Ever wondered what the freaks, errr I mean insightful personalities of the Paul Finebaum Radio Network look like? We didn’t either. In fact, we were afraid to find out. But Hunter Ford of the Western Star was kind enough to share his images from Finebaum’s Wednesday luncheon in Huntsville. So thank or blame him as [...]
Archive | miscellaneous
RSS feed for this section
An ode to football widows
By Hunter Ford “Wrote a song for everyone. Wrote a song for truth. Wrote a song for everyone. When I couldn’t even talk to you.”- John Fogerty I was going to write a column about how great it is that football season is finally set to begin. Then I thought about my poor wife who [...]
Firing out a column from the shotgun
By Hunter Ford I was talking with my buddy Shane the other day and he said he had a couple of ideas for a column and couldn’t decide which one to go with. “Do them both at the same time,†I advised. How do you do that? Occasionally, when writing a weekly column, inspiration can [...]
Advice from coach: ‘Stay Tough’
By Hunter Ford There are all kinds of coaches, good ones, bad ones, mean ones, winning ones, nice ones, losing ones. I don’t think there is any one formula that makes a coach successful. The best ones, in my opinion, are the ones that make impressions on people that last beyond the court or the [...]
UAB football fans send out SOS
By Hunter Ford An old friend recently contacted me about setting up a meeting to try and motivate UAB football fans to better support the Blazers. UAB football is on life support right now. I believe it could be resuscitated. UAB football has several problems, some that could be remedied quickly and others that will [...]
Team Focus is changing the face of America
Here’s an article and a column about Mike Gottfried’s visit to Lawson State with his Team Focus camp. Gottfried shared a funny Bear Bryant story with me. Gottfried brought his 1982 Cincinnati Bearcats to Bryant-Denny for what ended up to be Bryant’s last homecoming game. “Before the game a group of my players came to [...]
Gottfried continues coaching for Team Focus
By Hunter Ford TWS Reporter In the spring of 1956 an 11-year-old boy sat on his bathroom floor holding his father’s head in his lap. His father had collapsed from a massive heart attack. The young boy cried and prayed and talked to his father as his father’s life ended. The boy and his two [...]
Pell’s story sheds light on dark subject
By Hunter Ford A half bottle of vodka, a fistful of pills and a cloud of carbon monoxide would kill most people. It didn’t kill former Alabama football player and Florida Gator head coach Charley Pell. Pell died of cancer in 2001, but before he did he spent 17 years of his life fighting to [...]
High School Ringers
By Hunter Ford Here is a link to an excellent story on Bessemer Academy. You know, there is one similarity to what has happened at Bessemer Academy and what happened to Rush Propst at Hoover. Many parents of Hoover football players got tired of seeing Propst bring in “ringers” to play on the team. These [...]
Hunter: I love Independence Day
I love Independence Day, or What I Did Past Summers By Hunter Ford Most people have favorite holidays. For some it is Christmas, for others Thanksgiving or Easter. For me, give me Independence Day. More often referred to as The Fourth of July, Independence Day means many things to me. I love American history, especially [...]
Summer reading
Hunter Ford’s summer reading recommendations For readers of the Capstone Report “The coping w/shit” is either for obsessive Aubies who can’t live without flaming the CR or for we Alabama fans who dread the daily UA police reports either way….have a great weekend…how long til kickoff?
Hunter: Johns didn’t seem the type
Whoa, Alabama…your Cadillac has a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track…what’s going wrong? Hunter Ford Jimmy Johns has a website dedicated to selling Pit Bulls and nobody told him that might not be a good idea? It’s a free county, but did anyone suggest that he might keep it cool and [...]
Ford: Bessemer HS football
Freeman’s dismissal doesn’t make sense By Hunter Ford Ten years ago Bessemer Academy was at a turning point. The school was broke. It couldn’t afford to pay teachers. According to an award-winning story “About Face: A New Game Plan†that ran in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2005, the school turned to football to help [...]
Snake is down but shouldn’t be out
By Hunter Ford My heroes have always been cowboys, you know, people who have an independent spirit and march to the beat of their own drum. It’s hard to watch when one of them falls out of the saddle. Such was the case last week when the news broke that Kenny Stabler got arrested for [...]
Hunter: reaction to Shane’s latest
Tubby’s a cowboy who has fired his six shots By Hunter Ford I loved Shane’s latest: Tubby’s a desperate cowboy! The column and the following commentary make me want to break out in song. “Me and Billy The Kid, we never got along…I didn’t like the way he cocked his hat and he wore his [...]
Ranking the best Tide and Tiger coaches
By Hunter Ford Who is the best ever Alabama football coach? Who is the best ever Auburn coach? Alabama’s answer is a no-brainer. Bear Bryant. Two legendary coaches, Wallace Wade and Frank Thomas preceded Bryant. Since Bryant retired, only one other coach, Gene Stallings, has come close to winning on the field and winning over [...]
A Bright Star story
Gene Stallings speaking at the Bright Star By Hunter Ford You never know who you’ll see at The Bright Star restaurant in Bessemer. I was walking in to the Bright Star Wednesday when I saw a guy who looked a lot like Gene Stallings sitting in a chair in the lobby. Lo and behold it [...]
Are glory days of newspaper sportswriters over?
By Hunter Ford And I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it… but I probably will. Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture a little of the glory of… well time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister but boring stories of… glory days. -Bruce Springsteen Are the glory [...]
Profile: Steve Flowers
Writers Note: I thought Capstone Report readers might be interested in this story about Steve Flowers, former state representative and syndicated newspaper columnist. Flowers is “THE†political columnist in Alabama. You won’t find him in the Birmingham News or Mobile Register but you will find him in every small town gazette across the state, which [...]
UAB football: cooked goose or ugly duckling?
By Hunter Ford From The Western Star UAB’s football team went 2-10 last year, draws less fans than flies, and after learning that it will lose nine scholarships for academic incompetence, it appears the Blazers’ goose is cooked. Stick a fork in it- UAB’s football program is done. But wait! Hold up on that picnic. [...]
Stewart named Sportscaster of the Year
By Hunter Ford Chris Stewart was a young child when he caught the sports bug. “I was five or six years old calling play-by-play into a tape recorder,” he recalls. Last week, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association (NSSA) named Stewart, who is the lead play-by-play voice of University of Alabama basketball and baseball, the [...]
Is horse racing noble or barbaric?
By Hunter Ford It’s a story made for movies: An underdog filly defies the odds and places second in the Kentucky Derby. Then tragedy strikes as swiftly as the race itself. The filly goes down with two broken ankles on its front legs. It is euthanized on the track. The story of the gallant horse, [...]
The good, bad, and ugly of football uniforms
By Hunter Ford With a blank white page burning my eyes, I decided to go to the Internet, as I often do, to help me write this week’s column. Last week, I wrote a piece about the tradition of Alabama football. That started my mind wandering about other school’s traditions (or lack thereof) and then [...]
Bama tradition didn’t start or end with Bryant
By Hunter Ford Last week, sports talk radio in Birmingham took up a topic close to my heart- the tradition of University of Alabama football. Well, sort of. What happened was that the “Bald Smirky One†went fishing for some controversy. Paul Finebaum, in one of his columns, pondered a question, “Is Nick Saban bigger [...]
Hunter: Saban looking for hunting dogs
Editor’s note: Hunter’s shared some photographs from A-Day. Click here to see them in our A-Day gallery. By Hunter Ford Alabama head football coach Nick Saban says he still has some players who are “Too worried about how their britches fit or how their hairdo looks.†“We don’t need anymore show dogs,†he said. “We [...]
Hunter Ford’s conversation with Bill Baxley
Note: These columns were originally written for the Hoover Gazette last year. Â I visited with former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley in the summer of ’07 on a whim. I had always wanted to interview him. Â Mr. Baxley was a gracious interview subject. He is an interesting man who played an important part in Alabama [...]
Off topic: Hunter on APTV
For those who read Hunter Ford’s columns, Ford will appear on Alabama Public Television’s For the Record with Tim Lennox tonight (Friday, March 21) at 8 p.m. For more information on the show, you can visit APTV.org. Advertisement: Story continues below Topics for tonight’s show include the Adjutant General of the Alabama National Guard A. [...]
Hunter Ford: On Finebaum and the off-season
Real sport to fill football off-season is played on the radio By Hunter Ford You can read more from Hunter Ford at his blog Alagonzo.blogspot.com. Ford’s columns also appear in Bessemer’s Western Star newspaper. The University of Alabama’s 2007-08 basketball season was finally shot in the head like the lame nag that it was. The [...]
Creative ideas could make spring really fantastic
By Hunter FordYou can read this and more of Hunter’s writings at his new blog Alagonzo. Last year Alabama football fanatics lost their collective minds when more than 92,000 of them showed up for a spring football game in Tuscaloosa. The Crimson Nation was euphoric over the arrival of a real football coach (Nick Saban)- [...]
Hunter Ford: Pay Attention to the Light
The guy who played Bear Bryant: ‘The truth requires no questions.’ Saban: ‘It is what it is! No more questions!’ By Hunter Ford editor’s note: Hunter Ford is starting a new blog. You can read his writing online at: alagonzo.blogspot.com. I didn’t even bother to watch the Alabama-Auburn basketball game over the weekend. Tide roundball [...]
Bob Stoops leads entire state of Oklahoma “Up In Smoke”
It’s been a week since Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops made his idiotic statements to The Tulsa World about the [...]