The Greatest Story Ever Told

ALABAMA'S final game that season was against Auburn at Lakefield Park in Birmingham. A crowd of 5,000 paid 25 cents admission to watch, and special trains arrived from Selma, Aniston and Montgomery. Cadets fans decked out the Caldwell Hotel with red and white banners.

Besides Big Little the roster included Bibb Graves, who would later serve two terms as governor of the state, and William Bankhead, a future speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and father of the actress Tallulah Bankhead. Auburn was loaded with frat boys--three from Sigma Nu, three Kappa Alphas, two Phi Delta Thetas and one Kappa Sigma. This Greek chorus was cheered on with rousing choruses of:

Preck-a-ge-gex! Preck-a-ge-gex!
Who-wah! Who-wah!
Hallaballoo!
Auburn!

The Alabama faithful countered with:

Hullabaloo, hooray, hooray
Hullabaloo, hooray, hooray
Hooray, hooray
Varsity, varsity
U of A.

In the end Hallaballoo trumped Hullabaloo, as Auburn beat Alabama 32-22, the most points 'Bama would score in a losing cause for 52 years. The excitement was summed up in a front-page story in The Birmingham News. "As the game ended, a series of cheers rent the air; the sun went down, blotting out the day of the greatest football game that was ever played in the state of Alabama."

Considering both colleges had been playing for less than two years, that wasn't saying a whole lot.

EXODUS

OVER THEIR first decade the Cadets had nearly as many coaches as victories. Beaumont finished at one and out. He was the first, but not the last, Alabama coach to be fired after losing to Auburn. In 1893 The Corolla, the official college yearbook, brusquely observed: "We were unfortunate in securing a coach. After keeping him for a short time, we found that his knowledge of the game was very limited. We therefore got rid of him."

Beaumont begat Eli Abbott, a tackle and fullback on the '92, '93 and '94 teams (and coach of the '93, '94 and '95 teams). A ringer from Penn who had been lured away from his job as a foreman on Warrior River Lock 17, Abbott was not only 'Bama's second coach, but also, in 1902, briefly its eighth. Alas, he had better luck on the field (he scored four times in an 18-6 win over Tulane in '94) than the sideline ( Alabama went 0-4 in '93).