Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
I was raised in an Alabama family. There’s a lot of this, people associating with that school or, more specifically, the University of Alabama’s football team because they enjoyed a great deal of success in the middle of the 20th century. People like winners, and so all other things being equal, they side with the winner. Happens all the time.
So I had the room decorated in Alabama stuff. I remember watching the funeral procession go by as they drove Paul Bryant’s body from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery. I remember the sign hanging from the overpass: God needs a head coach.
Joey Jones was a brilliant wide receiver — he’s now the head coach at South Alabama. Mike Shula was a heroic quarterback — he coached Alabama and is now back in the NFL. Cornelius Bennett was a terror. The Goodes, “From Town Creek, Alllll-a-bama!” Derrick Thomas, Lee Ozmint and more, they were all legends on the radio and heroes when they appeared on television.
They didn’t always play on television back then, even in the 1980s. But they were there often. And when they weren’t, there was radio, with the call by Eli Gold (I’ve always liked him a bit more than most as a play-by-play man). The big games were always on television though. And they don’t come bigger than the Iron Bowl.
The 1984 Iron Bowl was a big game. Shula was Alabama’s quarterback on a bad 4-6 team. Auburn was 8-3 and one win shy of their second straight SEC title and Sugar Bowl bid. But Bo Jackson went the wrong way as a blocking back on fourth-and-goal:
The next year there was The Kick
Football was a big deal, but not the biggest deal. During part of that game I was outside tossing a ball around in the yard. My neighbor was an older kid. He would stand on one end of his yard and throw huge, deep bombs to me on the other end of my yard. It had to be three-tenths of a mile. He’d hurl it high and I’d catch the ball in my arms and it hurt, but he was clearly athletic. I remember my mother would come outside and tell me what this Bo Jackson guy was doing, and how Alabama was stopping him, or struggling to do so.
My neighbor would go on to break many of Bo Jackson’s high school football records, at the same school. He would play a little college football in Tennessee before his career was over. On the other side of my house was another neighbor who was a state champion high school quarterback. Talented neighborhood.
And that was the world I grew up in, in a world where the joke is you declare your allegiance when you move in or you’re assigned from birth. With no real earned allegiances elsewhere, the University of Alabama was the first choice.
It was not to last, and I think it started right here, in 1992, watching Pat Dye’s last game at Auburn. I was at my step-grandparents house. Alabama won, but this was a somber moment, the circumstances that precipitated his resignation notwithstanding:
Tomorrow, we’ll briefly discuss becoming an Auburn man through the football lens.
