IRON BOWL: Bringing game to Jordan-Hare one of Dye’s biggest victories

When Pat Dye signed on as Auburn’s 22nd head coach in 1981, he saw a football-stadium-sized problem he was determined to fix.

Every year since the rivalry between Alabama and Auburn was renewed in 1948, the Tigers would pack up their buses, drive the two or so hours north to Legion Field and be greeted by at least 50,000 fans, parking attendants and ushers draped in crimson and white.

A statue of Bear Bryant, Alabama’s legendary coach, greeted the players as they walked through the “Old Gray Lady’s” main entrance.

On paper, it was considered a neutral venue. On a different set of paper, Alabama’s annual media guide, it was considered one of the Crimson Tide’s two home fields.

It prompted former Auburn Board of Trustee member Morris Savage, a lawyer from Jasper, to once say Legion Field was “as neutral as the beaches of Normandy were on D-Day.”

That, among a bevy of financial, competitive and respect issues, was what prompted Dye to strike up a conversation with the real-life version of that
Legion Field statue shortly after arriving on the Plains.

Dye’s recollection of the conversation this week, heading into today’s 20th anniversary of the first Iron Bowl to ever be played in Auburn, was brief but prophetic.

“I guess you’re going to want to take the Alabama-Auburn game to Auburn,” Bryant said.

“We’re going to take it to Auburn,” Dye replied.

“Not while I’m around, Coach.”

“Well, you’re not going to coach forever.”

“We’ve got a contract through ’88.”

“We’ll play in ’89 in Auburn,” Dye recalled saying. “That was in 1981. We knew.”

‘Running our business’
The process began long before 1981, though. It started in the late 1920s and early 30s, the dormant era of the Auburn-Alabama rivalry, former Auburn athletic director David Housel said.

That’s about the time when Jeff Beard, a future Auburn athletic director, and Ralph “Shug” Jordan, the future winningest coach in program history, enrolled as students at Auburn University. At that time, the Tigers were playing one, maybe two games per year at their home stadium while having
the rest of their 11 games at opponents’ or neutral-site stadiums.

“Auburn was a road team,” said Housel, a published author of numerous books about Auburn sports history. “They dreamed of having a facility big enough and good enough to have our games in Auburn.”

The first expansion came in 1949, increasing the capacity from 7,500 to 21,500. Three more stadium expansions added 40,000 more seats.

By then, Auburn’s oldest rival, Georgia, had agreed to come to Auburn for the first time in 1960. Georgia Tech followed in 1970. Tennessee, with some resistance, agreed to come for the first time in 1974.

Alabama, though, wasn’t budging. And until then, Auburn couldn’t consider itself a “full-fledged member of the Southeastern Conference,” Housel said, because someone else was telling it what to do.

“As long as someone else can tell you where to play your home games, you’re not in control of your business. You’re not in control of your destiny,” Housel said. “Essentially, they were running our business, telling us where to play our home games.”

Auburn’s contract said it had to play at Legion Field until 1988. Alabama’s said 1992.

The handwritten extension was personally penned by Bryant, himself, shortly before he passed away in January of 1983.

Needless to say, Auburn was only locked into the deal until 1988.

And for what it was worth, Auburn, by all means, appreciated the Legion Field experience. Having tickets evenly divided meant that Auburn fans in Birmingham got a chance to see their team close to home and it created an atmosphere unlike any other in college football.

“It was just an incredible environment,” said former linebacker Quentin Riggins, who played his first three Iron Bowls at Legion Field. “Half the crowd would be cheering after every single play.”

It just wasn’t Auburn.

The breakthrough, Housel said, came in 1988, when Alabama assistant AD Sam Bailey called Dye. Alabama was set to unveil a new Tide Pride season-ticket plan, and Bailey said the school desperately needed more than its usual half-of-the-stadium allotment.

He posed the idea to Dye that whatever team was considered the home team should receive all the tickets while the road team received the usual 10,500 it would get when it played anywhere else in the conference.

“That phone call broke the logjam,” Housel said.

Auburn’s agreement to play a genuine road game at Legion Field in 1988, after working through some other paperwork issues and agreeing to play one more “home game” at Legion Field in 1991, basically made it official.

The Iron Bowl was coming to Auburn.

‘Hyped up’
For some, the tailgating began Monday, Nov. 28 — nine days after Auburn’s 20-3 victory at Georgia set the 8-2 Tigers up for a chance to claim a share of their third consecutive SEC title against undefeated, No. 2 Alabama.

“It was wild,” Dye said.

Dye knew if he couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement, his players would certainly need constant reminders not to play the game on
Tuesday or Wednesday at Auburn’s practice fields. After Friday’s pep rally at the old baseball stadium, the Tigers, for the first time in program
history, hopped on their buses and zipped up Interstate 85 to spend the night at a LaGrange (Ga.) Ramada Inn.

It’s standard procedure not just for Auburn, but most major college football teams, to spend the night before a game out of town away from the distractions, but it was an unprecedented move at the time.

“With all the excitement around the game and the number of fans coming to the game, it was a historical day approaching,” said athletic director Jay Jacobs, who served as Dye’s conditioning coach and handled some travel arrangements for the 1989 team.

The night in LaGrange wasn’t enough to prevent the excitement elicited from the following day’s Tiger Walk.

As players gazed out the windows of the team bus, they saw campers as far as the eye could see and fans lined up and down Donahue Street, five or six deep into the grass. Fans who wanted an aerial view hopped on top of their trailers and cheered from there.

“It made the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” Riggins said. “If you couldn’t play after going through that Tiger Walk, you weren’t going to play.

“You can’t manufacture that energy.”

For tailback James Joseph, it truly was an overwhelming experience. Shortly after he made his way through it, he hyperventilated in the locker room.

“He was hyped up,” Riggins said.

By kickoff, Joseph was settled down, but the same couldn’t be said for the 85,319, orange-and-blue paper shaker-waving fans.

Dye had a tough time holding back his emotions when he looked up to the sky right before the mid-afternoon kickoff.

“They were shaking them so hard there was a blue haze coming off next to the sunset,” Dye said. “It was breathtaking.”

Second fiddle
The game, for many Auburn fans, has become secondary in their memories of Dec. 2, 1989.

Riggins and his teammates admittedly had little understanding of the game’s significance until well after the kickoff. It didn’t sink in for some, Riggins said, for years thereafter.

“We quickly understood we were playing for bigger stakes than just the third straight conference championship,” he said. “We were playing for equality.”

Auburn won, of course, 30-20.

The game had minimal drama. Alabama held a 10-7 lead at halftime, but that was quickly turned into a 17-10 Auburn advantage after Joseph’s second touchdown run and a Win Lyle field goal midway through the third quarter. Darrell Williams’ 12-yard touchdown run made it 24-10 with 13:04
to play, morphing the final minutes into a Mardi Gras-style atmosphere.

Years of frustration, years of ridicule and scorn, years of being told the Iron Bowl would never come to Auburn came out on the faces of those present in the form of smiles, screams and tears.

“The whole campus, whole town, the Auburn people, wherever they live, had been working toward this moment and anticipating it for years and years and years,” Housel said. “Auburn people had made a trip they made that day they thought they’d never make: Home to Auburn to play Alabama.”

Housel, a sports information director at the time, remembered being on the field when the clock hit triple zeroes, waving to his wife in the stands and knowing “we had done it.”

Jacobs and Riggins were in the locker room for Dye’s postgame speech, which is still picking up hits on YouTube. Through tears, Dye delivered one of his most famous addresses, comparing the day to historical events in world history.

“People make fun of Coach Dye for comparing it to the Berlin Wall coming down or the children of Israel going into the promised land,” Housel said. “But he was right.”

Looking back, but moving forward
Since he returned to Auburn as the program’s 26th head coach in 2008, Gene Chizik has constantly told his team that the program was great before they were even born.

Half of this year’s team, in fact, wasn’t born when the Iron Bowl first came to Auburn.

Chizik’s soft spot for nostalgia came through earlier this week, when he showed clips of the 1989 game and Dye’s postgame speech.

“I just feel like our whole football team had to understand, historically, what this game is about,” Chizik said. “Just trying to really inform them the history of the game. I think it plays a role in why this rivalry is so big.”

They’ll get another reminder before today’s kickoff, when members of that team will converge at midfield for a tribute. Riggins and former quarterback Reggie Slack, the captains of the ’89 Tigers, will serve as today’s honorary captains.

“The players don’t understand really how big this game is as far as what it was like in ’89, 20 years later, how it is to alumni that never got to play this game in Auburn when they were in school,” Riggins said. “They’re playing for the Zeke Smiths, Terry Beasleys, Pat Sullivans, Tracy Rockers, Bo Jacksons, who never got to.”

Dye, who will also be in attendance, said he’s not the sentimental type, and that comparisons of this year’s game to the first — regardless of some of the similarities between this year’s undefeated Alabama and the 1989 Crimson Tide — stop at the site of the game.

That game, though, still goes down as one of Auburn’s biggest victories in program history.

“It isn’t about a bunch of old folks remembering how it was,” Housel said. “Football is a game of preparation, blocking and tackling, and that’s what’s going to determine this game.

“But it doesn’t hurt us to remember.”

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