Fred Sington, Jr.

One of the most famous names in Alabama football history is Fred Sington, who played on Alabama’s first Rose Bowl team for Coach Wallace Wade. He was so famous that one of the most popular singers of the 1920s, Rudy Valee, recorded a song, “Football Freddie!” about Sington. He is in the College Football Hall of Fame.

He was a Phi Beta Kappa student, played major league baseball for the Washington Senators, and founded a successful business, Sington’s Sporting Goods. He was so active in civic affairs he was known as “Mr. Birmingham.”

In 1957 he was one of a small group, including University President Dr. Frank Rose, who flew to Houston to meet with the head football coach at Texas A&M, and convinced Paul Bryant to come to Alabama.

In other words, he was a big name up until his death in 1998.

It was his son, Fred Sington, Jr., who had the burden of following that name as a football player at Alabama. He and his brother Dave were members of Bryant’s first Alabama team.

Fred, Jr. also went on to a distinguished career in civic duty in Gadsden, including serving as executive assistant to the mayor and most recently as chairman of the Gadsden Airport Authority. He was also active in both the Alabama A Club and the Red Elephant Club and was a past president of The University’s National Alumni Association.

He had stayed active on the sports scene in Gadsden as a high school sports radio announcer and with a weekly call-in show with his son Fred III.

Fred Sington, Jr. was not having a good year, having spent much of 2017 battling various ailments and being hospitalized on several occasions. At 5 a.m. today he died in a Birmingham hospital.

In a book I wrote in 2005, “What It Means To Be Crimson Tide,” Fred, Jr. talked about what it meant to play football for Alabama, and specifically for the first two Crimson Tide teams under Bryant, and also what it meant to have to live up to the Fred Sington name. As he said, “I tried to do the best I could.”

He did well, an offensive tackle and linebacker in 1958, and placekicker in 1959.

Sington recounted the introduction to Alabama football under Bryant in the spring of 1958. “It started in January with what was known as the gym program,” he said. “That was so tough that we thought it was a relief that we would finally get onto the football field for spring practice.

“We were wrong. There was no relief.”

He said in 1998 the ’58 team had a reunion. Someone had a pre-spring roster of 362 names from that first Bryant spring practice. This was before the days of limits on the number of practices that could be held. “When we reported in the fall,” Sington said, “we had 42 left.”

They were 42 good ones, including Fred Sington, Jr.