Month: July 2008

It was 1934, and the Depression was in full tilt in Alabama. Roosevelt’s New Deal, enacted just a year earlier, had yet to make itself felt. Amid the desolation there was one great hope for many Alabamians: the Crimson Tide football team.

“It was your source of pride,” said Ben W. McLeod Jr., who at 95 is the Tide’s oldest living former football player. “There was no money then.”

McLeod played on the fabled 1934 national championship team that beat Stanford 29-13 in the Rose Bowl. That squad included names now etched in Crimson Tide lore: Bear Bryant, Don Hutson, Dixie Howell and Riley Smith.

“The state of Alabama didn’t have a whole lot to be proud of back in those days,” said local author Winston Groom, who wrote The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama. “The football team was a great source of interest.”

A three-star athlete at Alabama, McLeod earned eight varsity letters in his time, winning one conference championship in basketball and three in baseball. A retired career Navy man, he lives in Pensacola, in the same house he bought upon arriving there. Tide memorabilia adorns the walls, and scrapbooks teem with old newspaper clippings.

On this recent morning, McLeod, whose wife of more than 60 years died just two years ago, sits in his living room, surrounded by family, including his son Ben W. McLeod III, who played defensive end and nose guard on Alabama’s 1965 national championship team.

As a football player on the 1934 team, McLeod played end behind the famous Hutson-Bryant duo, seeing only eight minutes of action in the Rose Bowl (though he became a starter the next season). Still, he said he walked tall on campus, like all the other football players.

“Yeah, I became a prima donna,” he said. “You better believe it.”

Historians have called the 1926 Rose Bowl – in which Alabama defeated the University of Washington, 20-19 – one of the most important college football games of all time. The game marked the first time a Southern team had ever competed in the Rose Bowl. Prior to that, the game usually pitted a Pacific Coast Conference team with one from the East Coast.

Alabama’s victory in 1926 famously is known for lifting Southern pride, said Wayne Flynt, an Auburn University professor emeritus and Alabama historian. But Flynt said the 1934 win had the same effect.

In 1934, Southerners were still reeling from comments made by U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who a year before had called the region “an untapped market for shoes,” suggesting that most folks below the Mason-Dixon walked around barefoot, according to Flynt.

“It (the Rose Bowl) was yet another way of responding to what Alabama had perceived was a putdown,” he said.

Howell, an All-America halfback and punter who had a brief career with the Washington Redskins, dazzled the 85,000 in attendance that New Year’s Day, catching two passes for touchdowns and completing nine as well.

One of McLeod’s most vivid memories involves the three-day train ride from Tuscaloosa to Pasadena. Along the way, he recalls meeting Johnny Mack Brown, a halfback on the 1926 team who had since become an actor in cowboy films. (Hollywood and college football were the only two U.S. industries that did not decline in the 1930s, Flynt said.)

The team stopped in Texas and Arizona to practice, McLeod said, and stayed in the Pasadena Hotel. “Everything was first class,” he said.

On the return trip home, McLeod and others on the basketball team stopped in New Orleans for a game against Tulane, which was followed days later with a game in Baton Rouge against LSU.

McLeod’s memories of Tuscaloosa in those years evoke a hardscrabble existence. He recalls waiting on tables as a freshman, which was part of his basketball scholarship. McLeod said he lived on $48 the next year.

But McLeod was lucky, compared to many young men of his time, according to Flynt.

“For a whole generation of white kids, football and baseball were two of the most important ways out of poverty,” said Flynt, adding that blacks had no chance of scholarships and held little interest in college sports as a result.

Born in Leaksville, Miss., McLeod and his family moved to the small mountain town of Geraldine, Ala., before he received a scholarship to Alabama.

While at Alabama, McLeod was tapped into Omicron Delta Kappa honor society. After graduating, he coached football at T.R. Miller, spending his summers playing semi-pro baseball in Alabama and North Carolina. As football coach, success did not come immediately. “I had a terrible first season and was almost run out of town,” he said.

But McLeod battled back. The next year T.R. Miller went undefeated, with the defense giving up a mere seven points the entire season. Tide football coach Frank Thomas visited McLeod in Brewton and recommended he pursue college coaching. “He kind of half way put me on a pedestal,” McLeod said.

The next day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and McLeod was soon stationed in Pensacola, where he’s lived ever since.

In the ensuing years, McLeod followed Alabama football closely. Ben III said Bryant would occasionally ask him how his dad was doing. “Bryant never did get close to the ball players, except the quarterbacks,” he said.

Bryant would stop by the house during recruiting trips to Pensacola and pay a visit, according to the elder McLeod. “Listen, there weren’t many people in the world better than Bear Bryant,” he said.

A picture of Hank Crisp – who served as head basketball coach for 19 seasons, not to mention athletic director and line coach under four different Alabama football coaches – still hangs on McLeod’s wall.

“I didn’t let him down,” said McLeod, recalling the time Crisp asked him to start in place of teammate Zeke Kimbrough, who’d suffered a broken cheekbone.

Up until eight years ago, McLeod drove to Tuscaloosa with his wife for home football games. “All I know was that Alabama was good to me,” he said.

(Press-Register, July 2008)