According to the poet William Carlos Williams, the pure products of America go crazy. Judging from the life of Kenneth Michael Stabler, lost just last week, the pure products of Alabama go deep.
People of a certain age are to be forgiven for not feeling a twinge upon hearing that the football legend known as Snake had been taken down by cancer’s immaculate blitz. After all, he had last suited up as an NFL quarterback in 1984 and was last heard from as part of the Crimson Tide broadcast team in 2007, so there was no contemporary frame of reference for his deeds and misdeeds. Trust me, though; you would enjoy football a lot more if somebody like Kenny Stabler were playing it nowadays.
Somehow Snake turned his weaknesses for demon rum, fast women and faster vehicles into strengths, manifesting a lovable bad boy persona all the more remarkable for not being a persona at all. He wasn’t playing at being Kenny Stabler, never once.
Johnny Manziel might be considered by some a latter-day Stabler, because of superficial similarities involving hard living and hard playing, but we will never see Johnny Football win a Super Bowl, will we? Certainly not the way Snake won one for Oakland in 1977, swashbuckling as a Raider ought. Fred Biletnikoff was named MVP for catching four passes for 79 yards, even though Kenny completed 12 out of 19 for 180 yards. “He knows everything there is to know on a football field,” his Oakland tight end Dave Casper said. “But when they give him his game plan on Wednesday, he probably takes it and throws it in the wastebasket.”
Kenny learned all that stuff here.
He grew up in Foley, down in the tail-end of the state, where he and his father listened to Alabama football games on the radio, back when rough-hewn country boys like Pat Trammell, Billy Neighbors and Lee Roy Jordan were bringing Tide football back to the nation’s attention.
In junior high school, Kenny played every sport well, but his coach there, Denzil Hollis, gave him his special nickname for his curious football prowess, because he’d serpentine 200 yards to score from 20 yards out. (“Skinny as a snake, too,” Hollis once recalled. “When he turned sideways, he weren’t no thicker than an air-mail letter.”)
Baseball became his focus in high school, where he notched 125 strikeouts in his senior year as a fastball-firing lefty. The Show came calling, too; the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates each wanted to give him $50,000 to sign with them right out of high school. In the end, the money didn’t matter. He’d decided he wanted to play football, and play it for Paul W. Bryant at Alabama. “If it hadn’t been for sports, I wouldn’t have gone to college,” Kenny told Sports Illustrated years later. “My dad was a mechanic in a garage in Foley, and I’d have followed him, I’m sure. I went to college to play football, not for education.”
He’d received another kind of education from his father, learned at the business end of a shotgun the drunken old man was aiming at Kenny’s mother and brother one bad day in Foley. The skinny 16 year-old somehow managed to wrest the weapon away and learned this lesson: “After you’ve come home to find your dad pointing a shotgun at your mother and brother, third-and-long doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore.”
He had to wait his turn behind Joe Namath and Steve Sloan, but when Kenny finally became the starting QB as a junior in 1966, he led the Tide to a perfect 11-0 season, passing for 956 yards and rushing for 397 more. After Green Bay won the first Super Bowl in January 1967, the Packers’ coach, Vince Lombardi, was asked how it felt to have the best football team in the world. “I don’t know,” he replied. “We haven’t played Alabama yet.”
The pollsters saw it differently. Although the only unbeaten and untied team remaining at the end of the season, Alabama was relegated to third place behind Notre Dame and Michigan in both the AP and UPI polls, probably because many who voted that year resented the Tide still being an all-white team (it would not integrate until the 1971 season).
With Kenny displaying what Coach Bryant called “the best touch for long passing I’ve ever seen,” 1967 should have been his year. Instead, he got dropped. Missing too many classes, skipping too many practices, racking up too many speeding tickets, he was cut from the team by Bryant in June. (Joe Namath, who had been suspended for disciplinary reasons in 1963, before a bowl game, no less, sent Stabler a telegram that stated simply, “He means it.”)
He worked his way back onto the roster and into Bryant’s good graces and he never forgot it. “At the time I couldn’t see it, but he was teaching me a life lesson. I was close to throwing everything away and he saw something worth saving,” Kenny told author Kirk McNair later. “Don’t think I got off light. I got the hell beat out of me at practice, but he didn’t let me throw it away.”
Alabama’s 8-2-1 record in 1967 was anticlimactic, but the regular season ended with an Iron Bowl nobody who saw it would ever forget. With winds gusting to 27 miles an hour, playing in a steady downpour that turned Legion Field’s turf into mud, the Tide and Tigers were locked in a scoreless tie until the third quarter, when a John Riley field goal put Auburn ahead. With time running out in the fourth, the Tigers’ punter bobbled a snap and Alabama took over at their own 46. In two plays, the Tide splashed to the Auburn 47. On third down, Kenny called his own number.
It was an option play to the right. He appeared to be trapped by the Auburn defense, but if the ball was slippery, Stabler was more so. He faked a pitchout, then, sprung by great blocking, he broke loose down the sideline for 47 watery yards and an improbable Alabama touchdown. After Alabama held on to win 7-3, Auburn Coach Shug Jordan just couldn’t resist telling the press, “I don’t think the best team won today.”
Though newspaper reports indicate that fans were departing in droves after the first half, Kenny said later, “It still amazes me the number of people who will tell me about seeing ‘the run in the mud.’”
After he left Tuscaloosa, Snake became a pro legend, first with the Raiders, then the Houston Oilers and finally the New Orleans Saints, posting career stats (27,938 passing yards, 194 touchdowns) that arguably make him the best NFL quarterback never chosen for the Hall of Fame. He also set some pretty high standards for partying, drinking and carousing, but the only hall of fame for those achievements is in people’s memories. One sportswriter, Bob Padecky, said last week, “Snake made Johnny Manziel look like a Buddhist monk. Snake was more fun to watch than Chinese acrobats…Snake was a thrill ride, a roller coaster all by himself.”
Padecky might not have been so effusive in 1979, when he wound up on the wrong end of a curious incident down on the Redneck Riviera. 1978 had been an off year for Stabler and the Raiders, and Padecky, reporting on the team for The Sacramento Bee, had arranged to meet up with Stabler in Gulf Shores after the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans (a thrilling victory for Kenny’s alma mater over Penn State, if you recall). When the quarterback decided he didn’t want to talk after all, the reporter decided he would go talk to Kenny’s neighbors and friends instead, against Kenny’s wishes.
Once his three-part series ran in The Bee, Padecky got a call to come back to Gulf Shores after the Super Bowl for a real interview. After he arrived, instead of a heart-to-heart with Kenny, Padecky got a special trip to the Gulf Shores police station, once the local constabulary found cocaine in his rental car. He was arrested, charged with possession, but eventually allowed to drive out of town with a police escort to the Pensacola airport.
Once this story broke, Kenny was suspected of having framed the reporter. Investigations ensued, from the state of Alabama to the FBI to the NFL. If Kenny had been reluctant to talk before, he was positively taciturn now. He let it be known that he would talk to only one reporter in the world, and that was Jimmy Bryan of The Birmingham News.
Jimmy was not only a meticulous sports reporter, but a bit of a rounder like Kenny, whom he had covered in Tuscaloosa and also in Birmingham in 1974, when it looked as though the quarterback might be playing for the Magic City’s World Football League franchise. Uncharacteristically, the top brass at The News chartered a plane for Jimmy to fly down to Lower Alabama to get the scoop.
In Gulf Shores, Stabler opened up to Bryan, explaining that the only reason he’d stopped talking to the press was because the Raiders were playing badly and he didn’t want to hide behind excuses. He revealed that he was hurt by Raiders owner Al Davis’s criticism of the team (“They ask for loyalty from the players. I think that should work both ways.”) and that he was thinking about getting out at the end of his contract in two years. “Maybe I’ll retire and maybe not,” he said. “I can’t say right now.”
He didn’t retire then, of course, and nothing ever came of the myriad investigations. “I don’t know what happened,” he told author Pete Axthelm years later. “Maybe no one ever will.” There were other investigations, having to do with allegations of consorting with professional gamblers in the Oakland and Houston years, but no charge held against him could they prove.
After the pro days were over, Kenny became the best color commentator Alabama football broadcasts will ever have, because he knew so much about the game and he instinctively knew how to explain what was happening to a listener. Drinking and driving got him fired in 2007, but I think the University should have followed the old coach’s example and given Kenny a chance to work his way back to the team. When you heard Kenny on the air, you heard a pure voice of Alabama, an embodiment of Crimson Tide tradition, twang and all.
His easy manner resounded with people. We heard a lot of affecting reminiscences, most of which centered on how genuine he was. There was a boy who met him in Orange Beach one weekend and asked for an autographed picture. Kenny didn’t have one on him, but he thought nothing of driving back to his house on Ono Island nearby to pick up a photo to sign for his young admirer.
Kim Bryan, Jimmy’s daughter, told about the time she babysat two of Kenny’s kids at a downtown Birmingham hotel while he was being honored as a quarterback on Alabama’s “Team of the Century.” “The girls and I were watching Hook on TV, and every half-hour or so he’d pop in from downstairs in his tux, just to say hey. It was a great honor and all, but he really just wanted to be with his girls.”
A Bama booster from the Shelby County Alumni Association, Lori Stamper, remembered seeing him before a home game. She was surprised to see him cross the Quad on foot, thinking surely he’d have been chauffeured around in a golf cart surrounded by security. “He stopped, smiled, asked how I was doing. It was like Kenny Stabler and I were old friends, and the warmth was immediate, genuine. I was almost taken aback at the familiarity,” she said.
Mal Moore biographer Steve Townsend noted that no less a star than Tom Hanks had tweeted about his passing. “Despite his human frailties, he had a following,” Steve said. He also passed on a poignant tweet Kenny had posted last September 11: “Happy birthday Coach Bryant. You saved me from myself by giving me a second chance. I think of you everyday. God bless you for making me believe.”
When he came to the end of his fully lived life last Wednesday, Kenny Stabler was 69 years old…the same age his beloved coach was when he passed.
If he had a credo, it might have been expressed best to Robert Jones of Sports Illustrated in 1979. “’Getting nowhere fast,’ he says. ‘I like it. As philosophies go, it’s as good as any. What counts isn’t so much where you’re going—I mean, we all end up in the same place—but what counts is the getting there. Kind of simple-minded, maybe, but it’s fun.’”