*Alabama, No. 1 in preseason football rankings, a healing force in Tuscaloosa*

[Coach Hank Crisp]

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I didn't know Cecil Hurt's dad played for Alabama. Even if it was for Ears Whitworth

By Chris Dufresne
 
August 31, 2011
Reporting From Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Cecil Hurt agreed to drive the rental through the tornado zone. It was his town. These were his tears.

His daddy played football in the 1950s for "Ears" Whitworth, famous now only for being Alabama's coach before Bear Bryant.

Hurt is a sports columnist for the Tuscaloosa News, but what ripped through his city April 27 made everyone chroniclers, first responders and teammates.

The tornado struck shortly after 5 p.m. and roared, a mile wide in some spots, four miles from the city's southwest corner to its northeast tip.

Hurt watched it touch down from his porch. With no basement shelter, he ran to the hallway and held on for dear life. It sounded, like almost everyone says, like a freight train. The twister uprooted four trees at Hurt's home, but the nails in his roof won a heroic battle against the updraft.

Others weren't so lucky. The Tuscaloosa death toll was recently raised to 50.

[Old Tider]

Ears is more famous for going 0-10 in 1955.

[Chechem]

"Somehow — thankfully, mercifully — the campus and Bryant-Denny Stadium were spared."  
Mostly.  
Some very dear parts of the family were forever lost.

[Coach Hank Crisp]

At the end of story:

After the tornado, Hurt found a ball in his driveway. Signed by members of 2001 Crimson Tide squad, it was soaking wet, and Hurt had no idea from where it hailed. The tornado probably plucked it from somebody's fireplace mantle and took it on the longest punt in Alabama history.

Hurt planned to donate the ball to the Paul W. Bryant museum.

Other memories have no such repository.

"We found that," Hurt said of the football. "And, more disturbingly, we found a baby shoe, which I'd like to think was in somebody's closet.

"But it was tied."

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