BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Forty years later, the details have gotten fuzzier and the legends have grown larger.
Some of those who were in the stands that night can't say for sure who won, and even many of those who were on the fieldare hard-pressed to remember the final score.
Wasn't it 14-0? Or was it 17-7? Something like that.
One fact, though, remains indisputable.
On Nov. 8, 1974 -- 40 years ago this Saturday - the two-time defending state champion Banks Jets met their eastern Birmingham rivals the Woodlawn Colonels in front of what was then and remains today the biggest crowd to ever watch a high school football game in Alabama.
They came out in such numbers that the start of the game had to be delayed twice so folks could work their way through the jammed Legion Field turnstiles. And when the game finally did kick off a half-hour or so later, the crowd kept pouring in well into the second quarter.
From his perch in the press box, Birmingham News sportswriter Wayne Martin could see the pedestrian bottleneck at the south entrance of Legion Field, as well as an unbroken strand of headlights from the long line of cars on Graymont Avenue, which was backed up all the way to downtown.
"We just sat up there and watched," Martin, now retired, recalls. "People drove up, saw the lines outside and just went on by. If all of the gates had been open, they would have had 60,000 people."
Banks quarterback Jeff Rutledge, who would later lead Alabama to a national championship and play on two Super Bowl-winning teams, and Woodlawn running back Tony Nathan, who would become Rutledge's teammate at Alabama and go on to play in two Super Bowls of his own, were the marquee attractions.
"They had the best running back in the state and we had the best quarterback," former Banks head coach George "Shorty" White remembers. "It was one heck of a game. The attendance was out of this world."
The final count was an estimated 42,000 people -- roughly 10,000 more than the previous record crowd at the Crippled Children's Classic between Phillips and Woodlawn, also at Legion Field, in 1950.
Birmingham police guessed another 20,000 gave up and went back home when they saw the long lines.
A battle of unbeatens
In the days leading up to the game, both The Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald played it up as not only a clash of the titans between Banks and Woodlawn but also a Rutledge vs. Nathan showdown.
The game, though, was way bigger than its two stars, a pair of Parade All-Americans who were among the most sought-after high school recruits in the country.
Banks came in riding a 34-game unbeaten streak, its last loss coming to Woodlawn, 21-18, three years before.
Woodlawn, meanwhile, had a nice streak going, too, winning 11 in a row since it fell to Banks 17-7 in 1973.
"It was a culmination of really four years of building up to that point," Woodlawn quarterback Denny Ragland remembers. "I think I had lost to Banks four times in three years because my freshman year, I played them as a freshman and on the B-team. So I had never beaten them."
Add to that the fact that, back in those days, only one team from each region made the state playoffs. And since Banks and Woodlawn were in the same region -- and both were competing in 4A, which was then the largest high school classification in the state -- only one of them would advance.
"It was always the biggest game of the year, for both sides," Rutledge says. "It was Banks-Woodlawn. You look at the schedule, and that was the one you've got marked down that you want to win.
"But this particular year, we were both undefeated going in. We felt like we were probably the two best teams in Alabama, but only one of us was going to get to go to the state. So it was almost like it was the state championship game that night."
Among those 42,000 who came to watch was a freshman sorority girl from the University of Alabama, who was there not because she had any allegiance to either team but just because she heard it was a big game and she wanted to see it and be a part of it. Unbeknownst to either one of them at the time, she would later marry one of the game's biggest heroes.
Out on the field, one of the players, a linebacker who also filled in as back-up tight end, caught the only touchdown pass of his high-school career, in what was by far the biggest game of his career. Another, a little fireplug of a linebacker who had moved to Birmingham from Texas the year before, became the surprise defensive star of the game.
Along the sidelines, one of the best coaches in Alabama high school football history would notch his 100th victory, but he would never win another.
And much to the surprise of probably everybody who was there that night -- fans, players, coaches, cheerleaders and sportswriters -- neither one of the teams would go on to win it all that year.
Neighbors and rivals
The two schools were just 10 minutes and less than four miles apart.
Banks High School - named for school superintendent L. Frazier Banks - opened in 1957 in Birmingham's South East Lake neighborhood and fielded its first football team three years later.
The athletic teams at Banks adopted the name Jets, and in 1961, the Alabama Air National Guard loaned the school a Korean War-era F-86D Sabre jet, which was painted in the school colors of Columbia blue and scarlet and prominently displayed on campus, making it an inviting target for practical jokers from rival schools.
Banks alums included Jimmy Sidle, an All-American quarterback at Auburn; Johnny Musso, an All-American running back at Alabama; and David Cutliffe, who became the head coach at Ole Miss and later, Duke.
Woodlawn High School had a much longer history that went back to 1916, when the community of Woodlawn was annexed into Birmingham.
The main building, built in 1922, was a grand, three-story structure that always looked more like a palace than a schoolhouse.
The sports teams at Woodlawn became known as the Colonels and the school colors were green and gold, the same colors that student pranksters sometimes painted that Sabre jet at nearby Banks.
Woodlawn grads included Harry Gilmer, who was an All-American at Alabama and the MVP of the 1946 Rose Bowl, and Bobby Bowden, who coached Florida State to two national championships on his way to becoming the winningest coach in college football history.
The quiet superstar
Although Woodlawn had history on its side, Banks, by 1974, had the upper hand on the football field, winning state titles in 1965, 1972 and 1973 - all under Shorty White's leadership.
With the arrival of head coach Tandy Gerelds in 1971, though, and the emergence of Nathan, who had a breakout junior season in 1973, Woodlawn started to level the playing field.
It was Geralds, Nathan would say later, who talked him out of quitting football, and for that, Nathan remained forever grateful.
The quiet Nathan, who teammates say tried to shy away from all of the attention, was one of Birmingham's first superstar black athletes in a city that was still adjusting to integration.
"This was before Bo Jackson," Ragland, the Woodlawn quarterback, says. "To be a 16-, 17-year-old kid, I had never seen anybody run and do the things Tony did athletically.
"That's why, for two years, we had a lot of focus and attention on Woodlawn. We were playing in front of 20,000 people regularly, so we were getting some big crowds."
The Colonels had something else going for them, too.
"Coach Tandy Gerelds was a fine man and a fine coach, and he had a lot to do with a lot of players on that team coming to know the Lord," Brad Hendrix, a senior defensive end on the '74 team, says.
"We dedicated our season to the glory of the Lord, and we played at a much higher level those two years (1973-74) than we probably should have. You could call it inspiration, you could call it whatever you like."
Talent on both sides
It helped, too, that both Banks and Woodlawn were also blessed with some enormously talented athletes who weren't named Rutledge or Nathan and who also went on to play in the SEC and the NFL.
From Banks, defensive lineman Freddie Knighton signed with Alabama, running back Jerry Murphree went to LSU, and linebacker Bob Grefseng played at Ole Miss. Jerry McDonald, a split end and defensive back, turned down college football offers and decided to play baseball instead after he was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
From Woodlawn, linebacker Rocha McKinstry signed with Auburn, and Hendrix, the defensive end, played with the University of North Alabama and later, the NFL's Dallas Cowboys and San Diego Chargers.
In those days, the Banks-Woodlawn rivalry was like the Alabama-Auburn of Birmingham high school football, but maybe just a little friendlier.
Many of the players on both teams grew up playing pee-wee football together at East Lake and Wahouma parks, and as teenagers, they hung out together at Eastwood Mall. They attended some of the same churches and dated some of the same girls.
"Almost everybody who played in that (1974) game, you may not have been close friends with them, but you knew who they were," Grefseng, the Banks linebacker, says. "We knew each other from grammar school."
Ragland, the Woodlawn quarterback, grew up in a house divided. His two older sisters went to Banks, but after the Birmingham schools were desegregated, he was zoned for Woodlawn.
"Up until my eighth-grade year, I had been going to Banks games all my life, watching Jeff Rutledge's older brother, Gary, and Johnny Musso play,'' Ragland says. "But it didn't bother me that I was forced to go to Woodlawn because a lot of my friends were at Woodlawn, too."
The build-up to game night
.
As that 1974 season progressed and both teams kept winning week after week, that friendly rivalry between Banks and Woodlawn reached a new level, though.
A couple of weeks before their game, Banks' White alerted the Legion Field staff to expect a monster crowd.
"I said, 'If we win (the next game) and they win, we are both going to be undefeated when we play each other, and it's going to be the biggest high school crowd there ever will be,'" White recalls.
White says he was assured by the Legion Field crew that it would be able to handle the crowd.
The week of the game, Jerry Stearns, who was an assistant coach at Woodlawn that year and later became the head coach there, recalls selling advance tickets at the school, something he says never happened before.
"We would go to the board of education and get tickets and we would be sold out in 30 minutes to an hour," Stearns says. "I remember going back and forth to get more tickets to sell."
In the lunchroom, the Woodlawn students would break into impromptu pep rallies, standing in their chairs and yelling, "Rip Jets, rip Jets, rip those Sugar Jets." (Sugar Jets was a reference to a brand of cereal from the 1950s and '60s.)
Something else special happened that week, too. The night before the game, Stearns says, members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapters from both teams gathered for a joint meeting at Woodlawn.
"It was an amazing thing to see all of those kids -- who grew up together and went to church together, played at Wahouma Park together - in that room together that night," Stearns says.
A police escort
By Friday, the excitement was at full-tilt boogie.
On the bus ride to Legion Field, the Woodlawn players knew it was a big deal when they got a police escort to the game, which was also a first for them.
As the teams went through their pre-game drills, Woodlawn's Stearns noticed another assistant, Mike Logan, staring up into the stands with his mouth agape. The year before, Logan had coached at rural Locust Fork High School in Blount County.
"I said, 'What's wrong, Mike, they didn't have crowds like this at Locust Fork?'" Stearns recalls. "We both started to laugh."
Not once, but twice, both teams were sent back to their respective locker rooms to allow the crowd to file into the stadium.
While it has been reported that only one gate was open that night, Walter Garrett, who was the stadium manager at Legion Field for 38 years, says that both gates 7A and 7B at the south entrance to the stadium were open, as was customary at all Birmingham high school games there.
"Each gate had four openings in it for four lines of people," Garrett says, "but it still obviously wasn't enough."
When the teams ran back onto the field for the third time, the lower bowl of Legion Field was practically full.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the delay in the game helped us,'' Banks' Grefseng says. "The Woodlawn guys were like maniacs, and they were roaring all through their pre-game warm-ups. I remember it was good we didn't start when we were supposed to because they were at their peak."
The unsung hero
Once the game did start, Banks built an 18-0 lead on a pair of 21- and 16-yard touchdown runs by fullback Jerry Murphree and a 32-yard TD pass from Rutledge to Grefseng, who also doubled as a back-up tight end. It was Grefseng's only touchdown catch of his Banks career.
"The touchdown was a busted play," he recalls. "It was supposed to be a quick pass but somebody got in there and almost sacked Jeff. But he made a great play and I just kept running, and he threw it and I caught it."
Rutledge lived up to his star billing that night, completing 9 of 10 passes for 188 yards and that touchdown to Grefseng.
The unsung hero, though, was a little linebacker named Greg Muse, who had transferred to Banksafter living in Texas.
Banks coach Shorty White had assigned Muse to shadow Woodlawn's Nathan everywhere he went, and although Nathan finished with 112 yards on 31 carries, Muse was all over him most of the night. Nathan scored Woodlawn's only touchdown on a 13-yard run in the fourth quarter.
"Everywhere Tony lined up, there was Greg," Rutledge remembers. "Greg was not very big but he had a huge heart and he gave Tony fits that night. Our defensive game plan was awesome."
Banks would win the game 18-7.
The following Friday night, Woodlawn closed out its season on a cold, rainy night at Fair Park, defeating Carver 12-0.
"We were out there playing in the mud and the rain," Woodlawn's Ragland says. "It was a miserable way to end your season."
That same night, Banks' 35-game unbeaten streak came to an abrupt end when Rutledge blew out an ankle and the banged-up Jets lost 34-27 to West End.
Their two-year reign as 4A state champs also ended with a 12-0 shutout loss to eventual champion Homewood in the first round of the playoffs.
Forty years later
In the 1980s, Banks High School -- home of those mighty Jets for all those years -- was closed as part of a city schools reorganization and it became Banks Middle School. After completing the eighth grade, those students who would have gone to Banks instead went to Woodlawn High School, Banks' old rival.
In 2006, the Birmingham Board of Education decided to close the deteriorating middle school, too, saying it was unsafe and an eyesore. That iconic Banks jet was turned over to the Southern Museum of Flight, where it has been restored to its Korean War glory days.
Meanwhile, Woodlawn High School stands majestically in the same location on First Avenue North, just like it has since 1922, and the football team is still sending players to the NFL, including Chris Davis, the Auburn cornerback who was the last-second hero of the 2013 Iron Bowl.
That 1974 Banks-Woodlawn game would be Shorty White's 100th win at Banks, and his last. After the season ended, he accepted an assistant coaching position on Paul "Bear" Bryant's staff at Alabama, where he was part of back-to-back national championships in 1978 and 1979 -- the first of which featured Rutledge and Nathan in the starting backfield. White is now retired and living with his wife, June, in Helena.
Tandy Gerelds left Woodlawn after the 1975 season to join his father in the family insurance business, but in 1984, he returned to coaching at Deshler High School in Tuscumbia. Six years later, he led the Tigers to an undefeated 15-0 season and a 4A state championship. Later, while at Belmont High School in Mississippi, Gerelds was diagnosed with brain cancer, and he died in 2003, coaching right up until the end.
Following his senior season at Alabama in 1978, Banks' Jeff Rutledge went on to play 13 years in the National Football League. Although he was mostly used as a back-up, he has two Super Bowl rings - one from the New York Giants and another from the Washington Redskins. After working as an assistant at Vanderbilt University and with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL, Rutledge is now the head coach at Valley Christian High School in Chandler, Ariz.
After four years at Alabama, Woodlawn's Tony Nathan was drafted in the third round of the 1979 NFL Draft by the Miami Dolphins, where he played for nine seasons under Don Shula, including two Super Bowls. When he retired from football, Nathan also got into coaching - first with the Dolphins and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and then at Florida International University. He is now a bailiff for Miami-Dade County Court Judge Edward Newman, a former Dolphins teammate. Efforts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful.
Although it was just one moment in time, all of their names -- as well as those of Greg Muse, Jerry Murphree, Bob Grefseng, Denny Ragland, Brad Hendrix, Jerry Stearns and many others -- will always be linked to that November night in Legion Field 40 years ago.
Memories live on
This week, Birmingham filmmakers Jon and Andrew Erwin began shooting a movie, "Woodlawn," which takes place during Nathan's days at Woodlawn High School and focuses in on that 1974 Banks-Woodlawn game.
So the magic from that night continues to live on.
"There are people who went to that game that I've heard from all my life," Rutledge says. "I'm 57 years old, and I'll run into people that I haven't seen in years and years and years and they talk about that game, that they were there."
Including his wife.
That University of Alabama sorority girl who was in the stands at Legion Field that night?
That was Laura Holmes, whom Rutledge later met when his Fellowship of Christian Athletes adviser suggested that he ask her to go with him to the team banquet following his freshman year at Alabama.
They've been married for going on 37 years now, with three children and nine grandkids.
"That was neat, that she had just come up (for the game), not knowing anything that was going to happen years later," Rutledge says. "We were just talking about it. Gosh, that game was 40 years ago, which is unbelievable."
As big as it was, though, even in these days where everything is just a Google or YouTube search away, only a few accounts and descriptions from that night are available, mainly in school yearbooks and newspaper archives.
And in the memories of those who were there.
"Somewhere, there is a videotape of that game," Grefseng says. "The trouble is, it's on VHS cassette, and my VHS player died years ago."
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
