Crimson Tide hoops carves out spot on football-crazed campus
Basketball fans suffer a bad bounce, living in a football town. That’s especially true when the University of Alabama claims 18 national championships on the gridiron, while collecting no NCAA titles — yet — on the men’s court.
Stan Adams grew up a fan of Crimson Tide sports, but it wasn’t until a strong early 20th-century men’s hoops run under head coach Mark Gottfried that the UA grad, now director of sports for Tuscaloosa Tourism and Sports, realized: “Wow, Alabama has a basketball team,” he said, laughing.
Right now, the Tide most definitely has a team, No. 5 in the nation, about to take on UCLA in the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 on Sunday, after having swept both the SEC regular season and tournament championships.
Though money is on Gonzaga and Baylor to battle for the top spot, oddsmakers, prognosticators and fans expect Alabama to make a strong run at Final Four. If so, it’d be the first time in that bracket for the Tide.
“Alabama fans can be pretty demanding, I would say even unrealistic in their expectations, sometimes,” said Matthew Kelley, a devotee since Wimp Sanderson checked in as head coach.
Kelley hopes new fans will be drawn in, and old ones reassured, by not just this season’s wins, but by the system of tough defense balanced with buckets of three-pointers — “In the NBA, they call it ‘3-and-d’,” Kelley said — being instituted by head coach Nate Oats, in his second season guiding the Tide. “It’s about building a culture,” he said. While working at UA, Jackie Wuska couldn’t say it out loud, but she’s actually a bigger fan of hoops than of that other sport.
“This is so much more than just a football school,” said Wuska, in her second year as president of the Tuscaloosa Tip-off Club, a booster organization founded roughly 53 years ago under C.M. Newton, the coach hired by Paul W. “Bear” Bryant in 1968 to bolster UA basketball.
The 2019 hiring of Oats helped membership in the Tip-off Club grow 29 percent, said Wuska, president and CEO of United Way of West Alabama, and the excitement is palpable. Fans are seeing the payoff from dedication over up-and-down years, under previous leadership. They’re feeling their Oats.
Wuska heard from assistant coach Antoine Pettway that the team was “blown away” by hundreds who greeted the returning SEC champs at Coleman Coliseum two weeks ago. It’s the kind of support shown more often for returning football champs.
“They’re fired up,” said Greg Byrne, UA director of athletics. “And that’s what we want the fans to be, excited by our programs, in fall, but also throughout the winter and in spring.
“Obviously, a lot of our fans and our community want to see us be great in men’s basketball, be great in women’s basketball .... ” he said, noting gymnastics recently won its 10th SEC championship, and that the track, rowing, women’s swimming and diving and other teams have ranked high this year.
Men’s baseball — which leads the SEC in all-time wins with more than 2,500, and has scored 13 regular-season and seven tournament SEC titles — and women’s softball — winners of a 2012 national championship, and 11 SEC championships — is expected to continue prospering, he added. And
basketball’s a key to that culture of excellence.
“This is an absolute dream, this season,” said City Councilman Kip Tyner, who considers himself an anomaly, another longtime Tuscaloosan who loves basketball a little more than he does football, dating back to days when his father would take him to games in Foster Auditorium.
“We’re finally seeing we can be a championship city all around,” he said. “It’s a great time to be crimson.”
In Tuscaloosa, football is the gravitational black hole, drawing everything into its event horizon. Football’s the sun around which all the planets, moons and other satellites orbit. Football’s the monetary angel, the cash cow, the goose that lays the gold that fuels the entire sports ecosystem, adding a not-insignificant chunk to Tuscaloosa’s economy.
Whatever overwrought image you choose, Bryant-denny Stadium casts a long shadow, one that engulfs even fellow Tide champions in gymnastics, softball, golf and other sports. Picturing UA means envisioning statues of Bear Bryant and Nick Saban looming over a stately walkway leading to the 10th-largest stadium in the world.
Basketball fans have those images embedded, too. Football’s unavoidable, growing up here, attending school at UA.
But UA hoops fans have also got cardboard Wimp face masks, and the repainted center court A from Coleman’s “Plaid Palace,” drawn from the coach’s loud tartan jackets, a rough equivalent to the Bear’s houndstooth hats.
They’ve got proud memories of Newton recruiting UA’S first Black athlete, Wendell Hudson, the year before Bryant signed Wilbur Jackson, and decades later of student groups such as Mark’s Madness and Crimson Chaos churning Coleman into an intimidating court to visit.
They’ve got the clarity of grace and power not covered in padding, and the immediacy of feeling that a crowd’s reactions can power emotions, turn a game’s momentum.
“I love football, but I don’t necessarily recognize those fellas on the streets, because they’re wearing helmets,” Wuska said. “With basketball you see their facial expressions as the game unfolds. You can form a personal connection with them. You recognize them on the street to say ‘Hey, we’re proud of you; you’re our team.’ “
Kelley’s wife, Kelly Pivik, describes herself as a basketball widow each
March, vowing to write him letters, and send photos of their son. She’s joking. Mostly.
“When it is played unselfishly, when they’re passing the ball ... it’s like poetry in motion,” said Kelley, an instructor of English and psychology at Shelton State Community College, and a fan of both NBA and college ball.
He believes Alabama basketball will continue to ascend.
“One of the things people have said my entire life: ‘Alabama is a football school; it can’t be a basketball school,’ “he said.
Kelley stuffs that notion in your face, noting Florida, Oklahoma and Miami have, at various points in his lifetime, boasted excellent programs in both football and basketball. Why not Alabama?
Crimson Tide football has been around roughly 129 years, kicking off in 1892. Tide men’s basketball falls just short of a century, begun in 1923, two years before the football team, led by running back and later Hollywood cowboy-movie star Johnny Mack Brown, would score its first national championship in the Rose Bowl.
Tide basketball really began to rise in 1968, when Bryant, not only a former UA tight end, and head-coaching legend, but the school’s athletic director, sought out former Kentucky player Newton. That same year UA opened the $4.2 million Memorial Coliseum, later renamed Coleman, to replace Foster. The coliseum seats a little more than 15,000, while Wpa-era Foster could hold only about 3,800.
Over 12 seasons, Newton’s teams went 211-123, with three straight SEC titles, the only program to hit that streak besides Kentucky. His chief assistant Sanderson outdid the old boss even better in his 12 years at the top, going 267-119, winning four SEC tournaments, and making the Sweet 16 five times. UA reached its next pinnacles under Gottfried, from 1998 through 2009, yet still took no NCAA crowns.
Tide women’s basketball only began in 1974, but has seen some peaks, advancing to the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament’s Final Four in 1994, and to the Sweet 16 six times, with 10 overall appearances.
Although not part of the athletic department, UA also sports men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams, both multiple times national champions: the men in 2013, 2018 and 2019, and the women in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021, having won that seventh title earlier this month.