Crimson Slide

This is the story of a coach’s life, and a coach’s wife.

It hasn’t been long since Mike DuBose was the coach at Alabama, 10-3 and Southeastern Conference champion in 1999 with a team that played in the Orange Bowl.

Now he is the coach at Northview High in Dothan, Ala., after taking over a winless team when he couldn’t find a job coaching in college or the NFL.

Last week, under the Friday night lights, Northview completed its first season under DuBose with a 34-0 loss and an 0-10 record. Winless again.

It sure isn’t the way Disney would have written it.

“We’ve improved, but we haven’t improved as much as I thought we would,” DuBose said. “I’m glad I’m back in it, but I haven’t enjoyed losing.”

The story would have been better if the coach with the tumultuous past had returned to the game he loved and transformed a winless bunch of skinny youngsters into champions. Maybe got those last two years he needed for his state retirement while he was at it.

Instead, the folks in the stands with the Alabama seat cushions or Auburn ball caps watched and shrugged. They were happy to get DuBose, but they could have gone winless again without a famous coach.

DuBose was fired at Alabama -- officially urged into resigning -- during a 3-8 season in 2000, a season that started with a No. 3 national ranking but collapsed with losses to Southern Mississippi and Central Florida.

The year before, he’d survived a sexual-harassment scandal, despite having admitted that he had initially lied when he’d denied an improper relationship with a former secretary. The university settled with the woman for $350,000.

That $350,000 eventually came out of DuBose’s paychecks, and that 10-3 season showed that Alabama was honest about what it cares about in its football coaches: winning.

When Alabama’s record crumbled to its worst in 45 years the next season, no one was standing by DuBose anymore -- with the very notable exception of his wife, Polly, his sweetheart from their days at Opp High in Opp, Ala.

“Yes, Opp, the city of opportunity,” she teased. “You haven’t lived unless you’ve been to Opp.

“God has been so faithful to us, not just in the good times, but in the hard times.... There are many things I guess you never really understand. We may never have an answer for them. But I think you just have to press forward. You just walk on and know God will use this and make you stronger, and that he has something for you, a hope and a future for you.”

DuBose understands better than anyone else what a remarkable attitude that is.

“She’s a very, very strong lady with tremendous faith. Much stronger than I am,” he said. “She is my strength. I’m very fortunate. It would have been much more difficult without her. She is a rock.”

There wasn’t only the notoriety of the harassment case. Alabama was put on five years’ probation this year for a recruiting scandal that occurred partly on his watch, though DuBose wasn’t charged with any wrongdoing.

That was only a final blow.

The job at their alma mater was gone. The town where Mike had been a star defensive lineman on Bear Bryant’s 1973 national championship team no longer felt like home.

The couple’s son, Michael, is a senior at Alabama, and their daughter, Julie, lives in Tuscaloosa with her husband. The DuBoses don’t go back.

“No, we don’t. We really don’t,” Polly said. “The children will come here and we’ll visit. It’s just really hard. It’s been home for a long, long time. Mike and I went to school there. Our children grew up there. It’s just real difficult for me to go back.”

After Mike’s final game as Alabama’s coach, he and Polly sold their house in a day and went to the beach near Destin, Fla., for a month.

Then they bought a house on a lake in Alabama and went to work remodeling and gardening.

“It was a very healing place for us,” Polly said. “Then it got to be football season and that’s when it was like, ‘OK, it’s time to go to work.’ ”

Mike is an excellent cook, but his dishes lost their savor.

“When you start putting the spices in alphabetical order, it’s time to get a job,” Polly said.

For the first time in their lives together, there was no football season.

After a year off, Mike, now 49, tried to get back into it, with little luck.

Four seasons as Alabama’s coach, all his years as a Crimson Tide assistant, even three seasons as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer assistant didn’t crack a door.

All those friends in coaching and not one job offer.

“There are consequences to your actions,” Mike said. “I don’t want to say it was because of friendships that the opportunities weren’t there. I don’t really know why.”

It could have been the taint of NCAA violations, no matter that DuBose wasn’t personally implicated. It could have been the harassment scandal, the record, even happenstance.

“I don’t know. I ask myself that, but I don’t have an answer,” DuBose said.

With his retirement not yet secured, DuBose went back to the bottom.

Northview Principal David Hopson remembers when the phone rang.

“He had a friend who made a call to me and said Coach DuBose is interested in getting back in coaching and exploring high schools and asked if I was interested, and certainly I was,” Hopson said. “Here’s a guy who’s coached in high school, college and the pros. Here was an opportunity to get someone with that type of background. Everybody was ecstatic, even those Auburn fans.”

It wasn’t quite unanimous, though.

“There were probably two or three people, at most, who ever let it be known they thought it was a problem,” Hopson said. “I’d say 99.9% were very much impressed we could get someone of Mike’s caliber. There were a few dissenters. I anticipated there would be, but there were even less than I thought.”

Hopson said he had no worries about DuBose’s recent past.

“It was one of those, ‘Let bygones be bygones’ things,” Hopson said. “Let’s move forward.”

That’s what they did.

All the losing, though, had shrunk Northview’s roster to a small group. DuBose’s celebrity drew some of the old players back and brought in some that had never played football at all.

“I know a lot more about the situation now than I did coming in,” DuBose said. “I made some decisions just to compromise, in letting guys come out late -- some who didn’t go through the off-season workouts or didn’t work as hard as they should.

“Normally, I wouldn’t do something like that, but I was trying to get guys involved, participating.

“Some I compromised on ended up quitting on us.”

As the losses piled up, the roster shrank again.

“I thought we were going to have a good season,” said Tommy Gilbert, the team’s talented freshman quarterback. “We’re coming along, but we’ve got some players who don’t want it as bad as the coach.”

Northview isn’t without football history. The school of 1,155 students won state championships, in 1981 and ‘85, and two players from that era went on to the NFL. Defensive end Larry Roberts played at Alabama and went on to play for the San Francisco 49ers, and receiver Lawrence Dawsey played for Florida State and Tampa Bay.

This season, the best player on the team was probably Brian Jackson, a kicker with 50-yard range.

“We’re small, young and inexperienced,” DuBose said.

In 10 games, Northview was shut out four times and outscored, 272-53.

The closest game was the next-to-last game of the season against rival Dothan, a 15-12 loss in which Jackson missed a potential tying field goal shorter than one he had made earlier in the game.

The final game -- against 9-1 Mary Montgomery of Mobile -- DuBose stood his ground and suspended one of his best players for disciplinary reasons. Not that it made much difference.

“I don’t know that we’ve lost to a football team we should have beaten,” DuBose said. “I don’t think I can say we were better than anyone we played. That’s not the same as saying we didn’t have chances to win, but I don’t think there were any we should have won. Again, losing is hard. The thing you have to do is learn from it.”

Far from his days on chartered flights and private planes, DuBose rode the bus to road games two hours away this season, coaching in stadiums where cheerleaders spell out “HOMECOMING” by poking Styrofoam cups into the openings in chain-link fences.

“There are times I’m disappointed and frustrated,” he said. “Life is a process, like everything else.

“The pressure to be competitive is still there. It’s not the same from a national standpoint, but most pressure is self-inflicted anyway. I’ve always thought pressure was good for you. But if pressure becomes stress, it can become deadly.”

DuBose absorbed the losing this season fairly well, but exactly when Northview’s 21-game losing streak will end remains to be seen.

“Mike’s making the turn,” said Hopson, the principal. “He hasn’t turned the corner yet, but we are rebuilding.”

DuBose is far from ready to quit coaching. Still, another opportunity could tempt him.

“We’re going to keep our eyes and ears open,” he said.

Before the season ended, he and Polly discovered they could secure Mike’s state retirement with just this one year.

“We will have three years we can buy from out of state that would make the 25 years,” Polly said. “We thought we needed two more years in Alabama, but actually at the end of the year, we could leave the state.

“We’ll sit down and talk about it, pray about it and see what the options are.

“There’s no doubt, Mike really misses college football, and I really do too.”