They traveled by train, carrying their own water. The trek across country took four days. They trailed 12-0 after two quarters, whereupon their coach offered the most efficient — eight words in all — halftime speech in the history of sports. They won 20-19 in a game regarded as a milestone in both Crimson Tide annals and the history of Southern football.
The date was Jan. 1, 1926. The venue was the Rose Bowl, then the only bowl. Alabama was the first Southern team invited to Pasadena, teams from the South then being regarded as second-rate. The opponent was Washington, which was such a prohibitive favorite that the humorist Will Rogers — who claimed he never met a man he didn’t like — found a team whose chances he hated. A “Tusca-loser,” he deemed the Tide.
Afterward, Ed Danforth of the Atlanta Georgian — he would later write for The Constitution and The Journal — proclaimed the victory “the greatest for the South since the Battle of Bull Run.” Damon Runyon, whose fiction would become the basis for “Guys and Dolls,” wrote of how a “human wildcat pulled (the) game out of the fire for the Crimson Tide.”
The human wildcat was a quarterback named Allison Thomas Stanislaus Hubert. Everybody called him Pooley. He would eventually settle in Waynesboro, Ga., where he died in 1978 at age 76. His son, Pooley Hubert Jr., is 87 and lives in Roswell. He wasn’t around for the momentous game — he’d be born four years later — but his house contains artifacts of his dad’s career, lovingly collected by his grandmother.
In “Roses of Crimson,” a 1997 Alabama Public Television documentary that’s available on YouTube, Pooley Jr. — that’s how he identifies himself, though Pooley isn’t an official part of his name, either — is interviewed. In the run-up to Saturday’s Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl between Alabama and Washington, he was happy to speak again this week of a game with which he has lived, albeit by proxy, for 86 years.
In that long-ago day, Western and Midwestern and even Ivy League schools were regarded as better at football than those in the South. (Although Georgia Tech under John Heisman had been named 1917 national champs.) “There was no SEC then,” Pooley Jr. said. “It was the Southern Conference. But Harvard and some of the other (northern) schools didn’t want to go to the Rose Bowl that year. That was the whole story at the time.”
Tulane was invited to face Washington, but the school declined for fear that its smallish players would be overwhelmed by the Huskies, also dubbed the Purple Tornado. An invitation was then extended to Alabama, which had gone 9-0 while yielding only seven points. (They beat Tech 7-0 at Grant Field and Georgia 27-0 in Birmingham.) Tide coach Wallace Wade gathered his players — and 55 barrels of water; he worried about sanitary conditions — and boarded a train for the coast.
“The trip was pretty hard,” Pooley Jr. said, repeating the account of his father. “When they got to California, they stayed in a nice hotel (the Huntington in Pasadena) and met some movie stars.”
Unknown at the time was that a screen idol was housed in the Bama backfield. Johnny Mack Brown, the Dothan Antelope, was a fleet halfback. By decade’s end, he would star alongside Mary Pickford in her first talkie. He would achieve greater fame as a cowboy star. Pooley Jr. recalls going to the cinema on Saturday afternoons to watch his dad’s former teammate.
Brown would score two touchdowns against Washington, including the clincher on a 30-yard pass from Hubert. The Bama quarterback saw his team through, and not just as quarterback. He also played linebacker, and his fierce tackling induced Washington halfback George “Wildcat” Wilson to sit out the third quarter, when the game — and the face of Southern football — was forever changed.
Alabama scored three touchdowns in seven minutes lead 20-12. Hubert started and finished the first drive with runs and ended the third with a pass that found Brown at full gallop at the Washington 3. If the Tide appeared a team playing with a new fury, there was a reason. At the half, Wade stuck his head in the locker room and said, “And they told me Southern boys would fight.”
Pooley Jr.: “Wade made that comment and turned around and walked. He let them sit and stew in their own juice. Some players got enthusiastic.”
Alabama won by a point. As “Roses of Crimson” recounts, crowds that gathered in theatres back in Alabama to listen to accounts of the game delivered via news ticker took to the streets in celebration. On the train trip home, the Tide were greeted by throngs at Southern stations and hailed as conquering heroes in Tuscaloosa. The South, which had lost a war barely 60 years earlier, had won something.
Pooley Hubert’s life traced an unlikely arc. Born in Meridian, Miss., he enlisted in the Navy at 16. After World War I, he attended Missouri Military Academy and was offered a scholarship to Princeton. Reports hold that he arrived in New Jersey too late to take the entrance exam. Pooley Jr. believes there was a more visceral explanation: “He didn’t like some of those damn Yankees.”
Traveling by train, Pooley Sr. stopped in Atlanta but found classes had started at Tech. He alit in Tuscaloosa. “His freshman year he played tackle,” Pooley Jr. said. “Wallace Wade put him in the backfield and that was the start of his career.”
After college, Hubert coached at Southern Miss — then known as the Mississippi State Teachers College — and VMI. Pooley Jr. grew up in Lexington, Va., and played football himself. He was a quarterback and tailback under Frank Howard at Clemson. (Asked for whom he pulled when Bama and Clemson played for the national championship in January, he said neither. “I didn’t care; I’m too old for it to matter.”) He settled in Atlanta and worked for the state rehabilitation agency until retirement.
After VMI, Pooley Sr. moved to Waynesboro and grew peach trees with Russ Cohen, who’d been Wade’s assistant at Alabama and later head coach at LSU. When Alabama staged a 50th reunion of the famous team, Pooley Jr. and his family accompanied his dad. “It was quite interesting to see how the people gravitated to the stars of that time,” he said. “I enjoyed basking in his popularity.”
About here, some of you may be wondering if the previous 1,000 words represent an excursion into alternate reality. Southern teams bad at football? Tusca-loser? But remember: Bear Bryant was 12 when the 1926 Rose Bowl was played; Bobby Dodd was a quarterback at Kingsport (Tenn.) High; Vince Dooley hadn’t been born.
It was a long time ago in a world that seems far, far away. Time and tide — no pun intended — would surely have carried Southern teams to prominence in what has become this region’s One True Sport, but it mightn’t have happened so soon without a team that boarded a train and set loose a human wildcat on the Purple Tornado.
Oh, and you’re doubtless wondering about the provenance of the “Pooley” nickname. Even the Huberts aren’t sure. “I asked my dad once how he got it,” Pooley Jr. said. “He said he didn’t recall.”
