Sylvester Croom and Rick Davis: An Unlikely Friendship That Became About One Color, Crimson

Being raised in a racially-divided 1960s Alabama was a difficult process for many, but for Croom and Davis it helped foster a life-long friendship

Sports has a way of bringing people together. People who might otherwise be completely different outside of the stadium oftentimes form friendships simply because they root for the same colors on game day.

In the realm of sports, the issue of race has had a compelling history. People forget that just 50 years ago, the University of Alabama was finally allowing its first Black football players to join the team on scholarship.

Recently, race and sport has become a hot topic of discussion once again. While Crimson Tide head coach Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant was the first coach at Alabama to have Black athletes on his roster, Alabama now has a different coach who has taken a stand to protect his Black players: Nick Saban.

Through marching and speaking at a rally this past week and letting his opinions on racial injustices and police brutality be known, Saban sent a rallying call far and wide, putting Alabama on a pedestal built by the Black athletes that have overcome obstacles and societal hurdles to make life easier for the athletes that we enjoy watching on the gridiron on both Saturdays and Sundays today.

Alabama Athletics

While it might have been easy for Saban to quickly come to the aid of his players, though, the road was not as smooth for the Black athletes that paved the way.

In troubled times like these, people often turn to stories of others to become inspired. We watch movies like Remember the Titans, a 2000 film made by Walt Disney Studios that depicted a high school undergoing the difficult struggles of integrating its football team.

While not nearly as dramatic as that story, Alabama football has a friendship between a white man from Birmingham and a Black man from Tuscaloosa. While the white man grew up in Bessemer and was forced to quickly acclimate to desegregation in a rapidly-changing country, the Black man had to constantly deal with racism in his own town, using football as refuge and shelter from a cruel world and taking his frustrations out on the field.

Despite their differences in a time where racism was at one of its highest levels in our country, these two dramatically different individuals chose not to succumb to the times and instead forged a close, intimate friendship that has now lasted five decades.

These two individuals’ names? Rick Davis and Sylvester Croom.

On paper, you would never think it would work out. In reality, the duo would form an incredibly tight pair of individuals who, while on the surface appear drastically different, would form a close bond while both playing the sport they loved: football.

Davis was born in 1953 in Birmingham. Growing up in Bessemer, a southwestern suburb of the largest city in the state, he started playing football at the local YMCA from a young age.

Despite there being a large African-American population in the city, Davis did not have any Black teammates until his time in junior high after integration had finally began to be implemented in the city’s school system.

Even then, there still weren’t many Black students at Davis’ school when integration first began in Bessemer.

“Growing up in Alabama, we didn’t have Black students,” Davis said. “There wasn’t integration until I was in junior high. In junior high there were some Black students that came but it was still pretty much 90-percent white, 10-percent Black.”

However, by the time that Davis was a senior in high school, the young quarterback saw a dramatic shift in the demographics of his team.

“In high school before my senior year they decided to close Bessemer High School and closed Carver High School and built a new high school and merged the two and I tell people it was kind of like Remember the Titans,” Davis said. “That was my senior year in high school pretty much. We went from being that 90-percent Black/white ratio at Bessemer High School to probably 55-45 Black to white at Jess Lanier [High School]. It was a great experience. The players got along. There was a little bit of uncertainty when we first started our senior year but we had a great year.”

About 50 miles to the west, though, Croom did not have such an easy time growing up in Tuscaloosa as his future teammate did in Bessemer.

In 1954, two major events happened that would impact the direction of Croom’s life. First and foremost, he was born that September. Later that same year, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education made segregation in public schools illegal.

Alabama not being a state to adjust quickly or accept the new laws, desegregation was rolled out incredibly slowly. In 1963, former Alabama governor George Wallace took his infamous Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, blocking the entry of two African-American students and letting the entire country know his stance against the desegregation of schools.

The next year, however, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, prohibiting discrimination in general, not simply on the campuses of schools. Despite integration at Tuscaloosa High School, the city saw a dramatic rise in the Ku Klux Klan. Croom recalled that one night, while hosting a meeting of his school’s Key Club in his home, a cross was set on fire not far from his residence.

For Croom, football was a form of escapism from the racism and violence. In 1970, Bryant signed his first Black players in Wilbur Jackson and John Mitchell. While Bryant had been urging the school administration to allow him to recruit and sign Black players for years, the school had finally allowed him to do so following a loss to Southern Cal in 1970, whose running back was Sam ‘Bam’ Cunningham. The loss led Bryant to claim that since USC was integrated, the fact that they had Black athletes on their team gave them a huge advantage, hastening the board to allow Bryant to sign Black athletes.

With Wilbur and Mitchell’s signing in 1970, Croom felt the winds change in Tuscaloosa.

“When Wilbur signed on I was excited that things were about to change,” Croom said. “I didn’t even realize at the time that I would even be considered to be offered a scholarship. It was a big change. It was a historic moment when Wilbur Jackson signed with the University of Alabama because you figured when Alabama as always as just a program and the recognition that — the clout that coach Bryant carried with the Alabama program — it was not only a big deal for the University of Alabama and the state of Alabama particularly at the time after the gritty years with governor [George] Wallace standing in the door when Vivian Malone went out there now all of a sudden we’re finally going to have a black football player out there on scholarship.

“It was a big deal at the time and it was hard for people who weren’t around then particularly in today’s climate when about 70 percent of the SEC are black players now, at the time that was a big, big deal.”

The pair of Davis and Croom would first meet, fittingly enough, on the football field. Their senior year, Jess Lanier High School faced off against Tuscaloosa. With Davis being captain of his offense and Croom being the captain of his, the two met for the first time at the middle of the field for the pre-game coin toss.

Hearing Croom describe their first meeting, you can tell that his initial interaction with Davis made quite the impression.

“The first time I met him we played Bessemer my senior year of high school,” Croom recalled. “I knew his reputation as a good football player but when I went out for the coin toss — of course you shake hands when you go out for the coin toss — I was impressed by him. Just the look he had on his face. My approach to the game was pretty much always just a stern-faced kind of a guy and very, very intense before a game but Rick came out and was smiling and he had this gleam in his eye and when we shook hands I always looked the guy in the eye and see what I could see in him and I was impressed because there was a different look.

“I knew he was a good football player but the guy had this big smile on his face and a gleam in his eye and it was a just a look of a competitor, but a guy who demanded respect and at the same time you knew he respected you. He had a look that he was glad to see you and he had respect for you but it was going to be a battle.”

Despite growing up under radically different circumstances, both Davis and Croom found themselves attending the University of Alabama in the fall of 1971. The two uniquely different individuals, Davis the lighthearted quarterback with a million-dollar smile and Croom with his stern demeanor playing center, soon found themselves both wearing the crimson and white jersey of Alabama.

Soon after arriving on campus, Davis was shifted over to defense while Croom played both tight end and tackle. While they were now on opposite sides of the field instead of sharing the intimate quarterback/center relationship that they both thought that they would, both young players quickly grew to become friends.

With desegregation still happening in the state around them, racial tensions were still high. While Davis hadn’t experienced any problems adjusting to Black athletes at his high school, the same couldn’t necessarily be said for all of his teammates. Integration was still a new concept to many white players who attended Alabama in 1970, but Bryant set the record straight early on.

For the Crimson Tide football team, the ease of integration started with its head coach.

“The whole of integration and the interracial turmoil that existed in Alabama in the 60s but as far as in Tuscaloosa with the team I thought our guys — everybody got along great,” Davis said. “It was just one of those things where I think the leadership in the program was so important — leadership from coach Bryant down — and what coach Bryant told us in the first meeting that we had our freshman year. The varsity team and everybody was all sitting in and that year it was Jackson, Mitchell, Sylvester, Stokes and Washington so we had five Black scholarship football players that year, but coach Bryant told the team — he was just going through the agendas and what we were doing and that was the same year that Alabama went to the wishbone — at the end of the meeting he ended the meeting by saying ‘I expect everyone to treat their teammates with respect. If I hear that’s not happening, you’ll answer to me.’ And that was all that needed to be said. The transition and the integration of the program went very, very smoothly.”

According to Davis, the media was also adjusting to having Black players on the Alabama team. Once in a postgame interview, Davis recalled hearing Bryant speaking to a reporter on the sideline.

“A reported asked coach Bryant ‘How many Black players do you have on your team?,’” Davis said. “Coach Bryant said ‘I don’t have any Black players.’ The reporter then asked ‘How many white players?’ Bryant said ‘I don’t have any white players. I’ve got players on my team.’ That’s the attitude we had and if it starts with the head coach and it goes on down the players usually follow the direction that the head coach goes.”

“The lessons that coach Bryant emphasized were a lot of the same things that my mom and dad did. In the early 70s Vietnam was winding down and so it was a lot of the hippies and social movements and a lot of stuff going on back in the 70s but it was a great experience. I learned a lot of life lessons reinforced by stuff that coach emphasized.”

Bryant Museum

Davis and Croom roomed across the hall from each other in Bryant Hall, the dormitory that the athletes called home. The two quickly became close friends and fostered a close relationship throughout their college days despite their differences.

“This was at a time when we were just integrating the schools and the thing that was in that first meeting was ‘This is a guy that’s a white guy but he’s different,’” Croom said. “I just had a feeling that he was different and the relationship continued to develop there but probably more than anything else was when we went through our freshman year.

“Back then freshmen couldn’t play and we had a freshman team and we played on the scout team. We were on the freshman team going against the varsity all the time and we had to help each other out just to survive and that’s where a lot of the relationship comes from because we had to lean on each other our entire freshman year. I think it was 35 of us in that group and I think it was 15-18 that actually made it after the whole four years.

“There was just a lot of mutual respect there for each other as a human being and Rick has a strong Christian faith and has always been a man of character and honesty and worked extremely hard at it. The thing about Rick that’s always impressed me is he’s such a nice guy off the field but a vicious competitor. He was intense; he was a full-contact football player and he would throw his body around and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to win.”

Over the course of four years at Alabama and four-consecutive SEC titles, both Davis and Croom developed quite a relationship both on and off the field.

Them being close also caught the eye of their head coach. Unbeknownst to either of them until years later, both went through a common test of Bryant their senior year when preparing for their final season.

“Coach Bryant would usually do something to a player in spring practice to see how they would react and we didn’t realize this until years later after we had left Tuscaloosa,” Davis said. “What coach Bryant would do is he would pick a player. I had started my junior year and had had a good year and was having what I thought was a really good spring and we were about halfway through spring practice and you would walk into the locker rooms down the hall there was a bulletin board on the left and it would have the first-team offense and first-team defense and all that kind of stuff on the board and so I’m coming in and all of a sudden I look on the first-team defense and I’m listed on the second team. It was kind of like ‘What the heck is going on?’

“So you go up and you get your uniform and you practice gear and stuff like that and you get a different-colored jersey because you’re on the second-team defense and not the first-team defense. So I’m mad. I’m upset. We’re supposed to be going half-speed and I’m going full-speed form-tackling and knocking guys on the ground and so [defensive backs coach] Curley [Hallman] is coming up to me telling me I need to calm down. Nobody says anything. That night, guys are coming up to me in the dorm and are asking ‘What happened?’ And I don’t know.

“The next morning I get up, go to class, nobody says anything at lunch, I go back over, go down the hall, look at the board for the depth chart and then I’m back on the first team the next day. It was kind of like ‘What the heck?’”

For Croom, the mind game played by Bryant was equally stressful but came about in a different way.

“Going into my senior year I was preseason All-American and we had our last scrimmage before the regular season starts,” Croom said. “I’m thinking ‘I’ve proved myself by now.’ We go out there for the scrimmage and I’m first offense and we’re wanting to go down and score the first touchdown and then get out of the scrimmage so we can go rest. Well, [Bryant] did take the first offense out of there. Everybody except me. He left me in there. We all went out, then he started to bring some of them in and I’m still in there. So I start with the first team, play with the second team, the first team comes back and I’m still in the scrimmage. So it didn’t take me long to figure out that ‘Ok, I’m a senior All-American and all this but [Bryant]’s testing me and he wants to see how I’m going to react to this.’ So I sucked it up and it was probably the longest scrimmage that I was every involved in at my time at Alabama.

“Later on I’ll never forget towards the end of the scrimmage and he was making another rotation and he looked at me and he said ‘Oh, I forgot about you’ with a big smile on his face,” Croom said. “I said, ‘Yeah right, coach.’ And I left the scrimmage but I knew that he was testing me and he wanted to see how I was going to respond. I just handled it, went through it and played as good as I possibly could and I know I earned his respect that day because I think he was testing me and testing me in front of the rest of the players because the rest of the players were shocked that I was still in there, too.”

Courtesy of the Bryant Museum

Bryant had decided to test both Davis and Croom their senior season, but neither of them realized it until decades of time had passed.

“Years later I was talking to coach Bill Oliver and he said that coach Bryant would always pick a player that he felt like would handle it the right way and it would send a message to other guys on the team,” Davis said. “You can do one of two things if that happens: you can pout and go half-speed and get upset about it or you can react and say ‘Well I’ll show them’ and turn it up to an even higher level. Coach Oliver said that every 4-5 years he would do that to one player. An offensive and a defensive guy, but not on the same day. Sylvester and I talked about that and neither of us knew that it had happened to the other guy and I didn’t realize that until five, six, seven years ago.”

After their senior season in 1974 concluded, both players were elected by their teammates as permanent co-captains, with Davis representing the defense and Croom the offense.

Though their time on the gridiron together had ended, both players remained in contact. Davis moved on to play in the NFL for four seasons before returning to Birmingham to attend law school. After starting a firm in Orlando, Davis would soon represent Croom as his agent, as Croom was developing quite a career as an assistant coach in the NFL.

In 2004, Croom made history by being the first Black head coach in the SEC, being hired at Mississippi State.

For Davis, it was the highlight of his career as an attorney.

“Sylvester Croom is one of my best friends,” Davis said. “We played together, we were freshmen together at Alabama and when I played in the NFL for four years and then came back, went to law school and Robert Fraley and I started a law firm in Orlando and we were representing players and coaches and then Sylvester went into coaching and I represented him for years and years and when he got the job at Mississippi State that was probably the highlight of my professional career was working with him.”

While Croom has since retired from coaching and Davis now practices in Birmingham, the two still remain in close contact to this day.

“It’s been tremendous,” Croom said. “We stayed in contact and I’ll say it again, the respect you earn in football from particular teammates never goes away. We were co-captains together. That’s an even better bond because those of us that played at Alabama, being elected captain on a coach Bryant football team was a tremendous deal because it’s voted on by the players and the permanent captains every year at the end of the season and you actually got to be permanent captain for one game which was the bowl game. It’s something that really, really means a lot to me because the respect of your teammates is what really lasts a lifetime and I always had that same respect for Rick because he’s an honest guy, I knew his heart was always in the right place and he became my agent and negotiated contracts for me and just has given me a lot of advice and helped me a lot, particularly when I went to Mississippi State as the head coach. He negotiated my contract there and he was a sounding board for me in a lot of things over the years as an assistant coach and as a head coach.”

In 2013, after seeing the film 42, a film about the legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson and starring the recently-deceased Chadwick Boseman, Davis had an idea. After several months of planning, Davis hosted a panel of both white and Black athletes at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that were part of the first teams at both Alabama and Auburn to have scholarship Black athletes.

The event was moderated by sports radio and television host Paul Finebaum and was sponsored by the city of Birmingham. Both Davis and Croom were two of the panelists, and Davis’ willingness to create and host the event shows his dedication — even all these years later — to the original Black athletes who broke barriers and overcame so many obstacles.

Birmingham Mayor's Office of Public Information

All these years later, the state of Alabama and states all across the country are once again going through racial turmoil. With the death of African-Americans like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, peaceful protests as well as riots have broken out across the nation in 2020.

While it might not be as bad as it was in the 1960s in terms of burning crosses and lynching, racism still survives in our country.

To Croom, who made history by being one of Alabama’s first Black athletes as well as being the SEC’s first African-American head coach, in order to repair our racial issues in the United States we must first look back upon the history that led us to this moment.

“First as a nation, we’ve got to come to grips with the truth of our history,” Croom said. “That is the first thing. There can be no healing of our nation, there can be no healing of race relations until we be honest about the truth of our history. It is our history. Let’s be truthful about it. Let’s own it. Let’s own it in our classrooms. Let’s own it in our history books. Let’s own it in our conversations. The effects of racism, slavery and injustices towards anybody is different of color, sexual orientation, all these things. Regardless of our differences we are all human beings, all created by God who all want to have a peaceful life and that’s what America guarantees. We’re all equal. None of us is less or more valuable than anybody else. None of us is less or more important than anyone else. We’ve all got the same feelings, we’ve all got the same desires to be loved, to love and to have peace, justice and equality. Everybody wants that. Everybody deserves that.

“We can have differences of opinion, but everybody deserves the respect of a human being regardless of their differences, and that’s what we’ve got to understand. Treat people like you want to be treated. That is the bottom line to me. Treat everybody else like you want to be treated.”

Davis accepts the Paul W. Bryant Alumni-Athlete Award on behalf of Croom in 2015 / Alabama Athletics

Today, Davis and Croom still talk to each other on the phone 2-3 times a week. The duo also play golf together when they can, though Croom chuckled when he admitted they haven’t been able to do that as much lately due to the coronavirus.

When examining the problems of racial injustice and police brutality that are currently at the forefront of conversation in America today, all of us should look at the unlikely friendship of Davis and Croom as inspiration in these troubled times. Davis, the white quarterback from a racially-divided Birmingham, and Croom, the Black center who helped to change the course of college football in the South.

“Stories like ours are great when you look at all the racial tension and friction that’s out there right now,” Davis said. “Sports is great like that. Sylvester was a center and he’s got his job. It doesn’t matter if the left guard is white or Black or the right guard — color doesn’t matter.

“It doesn’t matter what color you are. You’re part of a team and you’re expected to do your job. You don’t always have to like each other but it makes it better if you do.”