your time at Northwest Rankin Attendance Center. How would you evaluate high school and Northwest Rankin in particular?

GODFREY: I attended Northwest Rankin from 1997-1999 after transferring from a much larger high school in a Washington DC suburb. Northwest Rankin always felt like being sent to AA after a long slump in the Majors. I hated high school in DC for a number of reasons, and then I was magically whisked away to a whole new culture, albeit a very small one. Everything at Northwest Rankin seemed silly in comparison to being in DC. I’m looking at these goofball rednecks touting themselves as the popular kids, and they just had no fucking clue what existed outside of Highway 25. I held that attitude until my senior year, and then I just relaxed and had a good time. I don’t have that kind of deep seeded thing with high school like some folks, because I never took the majority of it seriously.


DS: Was it at Northwest Rankin you realized you enjoyed writing and possessed a knack for it? What triggered the interest in journalism?

GODFREY: God no. I was 14 or 15, in Virginia, when I figured out I could write for the local paper – covering high school football and community theater – and make the same kind of money I was making bagging groceries. The interest in journalism grew slowly from there.

DS: So you graduate from Northwest Rankin. You probably vow never to live in Jackson again. And you decide to go to Ole Miss. What attracted you to Ole Miss, and what sealed your decision? Were there other colleges you were considering?

GODFREY: Nothing attracted me to Ole Miss. Like I said, I was laughing in the face of Mississippi, and at 18, wanted to get the hell out of there. I got into a decent amount of good schools (even Vanderbilt) but money was a concern. UM had J-School and offered a huge chunk of money to me, but I dismissed it on principle. I hated Mississippi at the time. I applied to UGA, who rejected me on grades. So, like a dumbfuck teenager, I went to Auburn, an Ag school. I was too proud to admit it was stupid until the day before classes at AU, when the bursar told myself and my folks it would be 30K a year to go to that school as an out of state student. Finally I came to my senses and took UM up on their offer.

DS: Now I want to ask you about Ole Miss. You’ve been living history with Ole Miss during the past half-decade. What do you consider the most memorable events at Ole Miss during the last five years? And what do you consider the low point for Ole Miss while you were here?

GODFREY: The most memorable and lowest point would be the many, many times our administration had fumbled issues of race relations, history and public perception. And they usually fumbled them on a national stage. The mascot thing is still such a laughable, sad travesty.

DS: So are you supportive of Chancellor Khayat and The Ole Miss Administration?

GODFREY: See above.

DS: Student government was a big part of my college experience at Ole Miss. You never covered student government for The Daily Mississippian, though you would have made an animated and welcome beat writer. You did make several references to ASB in your columns. What do you think of ASB and student government?

GODFREY: When you ran it, it mean something. It really is as simple as that. Do something, don’t just sit around and circle jerk each other with resume titles. Do something that matters to the students, or you really are just playing government. I remember emotional debates about ASB code, like it was the Bill of Rights or something. Give me a fucking break. The DM might have its lackluster days, but its made millions of dollars over the years. At least we sustain ourselves.

DS: I can’t have an interview on SNN without discussing SNN. You, Steven, played a large role in popularity The Rebel Yell (The SNN message board) during the autumn of its existence. You were, if I can say, a real lightning rod for controversy. And in your DM farewell column two years ago, you even mentioned The Snyder News Network. Tell us what you thought of the message board, why you got pleasure out of posting, and what your co-workers thought of you being so vocal on the site? Why you don’t you comment on the new snydernews.net?

GODFREY: I didn’t know there was a new Snyder News until I got asked for the interview. As for the old day of the Rebel Yell, imagine a kid poking a stick at a caged, feral animal. That was the whole experience. In retrospect, it was stupid to keep company with so many of those bottom feeders. But it was funny.

DS: And give some advice to Alex Blagg. People might say that he’s the new Godfrey, the new fire starter on snydernews.net. What advice would you give him?


GODFREY: Take your phone number out of the book, and hit the gym.

DS: You seem to handle criticism remarkably well. And criticism at Ole Miss comes in boatloads, especially when you’re out in front. Sometimes, people’s vitriol and bitterness at Ole Miss really frightened me. What’s helped you develop your apparently thick skin?

GODFREY: Criticism on this level is as much praise as it is anything else. If you take the time out of your day to tell me what you think is wrong with what I do, I had an effect on you. I won, so to speak. When they get really riled up, like the frat-joke years, I don’t take all that animosity and verbiage as an attack. To me, it’s like the punch line to a joke I started. A lot of the fierce, fierce shit I’ve done – like proposing Slaves as the new Ole Miss mascot – was me and a buddy
sitting around riffing on life in this place called Ole Miss. My close friends are edgier and funnier than I am.

So to answer your question, it’s not about having a thick skin. It’s about how I perceived the comments that came back at me. And from the time I was 18, I had older friends telling me, “Walk into every social setting like you’re ten feet tall and your cock’s huge, and you won’t be intimidated by anyone.” I like to think I’ve grown out of that mentality, but during the wilder years of animosity with the Greeks, it was a great mindset to have. And oh yeah, I know I’m smarter than 99 percent of them. That helps.

DS: Tell us about your Mom and Dad. I know when I’m posting the content on snydernews.net; I try to prohibit myself from writing anything that could embarrass my parents. If it’s not fit for them, it’s not fit to print. But I tilt to the prudish side of our generation, so this rarely is a problem. You, however, are frank and graphic in some of your columns. How have your parents handled your rise to fame?

GODFREY: Lord, in the Snyder News glory days, I told my parents to log on and read that stuff. Dad loved it. My folks are your typical parents. Conservative Republican Methodists, a FBI Agent and a retired schoolteacher, college sweethearts and all that, but they’ve always been fans of my antics. My mother would say she’s not, but deep down she likes it. The catch about my folks versus most everybody else’s is that they’re permissive of any thought, expression or opinion. They’re the
most non-hippie parents around, but they have this free expression mentality that’s amazingly progressive given their southern backgrounds. The two of them, myself and my sister are a cussword festival behind closed doors. We’re mamas and sirs in public, but in the house we were always allowed to speak fairly freely. We got beat and reared and refined, but in an open sort of way. They also let me try anything I wanted to. Twenty musical instruments, school plays, community theater, choir, poetry classes, newspaper writing, they were always gung-ho on me expressing myself. I was always horrible at sports, but when I wanted to play Pee Wee hockey,
my mother just smiled at me until I ditched the idea. As for writing some of the things I do and them reading it, we’re just open enough to not make it an issue. Plus my parents act like the normal people that everyone knows that their folks are. There’s no pretense.

DS: I still read your material. I must say, it’s as strong as ever. You’ve toned down the rhetoric a bit. You’re not as controversial as you once were. Some would say you are kinder and gentler in your old age. Do you agree with this assessment?

GODFREY: I am wiser, not weaker. The fangs are sharper than ever, but don’t come out much. Yes, on the whole I’ve cooled down considerably. That’s the
nature of anyone maturing. Things that were the end of the world at 18 don’t carry the same brevity at 23. That’s life. However, I still retain the ability to instigate mass hysteria. It’s arguable that my biggest column ever was just last year with LSU. For God’s sake, the Louisiana governor called my boss.

DS: Is there going to be a Mrs. Steven Godfrey anytime soon?

GODFREY: I seriously doubt it. I’ve had a pair of boots longer than most of my relationships. The boots don’t talk, so they’re at an advantage.

DS: We’d love to have you at Ole Miss eternally, but you’ll be moving on soon. Do you have any idea where you will be working or where you would like to work? And what do you plan to write about? Sports, style, news, etc.?

GODFREY: Currently I have no idea other than an end date: December. I’ll be in the job interview gauntlet this fall.

DS: I appreciate your answering all these questions. One last question – when’s the
autobiography coming out?

GODFREY: In case nobody saw this coming, I am writing a novel. God help us all.