CECIL HURT: Sometimes awards can be the life of the party

Before we get to the news of the week, or at least the holiday weekend, here's a story to provide some context.

Back in 1978, when I worked as a student assistant at the University of Alabama's sports information office, college football didn't award any of its various national championship trophies on the field after a bowl game win. After all, there was no way to know which bowl might produce the eventual champion. The voting that settled the issue wasn't held until January 2, and you couldn't very well hand out a trophy in Pasadena when the eventual No. 1 team might be playing in New Orleans. So most of the various awarding bodies, being media affiliated, would just ship their trophies or plaques to the sports information office in the basement of Memorial Coliseum.

In those days, the coliseum housed virtually all Alabama sports, from coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's office upstairs to the storage areas below. Those included The Cage, a sort of indoor chain-link pen. The Cage could be locked, primarily because the irreplaceable (in those pre-microfilm days) scrapbooks of Alabama clippings going back to the turn of the century were kept there. The student assistants including future sports writers like me, Tom Ensey and Mike Bolton, and other young men and women who went on to more respectable (and gainful) careers, maintained the scrapbooks.

The coliseum was crowded and didn't have enough trophy cases for the hardware that Alabama had already won in its history. So the trophies stayed in The Cage, which only grew more crowded when another wave of trophies — all of them, this time — rolled in after the 1979 season: the AP Trophy, the UPI trophy, the Helms Foundation plaque and so forth.

It was tradition, after a long fall semester of working with football, for the student assistants to have a party welcoming the spring. Now, to make a long story short, the budget for that party in the spring of 1980 was weighted heavily in the favor of refreshment with scant funds left for decoration. But at some point in the lead-up, someone — let's say it was Bolton, though he might have a different version — said "Hey, I know where there are some decorations." And since we maintained the scrapbooks, well, we had the keys.

So the 1979 AP national championship trophy and all the rest were transported to Ensey's apartment for the party. As you might imagine, they were, as college party decorations go, a rousing success. And the story ended without catastrophe. There was no crystal football trophy at the time, mercifully, and I think Coach Bryant himself was given the MacArthur Bowl in New York, so that intricately-worked silver artifice was beyond our reach and never filled with onion dip. (I think we'd have stopped short of that.) Everything was returned in good shape and no one was the wiser, except that Ensey kept the AP Trophy as a centerpiece until it was missed a few days later.

So, to fast-forward to the future, when Alabama reported itself for an improper trophy display in its 2016 release of secondary violations, I double-checked the statute of limitations.

The point is that, while people read about that violation and shake their head at the "crazy NCAA," I get it. The trophies are impressive to a football-loving teenager. You don't want them filling the hotel room of a five-star recruit, shuttled around by a tireless team of managers. The rule seems extreme, because it doesn't give an inch — but it was designed for those who might take a mile, wherever they might be.

Reach Cecil Hurt at cecil@tidesports.com or 205-722-0225.