Mark Stallings had the gift of insight

[Guest guest]

CECIL HURT: Mark

Stallings had the gift of insight

Rise Center director Martha

Cook, left, gives a kiss to Mark Stallings after he unvailed the sign that

will be on the new playground at the center. Mark Stallings, the son of

former Alabama coach Gene Stallings, died early Saturday morning .

Staff file photo

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Among several lasting memories of Mark Stallings, one

always stands out in my mind.

It was moments after the University

of Alabama football team had soundly beaten Miami

in New Orleans, clinching the 1992 national championship.

Before he went to meet the national media, Alabama head coach Gene Stallings,

always a friend to local reporters, slipped into a small room deep beneath the

Superdome to speak briefly to me and to Hollis, the Birmingham News'

beat reporter at the time.

Amid the massive celebration that still echoed in the stadium, that tiny cubicle

contained only the coach (still a little damp from the Gatorade bath he was

given by his players), Larry White of the UA sports information staff, Hollis,

myself — and the person who put it all in perspective: Mark

Stallings.

All sorts of grandiose descriptions of Alabama's achievement were running

through my brain as I prepared to describe the epochal victory. But it was

Mark who saw it all in its proper light and summed it up in four words —

'Way to go, Pop.'

More than anything I could have said, that summed up the entire journey from

Stallings' hiring and the tumultuous 1990 season, through all the patient

building process that constructed the awesome defense that swamped the Hurricanes.

So much can go wrong on the way to a national title. Stallings had managed to

guide Alabama past every pitfall.

Mark Stallings wouldn't have expressed it in that way, but he understood.

It was a job well done. Alabama had won, which was the way he wanted things to

be in his world, and his father, of whom he was justifiably proud, had guided

the team there, as Mark knew that he would.

Mark Stallings, who passed away at 7:28 a.m. Saturday, always provided

that kind of insight. In a way, his whole life — his great gift —

was in teaching people to look at their circumstances in a different way.

That was certainly a theme in his relationship with his famous father. I wouldn't

say that was the entire relationship, because who can sum up all that exists

between a father and a son? But it is true that, just as Gene Stallings taught

and nurtured Mark, then Mark Stallings brought out and developed the

human side of his father as no one else could have.

Imagine being Gene Stallings in 1962, a fiery, motivated young football coach

on W. 'Bear' 's staff. Toughness was in every fiber of Stallings,

the sort of toughness that helped him survive the famous trip to Junction as a

Texas A & M player, the kind that made want to have him on hand as a

member of his staff when other, more experienced coaches were available.

Junction had been a test. Playing for 'Bear' had been a test. But those

tests were nothing compared to the crucible that Stallings and his wife Ruth

Ann, neither of them yet 30 years old, were to face that year. That's when they

learned that their infant son had been born with Down syndrome.

What emotions would someone feel at such a time? Anger, at the random

unfairness of such a fate? Disappointment, knowing that the child would never

play football or become a coach or fulfill those dreams?

But, in perhaps his greatest moment, greater than coming out of Junction in one

piece, or leading Texas A & M to a Cotton Bowl, or taking Alabama to a

national championship, Gene Stallings put anger and bitterness aside. He

embraced the challenge of raising his son. And what rewards he received for it,

what lessons he learned.

Years later, Stallings would talk about watching Mark struggle for every

triumph, the effort it took for his boy to master even simple tasks. It made

the coach appreciate the player who worked harder, even if he had less ability.

It made him reach out to so many young people whose lives are better today

because of the Stallings Center (which houses the Rise program for disabled

children at UA) or simply because the head coach at Alabama took the time to

visit their hospital bed, or host them and their family at a practice.

In that way, as Mal said on Saturday afternoon, ' Mark Stallings

touched every Alabama fan. The child who, it was thought, could never do great

things did them after all, with his gentle nature and warm smile. Most of all,

he did great things with his complete, unquestioning capacity to love his

family, to love Alabama and to love everyone who shared those feelings with him

in the short 46 years of his life.'

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at

cecil.hurt@... or .

http://www.tidesports.com/article/20080803/NEWS/107608225/1067/NEWS