http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/sec/2004-01-21-alabama-hudson-cover2_x.htm
Trailblazer back at 'Bama By Malcolm Moran, USA TODAY TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Student and teacher were reunited in November at the start of Wendell Hudson's new professional life. Hudson, an assistant athletics director at the University of Alabama, was in New York's Madison Square Garden for his first game supervising the basketball program he had changed forever. C.M. Newton, the coach who brought in Hudson as Alabama's first African-American scholarship athlete in 1969, was there for radio commentary. They exchanged memories, shared laughter. They marveled at the road they had traveled. More than three decades have passed since Hudson's playing career ended in the same Madison Square Garden where his new career is beginning. Then, he was the school's first Southeastern Conference player of the year. And Alabama's trip to the '73 National Invitation Tournament was important enough that coach Paul Bryant, the Bear himself, changed his spring football practice schedule to fly to New York and sit on the Crimson Tide bench. The three altered a landscape with an effort built upon Hudson's ability, commitment and demeanor, Newton's vision to build a program with in-state talent regardless of color and Bryant's endorsement of a new coach's initiative. Hudson came home after spending 18 years at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas, in capacities that included women's basketball coach, men's basketball coach and athletics director. He is the first former Alabama basketball player to become an administrator in its athletics department. "There's a story to his past, but he has been a very successful athletic director at the junior college level," says Alabama coach and former player Mark Gottfried. "Wearing the uniform doesn't make you qualified to do it. That's what I like about Wendell and what he has done professionally. I don't have to play catch-up with him." That's because Hudson knows the territory. There's no learning curve, no awkward moments with the coach. His duties will include leading the effort to reconnect with former athletes and helping to carry out the school's first capital campaign for athletics, a $100 million project to improve facilities. The result of his previous effort cannot be calculated. The flippant, often-repeated notion that University of Southern California running back Sam Cunningham's 1970 success against the Crimson Tide was a turning point for integration trivializes the understanding that began to take shape one year earlier. Before Wilbur Jackson and John Mitchell integrated Alabama football, Hudson became the only black resident of Bryant Hall, the athletics dorm. The emerging status of Alabama basketball and the enduring success of Bryant's program would depend upon Hudson's sense of accomplishment and contentment. "Wendell was in a position of nodding his head or shaking his head," says Ben Shurett, then a student manager for the basketball program, now a newspaper publisher in Fort Payne, Ala. "If he had said, 'You don't want to come here,' that would have had a tremendous effect on the football program." Ray Odums, whose Carver High team lost to Hudson's Parker High in the finals of the first integrated Alabama state tournament in 1969, would enroll at Alabama one year after Hudson's arrival. "They were treating him real nice, and he was enjoying himself," says Odums, who became an all-SEC guard. If that hadn't happened? "It probably would have really hurt the recruiting of black athletes," he says. Mal Moore, the Alabama athletics director who hired Hudson last summer, was an assistant football coach at the time. He says, "The success of Wendell and John Mitchell and Wilbur Jackson did as much for integration in this state as any one thing. It brought everybody together." A matter of family The relationship between Hudson and Newton has always been far more than a milepost for a university, a state and a region. It could be found in the coach's assurance, apprehensive and resolute at once, in response to a mother's question. "She said, 'What's it going to be like for my boy down at the university?' " Newton says, remembering. "I just told her, 'I don't know. I only know how I'm treating him. I'm not going to treat Wendell any different than anybody else. I'm a middle-class white guy. I don't know what it's going to be like.' " The relationship began with Newton's admiration for the discipline of a single-parent household in Birmingham and Hudson's ability to navigate without access to a car. The coach would eventually give the player driving lessons. "NCAA rule violation, probably," Newton says. "If it is, bury me." After his wife, Evelyn, died in March 2000, Newton began to suspect, correctly, that Hudson had something to do with the periodic telephone calls from former players. Soon after, when Newton would learn of an honor that would shock him, he called Hudson. "I said, 'I want you to know that you not only saved my job but I'm going in the Basketball Hall of Fame.' " That May, Hudson was introduced at private functions as a member of the family. "I said, 'I know they're trying to figure out how I fit into the family,' " Hudson says and smiles. Their journey has been about closeness from a distance and achievement and acceptance in a community where there had been little of either. Alabama won four games in 1968-69, Newton's first season, the one before Hudson arrived. In 1973-74, the year after Hudson's Alabama playing career ended, the Tide lost four games in the first of three consecutive SEC championship seasons. "He opened the door for a lot of us, and we respect him for that," senior guard Antoine Pettway says. "Not just anybody could have come in here when he did, under the circumstances he came in, and made that whole racial issue go away," says Newton, a consultant to SEC Commissioner Mike Slive. "He did it. "We didn't ask anybody or poll anybody on our team or on the football team. I told him, 'There's going to be some that don't want you here. Probably on both squads.' I'm sure there were. We didn't pay any attention to it. ... Things just kind of smoothed out — at least on the surface — and Wendell just handled the individual things so well. He's very, very special." Newton pauses. "And he turned out to be a heck of a player, besides." 'Community of one' The 6-5, 150-pound prospect would thrive in a system in which the coach criticized the act and not the person. Hudson averaged 19.2 points and 12.0 rebounds in three seasons and became an All-American as a senior. There is no way to measure the external treatment Hudson prefers not to emphasize. Shurett, the white student manager, had a two-door Camaro barely big enough for his tall friends. Somehow, Hudson could squeeze into the back seat. "You could get to know him pretty well," Shurett says. "You'd see people pointing and talking. I can't imagine the pressures that he felt." There was all the uncertainty of progressing from the status of slender, little-recruited prospect. "Plus, he was a community of one," Shurett says. That reality was never clearer than at Hudson's first dinner in Bryant Hall. The football players were at practice when Hudson and his basketball teammates moved in. Now it was evening, and more than 150 white athletes were turning toward the entrance. "You're in a cafeteria with guys eating and all that," Hudson says. "Forks and noise and mumbling and talking, and you could just hear it started getting quiet. And by the time I got close to the front of the line, it was pretty quiet. I can hear the stillness even today. The guys I was with were walking through the line and we were all talking, but as it started to get quiet, everybody got quiet. Here I am, the first African-American to be walking on this side of this line on scholarship, to go through here and be a part of this. "And I can also remember finally getting up to get my food and some of the people on the other side of the line were black, also," Hudson says. "They were smiling, and it made life a lot better. There was a wall and you couldn't see them, but when I turned that corner and saw them and they saw me, I can remember it was hard to take that tray out. There was so much food on that tray." Hudson recalled hearing the sound begin to increase as he moved toward his seat but never to the level it had reached as he entered the room. "That was a bad thing, but that was the way the world was." That is as close as he would come to a judgmental memory. The student became a teacher, delegating to others as Newton had done for him when Hudson was an assistant on the Alabama staff. Hudson has heard questions about black and white, about hardships and struggles along the way. "This is what I say to them: 'You don't want to hear my story. You don't want to write this stuff.' I would do it again because of the experience I had here, which was a good one. What's wrong with having a good experience? What's wrong with this working out right?" ______________________________________________________ RollTideFan - The University of Alabama Athletics Discussion List "Welcome to RollTideFan! Wear a cup!" To join or leave the list or to make changes to your subscription visit http://listinfo.rolltidefan.net
