Bama has good record in the Rose Bowl

By By Bob Martin, The Alabama Scene
The 1926 Rose Bowl was perhaps the most important game in Southern football history. For the first half century of college football the game was dominated by powerhouses in other parts of the country.
According to History Professor Wayne Flint of Auburn University, the big newspapers of that time were still writing very demeaning articles about the intelligence of Southerners.
So in 1925, when the University of Alabama, coached by Wallace Wade, had its first unbeaten season, giving up only seven points, it remained an unlikely participant in the Rose Bowl. But eastern schools, under fire that year for stressing athletics over studies, bowed out of competition for the Rose Bowl game.
So Rose Bowl officials, facing a problem of acquiring competition for the powerful University of Washington, booked Alabama, a team they thought would be a pushover for the Huskies.
The decision was a defining moment for football in the South, particularly for the Crimson Tide. According to press reports of the day, the team made its way west on a four-day train trip playing cards and studying their playbooks. But on arriving in California, Coach Wade, fearing that his team was being distracted by the media, locked down the team and put the players through some of the most rigorous practices ever.
With ears tuned to radios across Dixie, there was great pride and anticipation as the game started. But reality set in as Washington led at halftime 12-0. In the locker room Wade played on regional pride, only speaking eight words to the team: “And they told me Southern boys would fight.”
In the second half the team began responding to those words. Quarterback Pooley Hubert crashed the Washington line until he scored. Johnny Mack Brown, the running back who would later become a Hollywood star, caught a 50 yard pass in full stride for a touchdown. Everyone in the stadium was stunned. “Pooley told me to run up field as fast as I could,” recalled Brown. “When I reached the three- yard line, I looked back and sure enough the ball was coming over my shoulder. I took it in stride and went over carrying somebody with me.” The radio audience across the South went wild when Alabama walked off with a 20-19 victory.
In nearly every town across Dixie the team’s train passed through on the trip back to Tuscaloosa they were serenaded. In New Orleans a thousand Tulane students turned out when the train pulled into the station. And back at the University of Alabama campus, the entire student body and most of the town turned out for a parade that ended with speeches and tributes on the Quad.
After finishing the 1926 season 9-0-1, Wade’s team was invited back to the Rose Bowl in January, 1927 and tied Stanford 7-7. In Wade’s final season, Alabama finished 10-0, earning another trip to the Rose Bowl, where it defeated Washington State 24-0 on Jan. 1, 1931. Among the stars of the team was Fred Sington, who later became a successful Alabama businessman.
After Wade left Alabama to become the head coach at Duke, Frank Thomas took over at Alabama and launched another winning era for the Crimson Tide. Thomas compiled a record of 115-24-7. In 1933, after the creation of the Southeastern Conference, his team won the first SEC title.
A year later, his team went 10-0, including a 29-13 victory over Stanford in the 1935 Rose Bowl. Among the stars of that team were Don Hutson, Dixie Howell, and Paul Bryant. Hutson went on to become a star for the Green Bay Packers and a member of eight Halls of Fame, including the NFL and college football halls.
Thomas became the first to coach teams that appeared in what at that time were the four major bowls: the Rose, Cotton, Orange, and Sugar. His 1945 team also finished with a 10-0 record, defeating Southern California 34-14 in the Rose Bowl.
Birmingham natives Harry Gilmer and Vaughn Mancha were the stars of the team and the last All-Americans for Coach Thomas. He stepped down after the 1946 season because of declining health and was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951. I recently finished reading the book “Coach Tommy of the Crimson Tide” about Coach Thomas, written by Naylor Stone, the former sports editor of The Birmingham Post-Herald. It’s out-of-print, but worth a read. In my opinion he and Wade are the “forgotten coaches of Alabama football.
They coached Alabama to a 4-1-1 record in the Rose Bowl, the most important championship game of that era. While I know that the BSC Champtionship Game is not techincally “The Rose Bowl,” it’s Alabama’s Rose Bowl and they are unbeaten there in championship games. Can they stay that way against a team they have never beaten?
Some of the information in this column was obtained from Alabama Public Television’s documentary “Roses of Crimson.”
Bob Martin is editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent. Email him at: bob@montgomeryindependent.com