Alabama football fans being who they are, a lot more of them remember Chad Key than you’d expect. Were he a member of any other football team, the only people who would likely remember him would be his teammates, his family and some people from his high school and hometown.
But with Alabama fans, all you need is a brief moment in the spotlight and you’ve got a little place in their hearts forever. It doesn’t hurt either that there are still about a million VHS videotapes of the 1993 Sugar Bowl floating around in Alabama fans’ homes.
As the clock wound down on Alabama’s unexpectedly dominant 34-13 victory over Miami to win the national championship, Key could be seen cavorting on the sidelines with the Gatorade bucket that everyone knew would be dumped on Coach Gene Stallings’ head. He was a walk-on, backup quarterback who converted to a wide receiver and ended up catching a few passes later in his career.
But he was on that team, and that makes him a national champion. Not only that, he had a brief moment on TV that quite a few folks still remember and chuckle about.
One writer felt like Chad Key on the night of Jan. 1, 1993. He is part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team of journalists, but contributed about as much as Key did to that 1993 Sugar Bowl victory. He hopes Key doesn’t take offense to this because he did contribute, but he wasn’t quite Derrick Lassic, Martin Houston or George Teague that night.
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While most of reporters were out in the field covering the April 27 tornado, the writer was baby-sitting two wiener dogs here at the office and sitting on standby. The story he wrote that morning never ran in the paper. The stories he wrote during the next couple of days wound up somewhere on the inside of the paper with postage stamp photos.
He’d love to say he contributed more, but he didn’t. Thus for the defining moment of The Tuscaloosa News, at least during his days there, he was a mere accessory, a bench-warmer who got to wear the uniform for the big championship game but never broke a sweat.
The day started out with word that there had been a tornado in Berry. Business Editor Michael James and the writer knew that area well, and they talked about whether he could get up there, do the reporting and get back in the window between the morning storms and the front coming that afternoon.
They finally decided that he should go, but the writer thinks he went to his appointment with Dr. Betz first. In Berry, he found very modest tornado damage. It was the kind of storm damage that he’d seen dozens of times, maybe a little worse than he anticipated.
One mobile home had been destroyed, and he was able to talk to the owner. But he couldn’t hook up with the man who had been at the Chevron station when the twister ripped the canopy off of the gas island.
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He knew when the next front was supposed to arrive and kept an eye on the clock. Michael had told him not to risk being on the road when it hit, and he timed the drive home accordingly. He was coming down Alabama Highway 69 in Northport around Union Chapel Road when the tornado sirens went off.
The warning sirens were well in advance of the front. He had time to go to the office and then decide that he should go home and get his dachshunds, Rambo and Bama. The drive home from the office was strange. The streets should have been busy, but he saw only a few cars. When he stopped for the traffic light at Hunter Creek Road and McFarland Boulevard and looked both ways, it was eerily empty. He had to fight the urge to run the light.
That panicky feel continued to grow in him. The dachshunds were bewildered when he got there. They have a long greeting ritual when he comes home, in which they get petted and he gives them treats. They were a bit hurt when he immediately took the smaller Bama and shoved her into the crate with Rambo and moved quickly to the pickup.
He had to fight the same panicky urge to run traffic lights on the way back to the office. He felt like it would be a commentary on mindless rule-following if he were killed sitting at a traffic light on an empty street.
Again, his timing was good and once he got back to The News, his anxious feeling subsided. He wrote the story about the little storm in Berry while his dogs whimpered in their crate. He had the luxury of knowing his family should be fine because his wife and daughter were working at the University of Alabama and his wife had taken his son with her. They were in some of the sturdiest buildings in town.
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At some point, then-Executive Editor Doug Ray stepped into the newsroom and suggested we all go down into the basement. The dachshunds weren’t happy about this. There were lots of people and other dogs that they barked at. He tried taking them out of the crate, but they barked too much. He ended up putting them in the crate and opening the crate door so that he could pet them.
He was doing this when City Editor Katherine Lee walked into the basement and said, “A tornado a mile wide just crossed 359.” It was hard for him to wrap his brain around that. On one hand, he knew it would be headed east, and that meant we were already safe and it probably wouldn’t hit his house either. But he also knew it was plowing through a densely populated part of town. When he heard the path it took, he figured there would be 200 to 300 people dead.
Reporters started dispersing around town. Katherine looked at him with his dogs and told him to write his Berry story and stand by to go where he was needed. He never left the office that night.
When he did go out into the field, it was to Boley, a little place near Berry, where a much more powerful tornado had hit and killed four people in the afternoon. Then he went to Sawyerville, where four more people had been killed.
Those storms hit sparsely populated areas. As bad as they were, there was always something worse coming out of Tuscaloosa. Any other time, they’d have been played with big front-page headlines and huge photos. This was not any other time.
He was the lead reporter on the Dec. 16, 2000, tornado, so he felt a little strange warming the bench on this one. But he had colleagues who were more than equal to the task. They worked through a lot.
Reporter Lydia Seabol Avant, who lives in The Downs, started crying when she described to us what had happened to her lovely neighborhood. But she kept working. Jamon Smith looked numb when he told us that his apartment and everything he owned was gone. But he kept working. Jason Morton was everywhere. Photographers Dusty Compton and Michelle Lepianka Carter were out in it risking their lives.
We had our Chad Keys. But we also had our George Teagues.
Here is a table summarizing the evaluation metrics mentioned in the text:
| Category | Metric | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Catcher | Overall Skills | 1-5 |
| Pitcher | Offspeed, Curve, Backdoor Curve, Drop Curve, 2 Seamer, Screw, Rise, Drop | Velocity (Radar Gun) |
| Pitcher | Accuracy of pitches | 1-5 |
| Pitcher | Movement | 1-5 |
| Infield | Overall Skills | 1-5 |
| Infield | Infield Accuracy | 1-5 |
| Infield | Infield Footwork | 1-5 |
| Outfield | Overall Skills | 1-5 |
| Outfield | Outfield Footwork | 1-5 |
| Hitters | Overall Skills | 1-5 |
| Hitters | Hitters Power | 1-5 |
| Slapper | Overall score | 1-5 |
| Hitters | Projected distance that the ball will travel | Exit speed (1mph=3.8 feet of travel) |
Stories from the April 27 Alabama Tornadoes
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