How Alabama football's first national championship was fueled by a lie
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This story is one in a series looking back 100 years at Alabama football’s first national championship, captured with a victory over Washington in the Jan. 1, 1926, Rose Bowl. It marked the beginning of a century of championship success.
To understand the lie Champ Pickens told to the Alabama football team ahead of the Crimson Tide’s 1926 Rose Bowl appearance against Washington, you must understand who Pickens was.
Pickens was an Alabama football fan, a Crimson Tide promoter, one credited with christening the “Million Dollar Band” name. In the words of Damon Runyon, a national columnist, Pickens was of the Old South, someone who was “suave and insidious in his approach,” someone who believed Alabama to be the greatest state in the United States.
Pickens had no official connection to the University of Alabama. His self-appointed task was to make Californians believe the “‘Crimson Tide’ is the greatest football team (ever) mobilized, and that what it will do to the Washington Huskies on New Year’s Day is a shame.”
Pickens also found a way to help his team personally.
And on Jan. 1, 1926, the lie he told motivated Alabama to win its first football national championship, starting a legacy that stands 100 years later.
How Champ Pickens helped Alabama football
Alabama was not supposed to play in the Rose Bowl, first played in 1902 and created to pit the best team from the West against the best from the East in Pasadena, California.
According to the Birmingham News, Tournament of Roses officials considered Dartmouth, which declared against it; Yale, which vehemently declined; and Illinois, which was not allowed because the Big Ten considered postseason games “taboo.” Officials ultimately landed on the Crimson Tide, the Southern Conference co-champion headlined by star quarterback and defensive back Pooley Hubert and halfback Johnny Mack Brown.
“What, if anything, is the matter with the University of Alabama?” the Birmingham News wrote. “The silence seems to be deafening. There is absolutely nothing or even less the matter with the University of Alabama and the writer has reason to believe that it would hearken to the big city words of the coast promoters if properly approached. … Alabama doesn’t lack national consequence. It doesn’t lack anything. Any team that can run up 250 points against a gallant seven for the combined opposition, a kindly team in this case, must have plenty.”
Most West Coast football fans did not agree.
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Facing a Washington team with players who averaged 190 pounds and each member of the roster over 6 feet tall, Alabama had its share of doubters. People thought “the game would be a breeze,” according to the Alabama Public Television documentary “Roses of Crimson.” One writer, according to the documentary, said Washington would “blow Alabama back across the continent.”
Washington had won the Pacific Coast Conference. It opened the 1925 season with a 108-0 win against Willamette, a game the Associated Press described as one where “Willamette didn’t have a chance although the Oregonians tried repeatedly to put over a long pass, which was their only trick in trade.”
Washington’s only blemish? A 6-6 tie at Nebraska.
Led by captain and fullback Elmer Tesreau, first-team All-American halfback George “Wildcat” Wilson and quarterback George Guttormsen, the Huskies arrived in Pasadena, California, having outscored opponents 464-39 in 11 games.
To Pickens, it didn’t matter what Washington was or how good the Huskies were supposed to be. He aimed to help encourage Alabama that “the South would rise again.”
Pickens brought sectionalism between North and South to a Rose Bowl played 60 years after the end of the Civil War.
According to Clyde Bolton, a former sports writer at the Birmingham News, Pickens wired the presidents of the Alabama civic clubs in Tuscaloosa to send telegrams to Alabama football players to encourage the Crimson Tide that the “honor of the Confederacy was on their shoulders.”
“They had to avenge losing the Civil War by beating these Washington Yankees,” Bolton said on “Roses of Crimson.”
Washington was not a part of the Civil War. Washington was not admitted into the Union until 1889.
“Champ knew that, but he was counting on the players not knowing it,” Bolton said.
It’s who Pickens was. According to Runyon, he convinced a group of firemen visiting Pasadena that Alabama would win by recounting “the antecedents of each and every player, concluding with further mention of what they would do to the Washington Huskies.”
How Wallace Wade helped rally Alabama football at Rose Bowl
Alabama needed help to prove Pickens’ right.
Through the first half of the 1926 Rose Bowl, Alabama trailed Washington 12-0, allowing a 1-yard touchdown run from Harold Patton and a 20-yard touchdown pass from Wilson to Johnny Cole.
Alabama coach Wallace Wade was leading his team through a shellacking, one that was proving critics right.
At halftime, Roy “Dizzy” Dismukes, a guard in his second season with Alabama, remembered the moment that turned things around for the Crimson Tide.
The first half, he said, Alabama was entranced with the spotlight that the Rose Bowl brought: “gawking at the huge crowd and all the spectacle.” The Crimson Tide, he said, did “very little in the way of playing football.”
In the locker room at half, Dismukes remembers Wade preaching a very similar message to the one Pickens gave.
“Coach Wade reminded us of our great responsibility to our Southern football friends and to the tremendous opportunity we had to put Alabama football on the map,” Dismukes told The Tennessean. “He then had us all crying when he told us our ancestors would be turning in their graves in disappointment if we didn’t come back and win.”
With Wilson missing the third quarter after a late first-half hit that knocked him out, Washington was unable to contain the response to Pickens’ message that had reverberated through the Crimson Tide locker room.
Scores by Hubert, Brown off a 59-yard pass from Grant Gillis and another Brown score off a pass from Hubert gave Alabama a 20-12 lead in the third quarter. And the Crimson Tide held off a surging Huskies team that rallied for a fourth-quarter score but failed to take the lead late after two first-half extra-point misses.
The lie was the fuel Alabama needed. According to legend, Washington coach Enoch Bagshaw saw the one-point loss to the Crimson Tide as an aberration.
“Any other day, we’d have beat you,” Bagshaw allegedly told Alabama coach Wallace Wade as they shook hands after the Crimson Tide’s Rose Bowl win.
Wade brought Bagshaw back to reality.
“We didn’t come out here to play no damn series,” Wade said.
Colin Gay covers Alabama football for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at cgay@gannett.com or follow him @_ColinGay on X, formerly known as Twitter.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: How Alabama football won its first national championship 100 years ago
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