Memory Of The Week: The Man Who Brought Football To Tuscaloosa
Editor’s Note: As part of an ongoing partnership with our friends at Historic Tuscaloosa, Patch will be bringing you a quick piece of local history per week provided by those working hard to preserve the memories of our community.
TUSCALOOSA, AL — Plenty is being discussed at present about the Alabama football head coaching job, but this installment of Historic Tuscaloosa’s Memory of the Week takes us way back to the man who started it all in Tuscaloosa.
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There’s not a statue of William Gray Little on the Walk of Champions, no. But his name does grace one of the oldest buildings on the University of Alabama campus campus.
Little was born in Livingston in 1873 to a father with the same name and Laura Jane Hibbler Little and would go on to work as a judge before he died in 1938. But his impact was made in an unlikely place and its influence persists to this very second in Tuscaloosa.
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Historic Tuscaloosa’s Event & Digital Media Coordinator Sarah-Katherine Helms told Patch that Little was first introduced to football during his days as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Helms explained that Little came back home to help take care of his family after the untimely death of his brother and chose to enroll at the University of Alabama for the fall semester of 1892.
Additionally, Alabama Heritage says Little had hoped to attend an Ivy League college but returned to Alabama with “a pair of cleats, a leather football, and tales of the new sport that had captured the imagination of the Northeast and Middle West.”
Once on campus, Little set out to encourage his schoolmates to participate in the rugby-style sport folks called “football.” That same year, the University of Alabama fielded its very first football team with Little as the team captain and E.B. Beaumont as the first coach.
Originally from Fort McKavett, Texas, Beaumont coached just one four-game season in 1892, leading an Alabama team without a mascot to a 2-2 record. This was more than a decade before the “Crimson Tide” was adopted as the football team’s nickname in 1907.
Few records from those days exist, apart from a book at the Paul W. Bryant Museum that was originally donated by Grafton Hocutt — the undertaker responsible for Bryant’s funeral arrangements.
Alabama’s first football game was played on Nov. 11, 1892, against Birmingham High School, which also represented the very first organized football game played in the Magic City.
Little started at guard on a team that also featured future Alabama Gov. Bibb Graves and the first game was initially intended to be a practice match before UA was set to take on the Birmingham Athletic Club the next day. The boys from Tuscaloosa won a blowout first victory, 56-0.
The reference book reads: “The newspaper accounts of the game contained very little of the details except that Alabama scored 28 points in each half and touchdowns were made in the first half by [D.A.] Grayson, who scored after a 75-yard run, and by [G.H.] Kyser, who scored following a 50-yard end run by [Dan H.] Smith, by Little on a run for 30 yards, and by [T. Sydney Frazer] and Smith.”
The next day, Alabama was dealt the program’s first-ever loss in an odd 5-4 defeat to the Birmingham Athletic Club. Both teams leaned on the “flying V” or wedge formation and fumbles were plentiful.
Alabama would get revenge, though, meeting the Birmingham Athletic Club on Dec. 10, with the team from Tuscaloosa winning the game 14-0 at Lakeview Park in Birmingham. Alabama depended on the hard running of Grayson and Eli Abbott, who both scored touchdowns.
Then came the very first Iron Bowl — although it would not be until 1964 when iconic Auburn coach Shug Jordan coined the nickname of a contest that has been dividing the state of Alabama ever since.
On Feb. 22, 1893, the two schools met at Lakeview Park and played in front of 5,000 fans — a game ultimately dominated by Auburn, who went on to win 32-22.
The University of Alabama embraced this violent new game and played its home games on the Quad until 1914, before University Field was built in 1915 and later renamed Denny Field in 1920.
It was also fitting that the new football stadium was built adjacent to the brand-new Little Hall — the university’s first stand-alone gymnasium near the president’s home.
Helms pointed out that University Field had its sidelines set up for Model-T headlights to light the field when early fall darkness fell.
She went on to say that students quickly took to the sport and jammed as close to the action as possible — a celebrated tradition to this day.
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