mad society.

Didn’t matter if you were an honest-to-goodness football hero or someone purely fictional like Forrest Gump.

“By having him play football for Alabama, I guess that was the breakout of the novel,” Groom said. He was discussing his 1986 book, which became the basis for a nationwide love affair, which became the movie that won the Oscar for best picture last Monday. “Until then, I didn’t know what I was going to do with him.

“But then I thought if he could play high school football, why couldn’t he play football for Alabama? If he could make it at Alabama and play for Bear Bryant, he could do anything in world.”

So Forrest Gump went to Alabama, became a starting halfback, and scored four touchdowns in his first college game, a 35-3 victory over Georgia.

After that, Bryant, wanting to make even greater use of a 6-foot-6, 240-pound halfback who could cover 100 yards in 9.5 seconds, decided to make Forrest Gump the team’s “secret weapon’ … like a ‘Adam Bomb,’ or somethin,” Groom writes at the start of the fourth chapter. Forrest Gump learned how to catch passes, making him so productive that he was named the Most Valuable Player in the Southeastern Conference. “In those days, if we had great speed, Coach Bryant would put ‘em at end,” said Charlie Thornton, Alabama’s long-time sports information director during the Bryant years. “Ray (Perkins) had sprinter’s speed. He ran on the track team, I believe.”

But Ray Perkins, an All-America receiver in 1966, wore No. 88; Tom Hanks, who portrayed Forrest Gump in the movie, wore No. 44. “When I watched the movie and saw Forrest Gump running into that checkerboard end zone, I got chill bumps up and down my back,” said Frankie McClendon, an Alabama offensive tackle from 1962-64, supposedly the years Forrest Gump attended Alabama.

The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of the auditorium to try to block the entry of two black students, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood.^[1]

The incident brought George Wallace into the national spotlight.^[2