Tony Nathan: From Woodlawn to Alabama to the NFL (2024)

If it had been up to Louise Nathan, her son Tony never would have touched a football.

Once he started playing, though, she never let him quit.

So, when Tony was in the 10th grade, and he came home one day and told his mother he had left the Woodlawn High School football team, she replied, in no uncertain terms, no, he had not.

"I've never known a Nathan to quit anything," she said. "And you're not going to be the first."

They got in the car, and she drove him back to the football field, where she told Woodlawn coach Tandy Gerelds to do whatever he needed to discipline her boy for skipping practice, just as long as he was allowed back on the team.

Tony Nathan never forgot that.

"I was like, 'What?'" he recalls. "'And you told me you didn't want me to play this game.'

"She said, 'No, but even more so, you're not going to be a quitter.'"

So just think, if Louise Nathan hadn't put her foot down, maybe no one would have ever heard of "Touchdown Tony."

Perhaps that epic 1974 showdown at Legion Field between Birmingham high-school heavyweights Woodlawn and Banks would have been just another Friday night football game.

Probably, Tony Nathan never would have gone on to play for Paul "Bear" Bryant at the University of Alabama, and without him, it's possible the Crimson Tide might not have won that 1978 AP national championship.

Most likely, Tony would not have been drafted by the NFL's Miami Dolphins, and regrettably, he also would have missed out on starting in two Super Bowls, as well as being part of one of the most famous plays in Dolphins' history.

Almost assuredly, Nathan would not be the featured character in the upcoming movie "Woodlawn," which opens nationwide on Oct. 16, and most definitely, he would not have written a book, "Touchdown Tony: Running With a Purpose," which comes out Tuesday.

"That's a scary thought now," the 58-year-old Nathan says of what might have been.

"You go through life carrying that (lesson): If you start it, you better try to be the best at it, and finish what you've got to finish," he adds. "So it was a great lesson for me."

'I wanted to get picked'

William Nathan, who worked as millwright at Connors Steel in Birmingham, made his son Tony his first football by stitching together a strip of Naugahyde and stuffing it with rags and cotton balls. The next Christmas, Santa Claus brought Tony his first official football.

Tony -- the second oldest of five siblings -- used to wear out the grass playing ball with their neighbors in the backyard of their house in Parker Heights, near the airport.

"We let them run and play," Tony's father, whom the family calls "Pops," says. "I didn't have to worry about cutting grass because they played all the time."

Tony started playing pickup basketball games with some older boys in the neighborhood, and he was good enough that he was recruited to play in a rec league at Huffman Park.

"I played with older guys, and I wanted to be able to play on their level," Nathan says. "And when they were picking teams, I wanted to get picked. So you go all out and do what you can do just to fit in."

So by the time he arrived at Woodlawn High School to start the ninth grade, his reputation as a wizard of the basketball court preceded him.

Denny Ragland, who would become the Woodlawn starting quarterback during Nathan's senior season in 1974, knew something was up during freshman football practice, when most of the basketball team came out just to see what the 14-year-old Nathan could do on the football field.

"I knew some of those guys, and I'm like, 'Why would y'all be out here in the hot sun watching freshman football?'" Ragland recalls. "And then they told me that that guy (Nathan) was an All-American basketball player, and he wasn't going to be playing football. He was a basketball guy."

They got at least part of that right. He was indeed a basketball guy, but Tony Nathan would be playing football for a long time.

Louise Nathan, though, never was wild about her seeing her son get hit.

"All I had ever seen of football games was everybody falling on each other and piling on each other," she says. "And I didn't like that. . . . I told Coach Gerelds that I didn't want him to be anywhere near the ball."

Soon enough, though, Tony would be all around the ball.

'It was just that time'

Nathan played on the B-team his freshman year, and by his sophom*ore season, he earned a spot on the Woodlawn varsity as the starting free safety on defense.

His breakout moment came against Montgomery's Robert E. Lee Generals, when, late in the game, he scooped up a fumble and ran 38 yards for the winning touchdown.

Gerelds, recognizing Nathan's underutilized potential, thought he needed to have the ball in his hands more often and moved him to offense his junior year.
Before the start of that 1973 season, something else happened that changed the Woodlawn football team's fortunes.

During preseason camp, evangelist Wales Goebel, who became a born-again Christian after alcohol destroyed his small-college basketball career and nearly cost him his life, came to share his story with the Woodlawn players.

RELATED:See who plays Tony Nathan in 'Woodlawn'

As depicted in the upcoming "Woodlawn" movie, droves of players, Nathan included, stepped forward to commit their lives to Christ that night.

Unfortunately, he doesn't remember anything about it.

"I did accept Christ in my life at that time, they say," Nathan says. "But at that time, I had a concussion. I don't remember that whole week.

"But I was raised in the church anyway. My parents raised me that way. I did believe. I do believe. And when that happened, that movement, I was touched in my heart to do so again."

That spiritual awakening not only inspired the team, but it reverberated throughout the entire school, defusing some racial tension that Nathan says he felt his first couple of years at Woodlawn.

"It was time for people to actually get along -- no matter what race or color you were," he says. "It was just that time. And the majority of us did that. We prayed together, and from then on, I respected them and they respected me."

Grabbing a piece of 'Touchdown Tony'

Gerelds' plan to move Nathan to running back was paying off handsomely, too.
Sometime during that junior season -- maybe it was after he ran for 231 yards and four touchdowns in a 35-12 upset of the No. 1-ranked Huffman Vikings -- Woodlawn fans started calling Nathan "Touchdown Tony" and began clamoring for pictures and autographs.

Those were the days when running backs wore tear-away jerseys, which ripped when opposing players tried to bring down the ball carrier by grabbing ahold of his jersey.

Nathan, who wore number 22, went through as many as a dozen jerseys in some games. They made great souvenirs, too, and fans mobbed him after the games to get a piece of Nathan's jersey.

"His jersey would just be hanging on him," Woodlawn teammate Brad Hendrix says. "It wasn't hard to grab a piece of it. He would just tear it off and throw it up in the crowd. It wasn't anything boastful for him. He was worn out, and he was just tearing the rest of his jersey off."

The quiet, introverted Nathan didn't know quite what to make of all that attention.

"It was weird," he says. "It was odd to see people react and want a piece of cloth off of somebody else who was wearing it."

'They all came to see Tony'

By his senior year, it wasn't just folks in Birmingham talking about "Touchdown Tony." People around the country were starting to notice him, too.

Sports Illustrated featured him in its "Faces in the Crowd" section after he ran for 228 yards and scored seven touchdowns against Ramsay, and late in the season, along with Banks quarterback Jeff Rutledge, he was named a Parade All-American.

Meanwhile, the recruiting letters continued to pour in from schools such as USC, Notre Dame, Texas and Oklahoma, as well as SEC schools Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and Tennessee.

If all that notoriety affected Nathan, none of his teammates could tell.

"You wouldn't have known him to be any different from any of the other players on the team," Hendrix, who went on to play briefly with the NFL's Dallas Cowboys and San Diego Chargers, says. "I don't even know if he realized how good he was back then. He was just a humble high school athlete."

RELATED:Remembering the 1974 Woodlawn-Banks game

It all built up to Nov. 8, 1974, when Woodlawn, which had won 11 games in a row, met its old nemesis Banks, which was riding a 34-game unbeaten streak, at Legion Field.

An estimated 42,000 people poured into Legion Field that night -- a state high-school attendance record that still stands -- but as big as the game was, just as many people were curious to see its two superstars, Woodlawn's Nathan and Banks' Rutledge.

"That Banks-Woodlawn game our senior year, that was all about Tony and Jeff Rutledge," Hendrix says. "There wasn't anybody that came to see me play or any of the other guys. They all came to see Tony."

While Nathan ran for 112 yards and scored a touchdown that night, the Colonels lost to the Jets 18-7, with Rutledge completing eight of nine passing for 185 yards and a touchdown. Woodlawn never beat Banks during Nathan's three years on the varsity.

Coach Bryant pays a visit

When it came time to pick a college, Nathan considered going to Oklahoma, where renegade coach Barry Switzer was lighting up the scoreboard with a high-powered wishbone offense that was the talk of college football. But Norman, Okla., was cold and rainy when Nathan went to visit, and besides that, Switzer never bothered to come visit Nathan and his parents in Birmingham.

Bill Battle, the young coach at Tennessee, wanted Nathan to come play for him in Knoxville, and Vols star quarterback Condredge Holloway showed him around on his official visit. But, Knoxville, too, was a little too far from home for Nathan.

Meanwhile, Tuscaloosa was just an hour away, and one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game, Alabama's Paul "Bear" Bryant, had the Crimson Tide not just rolling again, but steamrolling.

Bryant paid several visits to the Nathan home, and he often brought with him an entourage of assistants and past and current Tide players, including Joe Namath, Johnny Musso and Ozzie Newsome.

On one particular visit, Bryant brought his overnight bag, Tony's father remembers.

"What are you doing with that grip?'" William Nathan asked, referring to Bryant's bag.

"I came to stay until Tony makes up his mind," Bryant replied.

Louise Nathan roasted a raccoon that her husband, an avid hunter whom friends called "Coon Man," had bagged on one of his late-night coon hunts, and they invited Bryant to have dinner with them.

"I wanted some kind of meat to serve him," William Nathan remembers. "He ate a few pieces of it, but he didn't eat much."

William Nathan was sold, though, and eventually, so was his son Tony.

'What am I doing here?'

Bryant sealed the deal by promising Tony he would get a shot at playing basketball at Alabama, too.

On signing day, both Bryant and Alabama basketball coach C.M. Newton stood behind Nathan as he sat next to his parents and got his picture taken signing his letter of intent.

"Before I signed to go to Alabama, Coach Bryant told me, 'Well, look, you can try out (for basketball), but if you're not within the top six, you've got to come back out for spring ball.'''

So after his freshman football season -- while his football teammates were enjoying their break -- Nathan was on the basketball court the next day, trying to break into an Alabama lineup that featured Leon Douglas, Reggie King, T.R. Dunn and Anthony Murray and that would go on to make it to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, losing to eventual champion Indiana.

"I was running down the baseline trying to follow my guy around, and, all of a sudden, they set a pick and this guy's elbow hit me in the eye and that cured my basketball desire," Nathan says. "I wanted to go home. Everybody else was gone home for Christmas vacation, and I was like, 'What am I doing here?' So I ended up saying, 'Thanks, coach, but no thanks.' Football was going to be it."

'Before Bo, there was Tony'

Fully committed to football now, Nathan became one of the key cogs in a wishbone offense that was clicking on all cylinders.

Jeff Rutledge, Nathan's old rival from Banks, was now his teammate, quarterbacking the Tide.

"In high school, he was the best quarterback in the state of Alabama, and Coach Bryant did his job and the recruiters did their jobs to get him to go to Alabama," Nathan says. "If we needed him to throw the football, I knew he could definitely do that. I wasn't too sure about him running the wishbone at that time, but he did a very good job and it was great to play with him."

After the Tide slipped to an uncharacteristic 9-3 in Nathan's sophom*ore season -- Alabama's worst record in his four years there -- the team bounced back to go 11-1 and finish runner-up to national champs Notre Dame in 1977 and to go 11-1 again and win it all in 1978.

Playing in the wishbone -- a four-pronged attack with two tailbacks, a fullback and the quarterback all sharing carries -- Nathan never amassed huge numbers like Crimson Tide workhorses Bobby Humphrey or Shaun Alexander or Trent Richardson, but for his career, he averaged an eye-popping 6.4 yards every time he carried the ball at Alabama.

"The other thing about the wishbone, if you were a truly good back in the wishbone, you had to block, too,'' says Murray Legg, who, as a defensive back on those Alabama teams, often went up against Nathan in practice. "Some of the other running backs didn't want to be that lead blocker. I can tell you, Tony had no trouble with his blocking."

And while most college players today are bigger, faster and stronger now than they were during Nathan's college days, Legg has no doubt that, had Nathan come along four decades later, Nick Saban would find a place for him with Derrick Henry and Kenyan Drake in the Crimson Tide's current running back rotation.

"I think back about our team, and I think about the players who played then and who could play now in terms of their strength and speed and ability," Legg says. "I think (defensive lineman) Marty Lyons could play today. (Linebacker) Barry Krauss could play today. I think Tony could definitely play today. Tony could have gone anywhere."

RELATED: Turning back the clock at Legion Field

Ragland, the former Woodlawn quarterback, recently watched an ESPN documentary about another Birmingham-area sports legend, Bessemer's Bo Jackson, and it reminded of that 14-year-old kid he first met at freshman football practice.

Like Jackson, Nathan excelled at just about any sport he played. He was a two-time all-state guard on the Woodlawn basketball team, and as a centerfielder and first baseman on the baseball team, he got drafted by the Montreal Expos.

"Before Bo, there was Tony," Ragland says. "We don't have any of the highlight reels from the '70s that they have from Bo Jackson's day, but Tony did some phenomenal things on the football field and on the basketball court."

'Shula knew what talent was'

Another one of football's coaching greats, Don Shula of the Miami Dolphins, drafted Nathan in the third round of the 1979 NFL Draft, and even though it was a long way from Birmingham or Tuscaloosa, Miami was like a home away from home for Nathan.

Nose tackle Bob Baumhower, who was two years ahead of Nathan at Alabama, was already there when Nathan arrived for his first camp. Center Dwight Stephenson and defensive back Don McNeal, who were a year behind him, would join the Dolphins the next year.

"Well, Shula knew what talent was," Nathan says. "We had a ball. We had a blast. We just couldn't put the icing on the cake."

The four of them -- Baumhower, Nathan, Stephenson and McNeal -- played in two Super Bowls together, but the Dolphins lost both games, to the Redskins in Super Bowl XVII and the 49ers in Super Bowl XIX.

In a 1982 playoff game with San Diego that became known as "The Epic in Miami," Nathan was the exclamation point on one of the most memorable plays in Dolphins' history -- dashing untouched into the end zone after receiver Duriel Harris caught a pass from quarterback Don Strock and then tossed it back to the streaking Nathan on a legendary hook-and-lateral play that ignited a dramatic Miami comeback. Even though the Dolphins eventually lost in overtime, the play lives on in Miami lore.

"He looked like he had a jet pack on his back," Baumhower recalls. "We were down 24-zip and nothing was going right, and that was the play that gave us the spark to come back. I still get chills thinking about it."

Nathan played his entire NFL career with the Dolphins - retiring in 1987 after nine seasons in the aqua and orange - and he has continued to make Miami his home, even when NFL assistant coaching jobs took him to Tampa Bay, Baltimore and San Francisco.

He and his wife, Johnnie, who was his high school sweetheart at Woodlawn and his college sweetheart at Alabama, still live in the same house they bought in 1983.

"It's been home a long time," Nathan says. "All three kids were raised here. We definitely love Miami."

'A very revered guy here'

The Nathans go to the same church, New Testament Baptist Church, with his former Alabama and Miami teammate McNeal and his wife, Rhonda. McNeal has been a pastor and counselor at the church, and he and Nathan are close, a friendship that dates back to their playing days at Alabama.

"He's very respected here," McNeal says of his old teammate. "When people say Tony Nathan, their ears go up. Tony is a very revered guy here in our community, here in our church community."

After Nathan got out of coaching, another one of his former Dolphins teammates, guard Ed Newman, told him he had the perfect job for him.

Newman serves as a criminal court judge in Miami-Dade County, and six years ago, he hired Nathan to be a bailiff in his courtroom. The easygoing Nathan had the ideal temperament for the job, Newman told him.

"I get to meet a ton of people -- lawyers, defendants, victims -- and they all are different," Nathan says. "Some do come in with attitudes, and you just have to diffuse them before they go in front of the judge. It's been very interesting. There's something always new at the courthouse."

Last year, Nathan was inducted into the Dolphins' Walk of Fame, immortalized alongside such legendary Dolphins as Dan Marino, Bob Griese, Paul Warfield, Larry Csonka and Nick Buoniconti in the sidewalk outside Miami's Sun Life Stadium.

"We have, I think, one of the best alumni associations in the NFL," Nathan says. "They do a great job of keeping us involved in what's going on and keeping us involved with the fans."

'The thrill of my life'

A few years ago, though, Nathan realized one thing was missing in his life.

He had left the University of Alabama in the spring of 1979 without a diploma.

After playing in three college all-star games following his senior season, Nathan fell behind in his classes, and he was worried he might flunk out his spring semester.

He got permission from his academic advisers to drop his courses with a withdraw-passing grade and come back to finish his degree later.

But there was one catch. He had to meet with Coach Bryant to get him to sign off on it, too.

"He wasn't too pleased," Nathan recalls. "I told him, me being so far behind, I didn't want to flunk out. He said, 'Well, make sure you promise me you're going to finish what you started.'

"I said, 'I will do that. I will make you that promise. I don't know exactly when, but I'll do it.'"

All three of Nathan's daughters have their college degrees - Nichole from South Florida and Natalie and Nadia from Alabama - as does his wife. So they put the pressure on him, too.

"They all looked at me like, 'OK, don't you think it's your time?'" Nathan says. "I was like, 'All right, it's that time.'"

He started taking online courses through the University of Alabama's Bama by Distance degree program, and this past May, at 58, he graduated.

"I just felt like I was the oldest cat in the house," he says. "I had some professors walk up to me and say, 'Hey, we were around when you were playing.'

So, it was an emotional day."

The stoic Nathan even teared up as walked across the Coleman Coliseum stage to receive his diploma from outgoing UA President Judy Bonner.

"It touched me," he says. "It really did."

It took him 36 years, but Nathan kept that promise to his coach. And to himself.

No one could be prouder, though, than the mother who wouldn't let him quit the football team back in the 10th grade, who taught him to always finish what he started.

"It was the thrill of my life," Louise Nathan says. "That's what I always wanted. It wasn't so much the football I wanted. I wanted him to have his degree. I was so elated that he did it, and I thank the Lord that he did."

Just like a Nathan, Tony never quit.

Tony Nathan will sign copies of his new book, "Touchdown Tony: Running With a Purpose," at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, at the Alabama Booksmith, 2626 19th Place South, Homewood.