My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  Saban might not coach the Tide to improbable wins, say Alabama fans. But he will not lose the handle on the games that are winnable and leave Alabama at the ugly end of a soul-killing upset. That is what they want from him, at least right now. In any event, it is unlikely any booster will look into Saban’s drill-bit eyes and tell him, “That ain’t the way Bear did it.”

  From the moment Saban was hired, there has been an electricity, a high-stakes poker feel to his every move. In Miami and on the national talk-show circuit he was badmouthed and lambasted for adamantly denying, as the Dolphins’ season wound to its 6-10 conclusion, that he would be the Alabama coach, then turning around and taking the job. He was called a liar, a snake, and other pleasantries. Of the firestorm he says, “We gave up a little bit to be here.”

  Then on April 21 Saban walked onto the field for the intrasquad game to that thunder, the pure and positive manifestation of the expectations at Alabama. “There is something special about this place,” he says. It is the only time in almost an hour and a half of discussion about football that Saban does not talk about work ethic, goals, discipline. “It was ... emotional.”

  Saban is not surprised that Alabamans agree with his ideas on what it takes to win. He grew up in coal mining country in West Virginia, pumped gas and broke down tires at a filling station his father owned. “The worst I could ever do is go back to West Virginia and pump gas again,” he says. “Life’s been pretty good to me.”

  He understands that in Alabama people believe you have to work for what you get. “The best thing about winning the championship at LSU was that it gave people hope, something to be proud of,” he says. “I don’t wear the ring. It wasn’t a personal accomplishment. But I think the people of Alabama understand what it takes to be successful, understand persistence, overcoming adversity, mental and physical toughness.”

  Saban does not see himself as mean, brusque, or distant: “I think most people who get to know me don’t have that feeling.” His wife, Terry, told him there might be a slight gap between how he sees himself and how others see him. That, she told him, “is your blind spot. And it’s as wide as the Grand Canyon.”

  “And she wasn’t even mad at me,” Saban says.

  There is no gap between what he wants and what Alabama wants. While “the name of the stadium’s not going to change,” says McNair, smiling, he believes that Saban, one Saturday at a time, will realign the program with its rich past. “It’s been a long, long time since I had this good a feeling.”

  To find the source of Alabama’s hunger, you have to go back further than the Bear. You have to go by train.

  It was always a tough room.

  Alabama’s first coach, E.B. Beaumont, went 2-2 in 1892. “We therefore got rid of him,” says the 1894 school yearbook.

  It was hard-nosed Wallace Wade who took Alabama to its first recognized national championship, in 1925, when his undefeated team beat Washington 20-19 in the Rose Bowl, the first time a Southern team had ever played in the game. Alabama won more national titles—and Rose Bowls—under Wade in ’26 and ’30. His successor, Frank Thomas, who had learned his football as a quarterback for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, took Alabama to Pasadena three more times, won a widely recognized national title in ’34—with Paul Bryant playing end—and a still-debated title in ’41. Some fans say Thomas’ best team was the undefeated Rose Bowl-winning squad in ’45.

  They were college boys in suits, but on the trips home from California, across Texas and the lower South, people stood beside the railroad tracks, waving and cheering. It was Faulkner’s South, Huey P. Long’s, and the Klan’s. Night riders in sheets still enforced their doomed ideals, and mill workers spun cotton all week for pocket change. Writers from the North and the West would question if it was wise to open the nation’s premier bowl game quite so often to the unsophisticated South.

  “Columbia or Pennsylvania would make a much better game with the Pacific Coast Conference representative for the 1946 Rose Bowl than would Alabama and, in addition, such a game would have that intangible thing called ‘class,’ something it can never have with a southern club being one of the participants,” wrote Dick Hyland in the Los Angeles Times. “Me, I’m kinda tired of hillbillies and swamp students in the Rose Bowl.”

  But from beside the tracks, people waved and waved. Reconstruction had faded into the Depression, and not much had changed. “It became our culture,” says Doug Jones, the former U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted two Klansmen for the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. “We were a poor state, with a great darkness in our history, but we took a team by train across the nation and played the best and beat the best.”

  From 1947 through ’54 Harold (Red) Drew kept winning at Alabama, but it is a testament to the expectations here that a coach who went 45-28-7 with berths in the Sugar, Orange, and Cotton bowls would be considered subpar. Over the next three years, under J.B. Whitworth, it got much worse. He was a nice man, people said, but he was 4-24-2. They needed something else.

  Bryant always said his impetus for winning was the fear that he’d have to go home to a plow in Fordyce, Ark. In December ’57, after having coached at Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas A&M, he came to Alabama. “One year [my family and I] were in Miami, and Auburn happened to be playing the Hurricanes,” says Fowler. “I walked out on the beach, and there were all these Auburn people. It was terrible. I looked up as one of these little planes went by pulling a banner, EAT AT JOE’S STONE CRABS, or something, and I got to thinking. The next day the Auburn people were still there, and a plane flies over, and it says ATTENTION AUBURN, THE BEAR LIVES. I don’t remember what it cost, but it was pittance for what I got for it.”

  There was a swagger then. “I had an Auburn friend, Spiro Gregory (Speedy) Mastoras,” Fowler says. “He would tell me, after another Auburn loss [to Alabama], ‘Wait till year after next.’ He knew that next year was out of reach.”

  What a shame it couldn’t last forever.

  Except for Stallings, no coach after Bryant lasted more than four years. Bear’s successor was Ray Perkins, a wideout on the 1964 and ’65 national championship teams, who went 32-15-1 and forever angered fans when he pulled down the tower from which Bryant would watch practice. It went back up after Perkins left. Bill Curry went 26-10 and was never beloved. (An 0-3 record against Auburn didn’t help.) Stallings won his title and 70 games, but the record book reads 62-25 after the NCAA stripped eight wins and a tie from the ’93 season, when a player was found to have had improper dealings with an agent.

  Then came everything but locusts. Mike Dubose, mired in a harassment scandal that the university would settle, went 24-23 as the NCAA investigated booster Logan Young’s involvement in the recruitment of a Memphis tackle named Albert Means. Dubose resigned under pressure after he lost homecoming to Central Florida.

  Dennis Franchione fled after two years (17-8) as NCAA sanctions became a crippling reality. He left for Texas A&M, and one Alabama fan, Morgan Plott, felt so betrayed that he went to Norman, Okla., to see A&M get whipped 77-0 by the Sooners in 2003. “I wanted to see Coach Fran get beat,” says Plott, “but I didn’t know it would be that good.” Alabama brought in Mike Price, who forgot he was in the Bible Belt and was let go after a visit to a topless bar, having never coached a game for the Tide. Then, in a hurry, Mike Shula was hired.

  People liked Shula, who had won a lot of games as a Tide quarterback in the ’80s. But, again, this is no business for a nice young man. Hamstrung by probation that was an earlier regime’s doing, Shula went 26-23 in four years. He was fired last November, after his fourth straight loss to Auburn. As it became clear that the program was losing ground, fans grew weary of players who talked big and did not do much, talked about realizing their potential and showcasing their talents, and then got beat on the line of scrimmage by Mississippi State.

  The expectations are cemented into the architecture. Four bronze giants watch over the promenade in front of Bryant-
Denny Stadium. Here stand Wade, Thomas, Stallings, and, of course, Bryant. But because this is Alabama, there is space left for a fifth pedestal. “How could it not be?” says Moore.

  Fans expect Saban to take that place. “The brick masons are probably already getting started,” says Jim Fuller, who won two national titles as an offensive lineman for Bryant and another as an assistant under Stallings. He has never seen the Alabama legions hungrier or more unified. Why else would 92,000 attend a glorified practice?

  “Just so long as he knows that 91,000 of them will be kicking his ass” if things go wrong, Fuller says.

  Does he really believe there are 1,000 benevolent Alabama fans? “Naw, I was being gracious.”

  They say college football is a matter of life and death down here, but it’s not. Winning only makes life sweeter, and, once in a blue moon, losing can too. Last winter Will Nevin and his father, Randy, who was dying of cancer, took a road trip to Shreveport, La., to see Alabama play Oklahoma State in the Independence Bowl. “He got cold, and he coughed some, and we lost,” Nevin says. “It didn’t matter. It was one of the best times we ever had.” Randy Nevin died on March 28. At his funeral it was noted that he loved deer hunting, his family, Moundville Nazarene Church, and one football team.

  109 YARDS RETURNED, TWO POINTS DENIED, AND ONE TWIST LEFT IN THE ROAD

  ESPN The Magazine, January 2014

  When I can, I watch the Alabama-Auburn game with my brother and sister-in-law, in the blue-collar foothills of Calhoun County, not far from the Georgia line. We do not scream at the television; we would not flint a Cheetos across the room. Our mama raised us right. We love football, but we have gotten old together in a place where padlocks and logging chains seal the doors to the mills and factories where people used to work. Football is not the world, merely our escape from it, and we are blessed to live in a place where dusty history and the here-and-now have both been kind to us, and rich for the University of Alabama. I would have liked to have watched the storied rivalry there, in their snug wood-frame house, for the rest of my days, wood smoke curling up through the pines, the sound of halftime drifting faintly out into the yard as we look over his beautiful hunting dogs. It is what I have done, off and on, since the days of the Bear, and now through the twilight of the BCS era. I would like to do that, but I know I am not welcome here anymore, even if I showed up with a 21-piece bucket and three-dozen Krispy Kremes.

  I am banned, for life. The past two times Auburn beat us, I was sitting in their house. First it was 2010, when Mark Ingram fumbled what seemed a certain touchdown and the ball rolled dead straight for what seemed like 50 yards, feet from the sideline, and through the end zone. “A football,” my brother Sam said, “ain’t even designed to roll straight. Try to roll one. Just try it.” And I was there again over Thanksgiving weekend, the last big weekend of the BCS, when God proved He is a vengeful God and smote Alabama with a 109-yard return of a missed 57-yard field goal. Considering how poorly executed our response was, when the impossible happened, I guess I should be glad He did not just turn us all into salt.

  Others will remember the two-point try in the Big House, at the end of the Ohio State-Michigan, or Oregon’s last-minute defeat of Oregon State, or that South Carolina and the Evil Genius whipped Clemson, again, or Georgia’s OT win over Tech, or Stanford over Notre Dame. But for me the last gasp of the final BCS weekend will always be the one stuck in my throat, as I watched a young man in orange and blue gather in the missed field goal and streak up the sideline with no one to catch him but some lumbering behemoths and a little-bitty kicker, beating us in a way no team has ever beaten another in the history of college football. Such a thing does not happen in the natural world. It made me wonder if that old nursery rhyme, the one every AU child hears, might be true.

  God must be a Tiger, too

  ‘Cause the sun is orange

  And the sky is blue

  Only divine intervention brings a people so low when they are just trying to have some time off. So I am unlucky. I made God mad at us, probably for whacking my brother in the head with a bucket while he was caught up in barbed wire fence in the summer of ’64; that, or some kind of coveting. Anyway, my brother did not even have to say it. I banned my own self.

  I know I said we were not crazed, drooling football fans. But I also pointed out, early on in this, that we live on this side of the Georgia line. We can take no chances. Roll tide. When this story gets out, I will be lucky if I am not banned from some parts of the Great State of Alabama altogether, and do not wind up listening to next year’s game on a taped-together transistor radio from inside a refrigerator box under the interstate. I have been banned before. I am also unwelcome at one auto parts store and at least one cellular phone franchise, for scaring clerks.

  But that’s what made the BCS era grand, in my eyes. Every weekend was life and death for those fortunate enough to be in the title hunt, and here in Alabama, if you can’t have the whole hog, why settle for a chitlin’? I worry, when the high sheriffs of the playoff era clamp their objective hands around our football, will every week of the season still be quite so dramatic, grim, wild. I guess it will make teams that don’t play defense—or play anybody—feel good, and I am all for making others feel good about themselves. I just wish I could have had a better, final image in my head, to remember it all by.

  Alabama student Elizabeth Manning comes from an Auburn household in Valley Head. Her father, Alan, graduated from AU, but stood helpless as his only daughter and only son left for Tuscaloosa. On the last big weekend of the BCS, father and daughter tried to be civil and watch the game together. “That lasted two and a half minutes,” Elizabeth said. He watched upstairs in the den. Elizabeth watched downstairs in the kitchen. “I was a lady, the entire game,” she said, not once screeching up the stairs as Alabama pulled ahead. But after Auburn’s miracle, her father ran down the stairs, flung a Tiger hat and T-shirt in her face, and crowed:

  “Get to wearin’.”

  Her last memory of the BCS is little better than mine.

  At least she can go home if she wants to.

  LONG TIME COMING

  Sports Illustrated, April 2004

  History really was made here, in the college town of Starkville, Miss., not far from the Alabama line. One of the last unwritten taboos in college sports really was busted here, amid the dark pine barrens and clear-cut timber and nowhere roads, when Sylvester Croom became the first man of his color hired as a head football coach in the storied Southeastern Conference. Yet four months later if you ask players, fans, or university officials whether history has been made, they tend to say much the same thing, at first: Mississippi State hired a coach, not a color.

  “We have never once mentioned in a press release that he is the first black coach in the SEC,” says Mike Nemeth, the school’s associate director for media relations. People at the school say that Croom’s race had nothing to do with his hiring, where the respected longtime college and professional assistant coach is being asked to snatch up a sliding program—one that may slip deeper still, as the NCAA mulls punishment for alleged recruiting violations under former coach Jackie Sherrill—and shake it into something people can be proud of again. The university’s president and its athletic director, praised for their courage, almost shrug. “The university could not have bought this publicity for a million dollars,” says the president, J. Charles Lee. But, “That courage issue was never a significant factor for me.”

  It is the same in the community. “Well, I asked my boyfriend, Buster, about him, and Buster said, ‘He’s going to be a good one,’ ” says Louise Ming, who is 78. Croom can win, people are saying. Too much time has passed to yammer on about color. Mississippi State has an A-plus football man, they say, and by God, that is all that matters.

  “Same thing as if he was white,” agrees Howard (Buster) Hood, who is retired from the dairy business and food industry and already has paid for his season tickets. “We give him a chance. He can’t do the job,
we don’t need him.”

  But something odd happens the more you let people talk, the more you ask them who they are, where they are from, what they remember about life before integration—or, if they’re very young, what they were told about that time—and it becomes clear, as a Mississippi writer once said, that the past is not dead here, nor even past. Croom himself, sitting in a spacious office with still-bare shelves, first swears that maroon and white, not black and white, are the colors of this football team, the only colors that concern him now.

  Then the 49-year-old coach drifts back in his mind to the people who bled and died in a struggle he remembers mostly through the eyes of a child and teenage boy—people who absorbed genuine hatred, who changed his society and made it possible for him to play his way onto the Alabama football team in 1971, the second year that Paul (Bear) Bryant allowed black players on his squad. And he begins to cry.

  His father, in the late 1940s, feared being lynched. Croom himself attended a newly integrated junior high school where students refused to talk to him or even look at him, where a spit wad spattered on his face the first day of classes.

  But none of that is worth crying over, for Croom. It is the memory of a white woman that is causing him to break down, a 39-year-old homemaker and mother of five from Detroit who volunteered to drive protesters during the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. Three Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her as she drove down a stretch of road, a black man in the seat beside her. It was more than the Klansmen could stand.

  “Viola Liuzzo,” says Croom, and he takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. It looks a little strange, to see hands that big wiping at tears. “When she got shot ... all that lady was trying to do was help someone. Just plain ol’ people, trying to do the right thing, and they killed her.”