Gift lifts lifelong Tide fan
Alabama QB sends signed ball to fellow student, College Park grad hurt in accident
Paul “Bear” Bryant was known for his tough football practices at Texas A&M and Alabama, and even his prose carried a heavy hand with incoming prospects.
“Something wonderful has happened to you. You have become a University of Alabama athlete,” Bryant wrote to scholarship signee Don Ray in August 1964.
Following a handful of pleasantries in the tidy letter, Bryant cut to the heart of the matter.
“Let me put it this way,” Bryant explained. “Alabama is known nationally for its athletics. Its teams and individuals are BIG NEWS. Now this makes for a lot of flattering publicity, but it also makes (our) athletes sitting ducks for bad publicity. When plain Joe Student gets into some kind of a scrape, it usually isn’t news.
“But if a Tide athlete gets into the same situation it may be printed all over the country.”
Bryant wrote to Ray that as a newly hatched “public figure” Ray must be mindful of the way he dressed, spoke and behaved in public.
“All these things will be observed by people around you,” Bryant emphasized, “and theywill judge all of us involved in Alabama athletics by what they see in you.”
Based on the above there is no doubt Bryant, who died in 1983, would have been delighted with a quite unpublic, passionate act of current Alabama quarterback Mac Jones toward a Crimson Tide fresh man nearly killed in ahead-on collision in late October on Highway 43 in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Clutching a crimson and white Alabama football signed by Jones in her hospital bed this month, Don Ray’s granddaughter, Victoria Ray, sobbed and said, “What did I do to deserve this?” For the first time in three weeks, Victoria’s tears weren’t merely in anguish, thanks to Jones’ unforeseen compassion.
Growing up with heart set on Alabama
Victoria, a 2020 College Park High graduate from The Woodlands, had grown up hearing about her grandpa’s stint in Bryant’s Alabama program. While Don Ray was a reserve on a couple of national championship teamsin the mid-1960s and then left school when he entered the military and married Victoria’s grandmother Vicky, the Alabama football stories last forever.
And Victoria’s father, Kevin Ray, was more than happy to pass them along. When the time came to choose a college, Victoria knew there was only one option — one she’d set her heart on from the time she was in elementary school.
“Alabama,” Kevin said with a slight chuckle. “She only applied to one school.”
Kevin, a former lawman in Montgomery County and now manager of fleet operations for a trucking company, had been a good football player at Oak Ridge High in the late 1980s. He also was my first “boss” in journalism — as the sports editor of the Oak Ridge yearbook the Aerie when we were seniors in 1988-89.
I had signed up for the yearbook at the last minute entering our senior years, and soon we were an unlikely Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid about South Montgomery County: the brawny football player and the lanky basketball player, in perpetual search of hijinks coupled with shenanigans.
Our magnum opus wound up taking up a centerfold of the 1989 yearbook: When we skipped school on a February day of our senior year and attended the Mike Scott/Roger Clemens Open in The Woodlands— a golf outing for charity.
That day we “hung out” with Clemens, Scott, Nolan Ryan, Danny Ainge, Kevin McHale and plenty of other celebrity athletes of the era, and then immortalized it in the yearbook.
Along the way Kevin, often dressed in Alabama gear, consistently hammered me over the head with stories of Alabama football. As a guy who grew upon tales of Texas, Texas A&M, the University of Houston and Baylor, among other Lone Star State flavors, Kevin’s Crimson Tide yarns might as well have been about the University of Timbuktu.
But I certainly knewh e was passionate about this faraway place called Tuscaloosa. When he worked for the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, Kevin had the privilege of escorting the Alabama football team from Bush Intercontinental Airport to a resort on Lake Conroe and then over to Kyle Field in College Station on game days in 2013, 2015 and 2017.
“Nick Saban was impressed enough with the escort that he sent me a signed football with my name on it,” a beaming Kevin said of the iconic Alabama coach. “I was ecstatic about that.”
Kevin and I caught up at our 30year reunion in the fall of 2019 in The Woodlands, and he was even more ecstatic to share that the only daughter of he and his wife Melanie was headed to Alabama. Victoria has dyslexia, a reading disability, and her parents were especially proud of her always-flawless report cards through grade school.
“A grinder,” Kevin said lovingly of his daughter. “Victoria would call the Alabama admissions office weekly, asking what she needed to do to get into school.”
Jones’ small act changes ‘life forever’
Victoria was accepted and enrolled at Alabama this fall and among her new friends from Alabama was Brent Webster, from Northport, just above Tuscaloosa. The two were riding in his car on the night of October 29 when, according to a news report, a vehicle crossed over the Highway 43 center line and collided with Webster’s car.
Webster and the other driver died, and Victoria was in critical condition when Kevin and Melanie received word back in Texas that their daughter had been in a car crash north of Tuscaloosa. The couple threw a few things into their car at their home near Conroe and drove the 9½ hours to meet up with their daughter in a Birmingham, Ala., hospital.
“With all my years in law enforcement, when I sawa picture of the vehicle she was riding in, I would have never thought somebody could have survived that,” Kevin said. “She had two brain bleeds, and internal bleeding was a major issue. She broke everything from the waist down.”
Victoria since has had seven surgeries, and has been moved to a rehabilitation center in Birmingham. Kevin along the way kidded with Victoria, 18, that she was going to break his family record for surgeries, considering he’s had six over the decades for a variety of issues.
She smiled and responded, “Dad, you know me, breaking records like Mac Jones!”
Kevin and Melanie posted the humorous anecdote to social media and lo and behold, a signed football arrived at the hospital from Jones: “To Victoria, Prayers for a speedy recovery. Roll Tide. Mac Jones.”
She cried, embraced in the comfort of the Alabama family. Two of Victoria’s first words as a toddler were “Roll Tide.”
“Iwant the Jones family to know you have changed a young woman’s life forever, and solidified why we love our Bama nation so much,” Kevin wrote in an open letter to the Joneses.
Mac Jones’ mother, Holly, had been instrumental inher son offering a helping hand. A Ray family friend has set up a GoFund Me account for Victoria and her family, considering Kevin and Melanie are now spending most of their fall in Birmingham — they quietly celebrated their 20-year anniversary in the hospital— with the hopeVictoria can be back home in The Woodlands by Christmas.
“They’re making sure she can function in a wheelchair,” Kevin said of the latest at the rehab center. “Hopefully when Victoria heals, we can start with physical therapy to teach her towalk again. All she talks about is going home, getting back online with her studies at Alabama, and returning to Tuscaloosa in the fall.
“The University of Alabama has been amazing through this.”
Kevin paused, gathering his emotions after what his family has endured in the weeks before Thanksgiving.
“People we don’t even know,” he said, “have been amazing through this.”