"From their first national title in the 1926 Rose Bowl to the 2010 BCS National Championship Game, The Bama Way: Profiles of Champions highlights the life of one extraordinary player from each of the Crimson Tide's 13 national championship teams. Alabama 2004 team captain Todd Bates profiles the lives of these men who were true champions both on and off the field through one-on-one interviews with the players and their families. Unique to this one-of-a-kind book are the reproductions of each player's favorite piece of memorabilia. Replicas include Lee Roy Jordan's treasured coin flipped by President John F. Kennedy before the 1962 Orange Bowl, Ray Perkins official scholarship offer signed by the legendary Paul Bear Bryant, and Greg McElroy's name banner that hung on his locker at the 2010 BCS title game. Every Alabama fan will want to read about these outstanding men who built the great tradition that is Crimson Tide football!"--Publisher.
The University of Alabama boasts one of the nation's most storied football programs, and the recruiting acumen of coaches like Bear Bryant and Nick Saban plays a major role in that. The Road to Bama is a wild ride into the competitive world of college football recruiting, revealing how many Crimson Tide players found their way to Tuscaloosa.
What do four LSU fraternity brothers, three Auburn sorority sisters and a Birmingham volunteer church group have in common? They’re on a road trip to the iconic Flora-Bama Lounge & Package to first experience the world-famous Interstate Mullet Toss! Unbeknownst to them, they’re on an unprecedented collision course for fun, sun and subtle fame—meaning their lives will certainly never be the same. The Flora-Bama’s new owners, against the wishes of their minority partner, have cut a lucrative Hollywood deal to produce a “no-holds-barred…anything goes” documentary on the zany, voyeuristic beach party known for string bikinis, cold beer, frothy bushwhackers and of course, thrown fish. The filmmakers have coughed up major dough, and have been given full reign of the quintessential beach bar and its patrons for the duration of the risqué four-day event. What they witness and capture on film is wilder than anything Tinsel Town could have scripted. In their quest for a memorable time the college kids find unforgettable adventure. Amazingly, all the frat guys hook up with people who look better than them. The unfortunate fact for one is that unbeknownst to him, his significant other—a gorgeous church volunteer and preacher’s daughter—is underage—by almost two years. After a raucous night, an arrest lands the two in the local hoosegow, where that latter, salient fact is painstakingly revealed, warranting a more serious charge. The desperate kids seek and find help in the iconic bar’s founder, Joe, who uses local resources to try and ease them out of the jam they precariously find themselves. However, the gig is complicated by the fact that Hollywood producers have trained their cameras on the developing story, spooking the entrenched power players within the good ole’ boy network who will determine what level and brand of Southern-style justice is ultimately served—if at all. The loveable bar owner, Joe, and his inner circle of unique characters, musicians and connected island dwellers are challenged like never before to save not only the reputations and records of the kids he has befriended—but for posterity, the character of his beloved beach bar and the community it faithfully supports. A fast-paced yarn reminiscent of its predecessor, “They Met at the Alabama-Florida Line,” is the second fictional tome by Chris Warner set at the world-famous Flora-Bama Lounge & Package. It is another romantic, satirical tale seeking to draw semblance to Southern living, art, failed politics and pop culture.
The extraordinary story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime. During the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement, Bear Bryant and Joe Namath-two of the most iconic and controversial figures in American sports-changed the game of college football forever. Brilliantly and urgently drawn, this is the gripping account of how these two very different men-Bryant a legendary coach in the South who was facing a pair of ethics scandals that threatened his career, and Namath a cocky Northerner from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania-led the Crimson Tide to a national championship. To Bryant and Namath, the game was everything. But no one could ignore the changes sweeping the nation between 1961 and 1965-from the Freedom Rides to the integration of colleges across the South and the assassination of President Kennedy. Against this explosive backdrop, Bryant and Namath changed the meaning of football. Their final contest together, the 1965 Orange Bowl, was the first football game broadcast nationally, in color, during prime time, signaling a new era for the sport and the nation. Award-winning biographer Randy Roberts and sports historian Ed Krzemienski showcase the moment when two thoroughly American traditions-football and Dixie-collided. A compelling story of race and politics, honor and the will to win, Rising Tide captures a singular time in America. More than a history of college football, this is the story of the struggle and triumph of a nation in transition and the legacy of two of the greatest heroes the sport has ever seen.
What is it about sports that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why does winning compel people to tear down goal posts, and losing, to drown themselves in bad keg beer? In short, why do fans care? In search of answers, Warren St. John seeks out the roving community of RVers who follow the Alabama Crimson Tide from game to game. A movable feast of Weber grills and Igloo coolers, these are hard-core football fans who arrive on Wednesday for Saturday’s game: The Reeses, who skipped their own daughter’s wedding because it coincided with a Bama game; Ray Pradat, the Episcopal minister who watches the games on a television beside his altar while performing weddings; and John Ed, the wheeling and dealing ticket scalper whose access to good seats gives him power on par with the governor. In no time at all, St. John buys an RV (a $5,500 beater named The Hawg) and joins the caravan for a full football season, chronicling the world of the extreme fan and learning that in the shadow of the stadium, it can all begin to seem strangely normal. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is not only a hilarious travel story, but a cultural anthropology of fans that goes a long way toward demystifying the universal urge to take sides and to win.
A lively chronicle of how the 2020 Crimson Tide became Nick Saban's "ultimate team." Was Alabama's Crimson Tide in 2020 the greatest team of all time? The squad went 13-0 in a pandemic year, scored a combined 107 points against SEC powerhouses LSU and Florida, crushed Ohio State in a National Championship Game 52-24 in a contest that wasn't even that close, and followed it up with another top-rated signing class. Nick Saban called his boys the "ultimate team," but it wasn't just because they kicked the ever-living hell out of everyone on the football field. It was because the team leveraged a power and influence born of Southern pride to push back against a hateful legacy of racism that a populist president was exploiting to divide the nation. At a time when Americans needed real leaders in the face of so much hate, the sports world answered the call and fought back for the soul of the country. In the summer of 2020, the Tide players left their training facility and, led by their celebrated coach, marched to a campus doorway made infamous sixty years earlier by another political demagogue and showed what people can accomplish when they fight together for a just cause in the name of unity. The most powerful force in a state crazy for college football had chosen to make a stand and replace George Wallace's "Segregation forever!" with a different message, written by one of the players: "All lives can't matter until Black lives matter." There have been some great football teams through the years, and they all deserve respect. But here's what we know for sure: They all would have been appreciative of what this Alabama team represented, and proud of what it accomplished. The Crimson Tide in 2020 captured something special that moved it beyond the conversation of best ever, and into the place reserved for most important of all time.
Alabama fans love their football, and they also love a good laugh. Cartoonist Anthony Sisco has compiled his best work in the book "Crimson Tikes.'' There's a lot of Alabama football, but some fun political cartoons and laughs at every day life as well.
Bushwhacked at the Flora-Bama A Character-laden History & Tales from the Last Great American Roadhouse... The Legendary Flora-Bama Lounge & Package Store By Chris Warner with Joe Gilchrist. It has been called one of the last great American honky-tonk roadhouses, the perfect blend of beer and whiskey, laid back and wild, where you wipe your feet on the way out, an otherwise tattered, white sandy blip on the teeming gulf coast radar that for more than three decades has served as a romantic, raunchy, roadside respite for good music, good times, good views and most importantly great people. According to its uniquely colorful originator and operator, Joe Gilchrist, the legendary Flora-Bama Oyster Bar & Package Store is many things to many people...a place where all walks of life bikers, judges, professional partiers, politicians, dignitaries, derelicts, diplomats and coquettish coeds converge to embrace a special brand of unmitigated pleasure. And that s the way it should be, according to the muse-like Gilchrist, who for the past 50 years has piously lived his often-repeated mantra: Life is meant to be enjoyed. Gilchrist s simple formula for fun and frolic of bringing different people together in a beautiful spot to enjoy the universal language and tonic of music and laughter has made his tropical watering hole a global icon among expatriate dives. Playboy has called the loveable, makeshift hodgepodge of wood, rope and canvas America’s Best Beach Bar, and during Mullet Toss Weekend in April, or the ever-bustling Fourth of July weekend, you ll be lucky to find elbow room, much less an idle bar tender. In this book Joe Gilchrist tells the amazing history of the Flora-Bama, its inauspicious start, its phoenix-like rise, and tragic, near-demise at the destructive hands of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. Moreover, Gilchrist chronicles his quixotic run as a fun-loving and free-wheeling entrepreneur during what was undeniably a much simpler time, as well as his thoughts about the uncertain future of our great country and free market capitalism, in what is today an increasingly difficult small business climate. More than a spicy expose on cherished Southern comforts untold, this book is a lasting tribute to the magical, music-filled Mecca that has entertained millions, as well as a provocative, wisdom-filled analysis of integrity of our current class of American political leadership. This book will forever alter the way you view The Bama, Joe Gilchrist, and the United States of America.
