Back When: They boom the drum twice

UAB hosts UL Monroe on Saturday. Thirty-four years ago on the same date, the Blazers played one of the strangest games in program history, and I'm not sure anything since has topped it.

They beat the national university for the deaf 44-6 at a high school stadium, with a blind man calling the game on radio.

I was there. I was a student-assistant in the athletic department, and nobody planned for this game to become a story worth telling 34 years later. UAB was a second-year Division III program trying to find opponents willing to come to Birmingham and trying to get anyone to notice it existed. The Blazers got a little attention.

UAB's home field was Legion Field, but Alabama had a game that day against Southern Miss, so the Blazers were displaced to Lawson Field — a local high school stadium on the other side of town. It was the only game UAB ever played there, and 5,349 people showed up, which for a Division III team in its second year wasn't bad.

Gallaudet University is the national university for the deaf, out of Washington, D.C. They'd been playing football since 1883 — more than a century before UAB kicked off its first game. Jim Hilyer called them "kind of like Notre Dame for the deaf community." UAB never played them before this game and never played them after.

Gallaudet went 1-7-1 the year before. They had three Alabama kids on the roster — Wesley Moran from Daviston, Andre Gray from Montgomery and Teddy Beasley from Mobile. And they had a drum.

Instead of a quarterback calling cadence, an assistant coach on the sideline beat a drum and the players felt the vibration through the ground. The ball was snapped on the second beat. Matt Eviston, Gallaudet's sports information director, explained it to the Birmingham Post-Herald's Cary Estes before the game: "Instead of the quarterback going 'hut, hut,' they'll boom the drum twice. It's just like a whistle in track. It gets us off the starting block together."

Eviston was a hearing person working at a university for the deaf, and he told Estes what that was like.

"It's kind of like being in a different country. I'm the minority here. Everybody speaks, but it's in a different language, a different way. But the people are the same."

He also knew what Gallaudet dealt with when they showed up somewhere new.

"Naturally, the first time a team plays us we're not as respected. Some athletes don't want to lose to a quote-unquote 'handicapped school.' Some players just think that way. Others are more vocal. They're talking trash, but we don't hear it."

But Eviston said the disrespect was always temporary: "It's all about earning respect. Their eyes are opened after the first time they play us. The football is still the same."

Hilyer said it his own way. "The talent and ability and toughness is just like anybody else. They have an aggressive group of Division III football players. They want to play hard and win just like everybody else."

The game was never close. Chris Bradford went 9 of 12 for 207 yards and two touchdowns, then scored on an 8-yard keeper to make it 14-0. Pat Green ran in the first score but left with a back injury after a headgear hit in the first quarter, and David Thornton took over with 52 yards rushing and a touchdown catch from backup John Whitcomb. Bradford hit Chip Harris for 64 yards and Derrick Ingram for 28, and Hilyer played about 95 kids by the end. "We played everybody but those who were redshirted."

The Gallaudet game also marked the first playing time for Whitcomb, a Southern Miss transfer who had once backed up Brett Favre. Two weeks later, with Bradford out with a broken finger, Whitcomb took over the starting job. He never gave it back, and he went on to write most of UAB's passing records, many of which still stand.

In those days, UAB AD Gene Bartow was always looking for a way to get UAB football a little attention. He was pitched an idea for a guest color analyst program — pair a local personality with UAB broadcasting legend Gary Sanders, give people a reason to show up or check out the radio broadcast. When they picked the guest for the Gallaudet game, they chose world-famous Birmingham blind golfer Charley Boswell.

Considering he couldn't actually see the game, Charley did a pretty darn good job.