"Alabama Touchdown"

Original Oil on Canvas Framed 26" x 30"

"Jimmie Johnson cuts between blocks by Fred Pickhard and Babe Pearce to score a touchdown in the 1927 Rose Bowl."

The Moment: Return to the Roses. Zipp Newman had a premonition. The Birmingham News sports writer watched Alabama rise up in Rickwood Field and slay mighty Sewanee, 2-0, and he witnessed a test of strong wills and stout fortitude. Alabama could have faltered. Alabama Didn't.

Sewanee had not lost a game in three years. Sewanee was riding a twenty-five game winning streak and had no doubts about number twenty-six. As Newman wrote, "The Crimson caught the Tigers in an ugly humor. No one but the Crimsons themselves will ever know the amount of punishment they took."

The war did not end with a single shot.

Alabama had brought along its own box of ammunition.

The Tide had its back against the wall. It bore the scars and wounds of brutal combat. But... Alabama unleashed its own attack, and Sewanee buckled. Newman wrote, "Only a Rainbow Division that saw service in the Argonne could have withstood the pounding the Tide gave the Tigers and Survived."

Zip Newman had witnessed the terrible storm. Thunder rolled. Lightning wore cleats. For him, it was indeed a premonition of what might lie ahead.

The Rose Bowl wanted Alabama back. Had the Crimson Tide been that good? Or that Lucky? The Rose Bowl didn't know. But the Rose Bowl certainly liked the show. California had not been able to forget the farms boys in Crimson who marched at will across the grass of Pasadena and sent the strongest team on the coast down for the count. Washington was desperately trying to get up at the end, but the body blows had taken their toll.

The Tide's impending duel with Stanford created so much interest across the vast American landscape that NBC radio made the decision to air the first football game ever broadcast nationally.

It began slowly and awkwardly, two teams trying to dance to different songs and tripping over their own feet. They traded mistakes. Fumbles. Missed field goals. They stood eyeball-to-eyeball with sledgehammer defenses. Neither gave an inch. Neither blinked. The game was a dogfight from beginning to end.

The Crimson wall did not break, but it did crack once, and Pop Warner's Stanford team slugged its way to a 7-0 lead at the end of the first quarter. As one sportswriter said of Alabama, "A football team of less brave souls would have folded up right there."