The Greatest Story Ever Told

By '95 Big Little had graduated, and things, to use another oxymoron, got pretty ugly. The Thin Red Line, as 'Bama was known, again lost all four of its games, this time by a combined score of 112-12. When Alabama hosted Auburn for the first time in Tuscaloosa , the Red Line was very thin indeed: Auburn won 48-0. A Cadet named Hill Ferguson lamented that "nobody seemed to have enough interest to take a picture of the team."

Abbott begat yet another Quakers alum, Otto Wagonhurst, whose '96 reign spanned just three games and two months. Wagonhurst was supposed to be paid $750, but the senior class, which underwrote his salary, could only come up with $200 after the final game--a 20-0 loss to Mississippi State . The class raised $50 and mailed it to him the next spring. In 1927, after the Crimson Tide had become a national power and won the Rose Bowl , the college's athletic association finally cleared its conscience and cleaned up its books. Wagonhurst was tracked down at an Akron rubber company and paid the remaining $500.

Wagonhurst begat Allen McCants, who won the only game he coached, 6-0 over the Tuscaloosa Athletics. That was also the only game Alabama played in '97. The year before, university trustees, concerned over the conflict between athletics and academics, forbade the team from traveling off-campus. Students protested, to no effect. So began the Great Alabama Football Schism, which resulted in no team and no football in '98. Under pressure from students and faculty, the travel ban was lifted in '99, and play resumed.

JOB

AFTER PLAYING against lineman Bully VandeGraaf, Alabama 's first All-America, in 1913, Tennessee 's Bull Bayer observed, "His ear had a real nasty cut, and it was dangling from his head, bleeding badly. He grabbed his own ear and tried to yank it from his head. His teammates stopped him, and the managers bandaged him. Man, was that guy a tough one. He wanted to tear off his own ear so he could keep playing."

KINGS

JOHNNY MACK BROWN was born in Dothan , Ala. , and enrolled at the university in 1922, the year it first gained national prominence by beating Marion ( Ala. ) Institute 110-0 in the season opener and John Heisman 's Pennsylvania Quakers 9-7 in Philadelphia . A sensational open-field runner dubbed the Dothan Antelope, Brown glided across the gridiron in "low cut" football shoes in an age when players universally wore high-tops.

Those shoes were designed by Wallace Wade , the Crimson Tide's first semimythic coach. A perfectionist who used a metronome to hone his players' timing, Wade led the team to the Rose Bowl three times, had three undefeated seasons and won three national championships in his eight years as coach. Brown was the halfback on the unbeaten 1925 squad, which had eight shutouts, outscored its regular-season opponents 297-26 and came from behind to upset Washington 20-19 in the Rose Bowl , the first time a southern team had been to Pasadena . He caught a couple of TDs on pass plays--one for 58 yards; the other, 62--and was the leading ground-gainer.

Two years later Brown returned to Southern California to become a movie star. He appeared in 167 features--from Slide, Kelly, Slide (1927) to Apache Uprising ('66) and starred as Billy the Kid in the eponymous film, twirling the real outlaw's six-shooter. Asked what he thought of his star player's acting career, Wade snorted, "He has to make a living doing something."

SONG OF SONGS