Eddie Conyers: Six decades of laughs, thrills, spills on Alabama football practice field

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It's a pretty good bet that at some point during the late Cecil "Hootie" Ingram's seven-year run as Alabama's director of athletics, security around the Crimson Tide's football facilities got an upgrade. That tends to happen following coaching changes, and within a few months of Ingram's 1989 arrival as Alabama's AD, he replaced coach Bill Curry with Gene Stallings.
And along with Eddie Conyers, Ingram knew something about security from the break-in side.
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Conyers, 97, relaxes on a couch in his home no more than a mile from UA's practice fields in Tuscaloosa. Sitting beside his wife, Peggy, to whom he's been married an incredible 76 years, he cracks a sly grin when asked how he first became an Alabama football fan as a teenager in the 1940s.
"Hootie had become fast friends," Conyers said. "He and I used to slip under a fence to watch Frank Thomas' teams practice."
Thomas coached at Alabama from 1931-1946, winning a pair of national championships. Conyers is one of the only men alive who can speak first-hand about Thomas' Crimson Tide teams. And if you count practices, absolutely nobody alive has seen more Alabama football. A beloved figure around the Mal Moore Athletic Facility, Conyers got his first break as an Alabama practice official from legendary coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant in 1962, and has been doing the job ever since for more than 60 years.
For 10 head coaches.
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For 12 national championship teams.
For thousands of players.
And as a die-hard fan, for the love of the program.
Ingram went on to play at Alabama from 1952-1954, but as athletic director, ultimately made his mark on Alabama football outside the practice-field fence. But once Conyers got under the fence, he stayed inside and never left.
Ref riffs from Eddie Conyers
Sitting in his post-retirement office in the South end of Bryant-Denny Stadium, a smile comes to Nick Saban's face. He's been asked about Conyers' fabled sense of humor and could dig out any number of moments from years gone by. Instead, he goes for the recent, pleased that Conyers' wit easily survived a fall he took at his home in the spring that resulted in a hip fracture.
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"(Trainer) Jeff Allen went to see him (in the hospital) and called Eddie to see what room he was in," Saban said. "And this is typical Eddie − he said, 'Just ask the nurse at the desk which room the guy who looks like Brad Pitt is in.'"
Over Saban's 17 years as head coach there was an unmistakable banter between he and Conyers − Saban would often crack "whatever we're paying you, Eddie, it's too much" − but with UA practices being the most serious of business for Saban, Eddie had to pick his spots for return fire. In the Mal Moore building, one of the rooms name-plated via donation reads the "Eddie Conyers Football Coaches Dressing Room".
"I've joked with him before that he had to get it cleared with me to dress in there," Conyers said.
Conyers was 79 upon Saban's 2007 arrival at Alabama, 95 when Saban retired, but the legendary coach's expectations didn't bend for old age. Anyone on the practice field not meeting Saban's mandate for excellence was at risk to be ripped for it, and Conyers certainly wasn't immune. But Saban did carry a deep respect for his place in the program's tradition as someone who had thrown flags in practice as far back as the Bryant era. And while that didn't buy Conyers any breaks if he made a mistake in practice, it did occasionally buy him the leverage to respond to Saban's jabs with a jab of his own, if the timing was right.
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"Sometimes, Eddie would give it back to him," Allen said. "He was one of a very few people who would even come close to doing that."
Saban would famously chide Conyers for never calling penalties on the UA offense in practice.
"Eddie!!! Have you ever called a penalty on the offense!?"
"Why, yes, coach. I believe it was seven years ago."
Then there was the day Conyers told the coach he could beat him in a round of golf.
Saban: "OK, Eddie, we're going to go to NorthRiver and play for $1,000 a hole."
Conyers: "Oh, come on, coach. I thought you were talking about playing for real money."
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Practice on the two-minute drill, however, was no laughing matter for Conyers. When Alabama scrimmaged, Conyers would typically handle the clock. And Saban paid attention to every second; if Conyers didn't stop the clock at the right moment or committed any other error where the clock was concerned, Saban was sure to ride him. It was Conyers' least favorite part of practice.
The week of the 2009 SEC title game, Conyers had been berated about his clock mishaps for three consecutive days. He convinced SEC football official Steve Shaw to travel to Tuscaloosa to officiate the Thursday workout before the team traveled to Atlanta, imploring him to handle the clock when the team worked on the two-minute drill. By that point, Conyers wanted nothing to do with it, having drawn Saban's ire all week. Shaw reluctantly agreed, and when Julio Jones took the first pass of the two-minute simulation for a long touchdown, the drill ended for the day after one play.
"I looked over at Eddie and said 'What's the problem? This is easy,'" Shaw said.
Depression-born
Conyers attributes his sense of humor to Bob Cone, an uncle on his mother's side, who co-hosted a comedic radio show on Montgomery's WSFA in the 1930s. It was situational comedy and, as Conyers recalls, a takeoff on the more popular "Amos 'n' Andy" show. Conyers was a loyal listener to his uncle's program and described Cone as a "charismatic" figure who eventually made a living at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Conyers' memory, beyond sharp for his age, goes back far enough to recall cars that were started with hand cranks, and remembers the fun-loving Cone once telling him to turn a car crank in the wrong direction, knowing it would recoil.
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"I was just a kid and it knocked me right over," Conyers said. "Everybody laughed. I didn't laugh."
He was born Samuel Edward Conyers III at Montgomery's Hubbard Hospital in 1928, a year before the Great Depression began, and has a few childhood memories of his family's subsistence through the nation's most desperate economic decade. His father died in a car accident when Conyers was only nine months old, and he was raised by his mother, Polly Conyers, and grandmother, Ollie Finklea. He lived in a boarding house near the state capital, owned by Finklea, where he shared space with two other families and whomever else − often, politicians traveling to the capital − needed a short-term room. The ice box in the kitchen had no electric refrigeration; instead, it was stocked daily with a giant block of ice that required loading by two grown men with sturdy ice tongs.
"I'll never know how my grandmother did it," Conyers said. "It was tough, but we didn't know it was tough at the time, because that's the only life we knew."
Finklea died when Conyers was 10, and a few years later the family moved to Tuscaloosa, where he's lived for the last 83 years.
War veteran
After graduating from Tuscaloosa High School in 1946 − Conyers was the quarterback and captain of the football team − he took quite the winding path to an advertising degree from Alabama. He spent two years in the U.S. Navy out of high school, then returned for two years of classes at UA, only for the Korean War to pull him back into the Navy for another two years. His first stop was the Brooklyn Radio Center, where the Navy trained him for several months to send and interpret Morse code. With a proficiency of about 20 words per minute, he was assigned to a destroyer, the USS Dickson, in 1946.
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"Word War II was declared over in '45. The only fighting I ever saw was in a bar in Newport, Rhode Island," Conyers quipped.
During his first two years as a student as UA, Conyers made one great decision − he married Peggy − and one not so good: He joined the Naval Reserves for extra money just two weeks before the Korean War broke out. That put him back on another destroyer, this time, the USS Henley, with international tensions much hotter than they'd been in his first Navy stint. Deployed to waters near Reykjavík, Iceland, the Henley kept tabs on Russian boats in the area, and Conyers at one point was told the Henley was awaiting possible orders from Washington, D.C., to strike a Russian submarine that "would have been the first shot of World War III."
Third-class petty officer Conyers' sense of humor, even in the midst of military service, was already sharp. His captain came to him one night and said he'd not heard from his wife in too long, giving orders to wake him up at any hour if a message came through. When it did, Conyers attentively typed up the Morse transmission, through which the captain's wife wrote, 'I can't understand why you haven't heard from me, I've written you six letters.'
Conyers knocked on the captain's door around 3 a.m. and handed him the message, only to get a scowl in return.
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"Is this your idea of a joke?" the captain asked.
"I said 'No, sir, that's the message'. I didn't realize I'd mixed up the I with an E, and it said 'I've written you sex letters,'" Conyers said. "The captain didn't think it was too funny."
Bryant-hired, never-fired
Conyers' experience as a football official had spanned exactly two games − one of them as a clock operator − when he managed to get under the UA practice fence once again. It was 17 years after he and his boyhood pal Ingram had done so as teenagers, but this time the chance came by way of invitation. Bryant's personal assistant, Carney Laslie, was in a panic when he called Allen & Jemison Hardware in August of 1962, where Gordon Pettus and Conyers worked, alarmed that Pettus, Bryant's hand-picked practice official, was suddenly unreachable. Conyers informed Laslie that Pettus had moved to Chattanooga, and Laslie asked Conyers if he had what it took to substitute.
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It was perfect timing for an inexperienced high school ref to seize a fabulous opportunity, and on his first day, Bryant told him to throw flags only on the offense. Conyers remains convinced that Bryant retained him largely because a couple weeks after he replaced Pettus, the Crimson Tide committed no offensive penalties in a rout of Georgia to open the '62 season.
"Of course, that was coincidental to my being there, but Carney called and said, 'Coach Bryant wants you back out there,' Conyers said. "I told him, 'Carney I can't come out there every day, I've got a job.' He said, 'Let me give you coach Bryant's phone number and you call him and tell him you can't come to practice.' I said, 'No, I'm not doing that.'"
Conyers made arrangements with his Allen & Jemison supervisor to break from work in the afternoons to be the only practice official Bryant had for more than a decade. Bryant eventually wanted two officials, and subsequent UA coaches worked with two or three until the 2007 hire of Saban, who wanted four at practices and full crews for scrimmages.
For about six decades, Conyers took his knocks being caught standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment. He's been run over by more players than he cares to remember; among them, he sustained a neck injury in a collision with former UA linebacker Barry Krauss.
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Conyers recalls a 1992 practice in which coach Gene Stallings had told him to blow a quick whistle to protect quarterback Jay Barker from being hit by All-American defensive ends Eric Curry and John Copeland. On one play, Barker dropped back to pass and Conyers, stationed behind the pocket, accidentally dropped his whistle very much in harm's way, near Barker's feet. Determined to get the whistle blown to prevent Barker from taking a hit, he pounced on the whistle, but was crushed by Curry before he could blow it.
The most widely remembered hit Conyers took came in 2009 in UA's indoor practice facility.
This time, a Rolando McClain blitz flushed quarterback Greg McElroy out of the pocket, and as McElroy sprinted to the perimeter, he and Conyers were both looking downfield when McElroy flattened the then-82-year-old.
"The first thing that hit the ground was the back of Eddie's head," said practice official Jerry Brown, who played for UA in the Bryant era. "For a few minutes, it was really scary."
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"He was pale as a ghost," said another practice official, Burt Willis. "It was like looking down into a casket."
UA trainer Allen said Conyers was briefly knocked out cold, but the first thing to come back to him, of course, was his sense of humor.
"True story," said Allen. "When we went back in the training room, the first thing he said was, 'How's McElroy?'"
Saban, typical of their exchanges, asked Conyers how he missed a holding call on the play. When he returned to practice later that week, Saban arranged for him to get a black jersey − which were used for injured players − with Conyers' name on the back. It remains one of his prized possessions, along with Alabama national championship rings from 1965 and 1992.
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Several years ago, Conyers hung up his whistle, but remains part of the football program as the practice officials coordinator in charge of scheduling. Willis had a hand in convincing Conyers that there was too much danger in continuing to be on the field.
"Eddie's position behind the offense was pretty safe, but when there was an interception or a fumble return in a scrimmage, they didn't kill the play early. Those guys were finishing, and everything would turn back toward him, and Eddie was in his 90s and might've weighed 120 pounds," Willis said. "If you've ever been driving a Volkswagen on the interstate and a trucker blows by you in the passing lane, and you can feel the car shake, that's what it's like when those players run right by you. I said 'Eddie, you have no business out there anymore. There's no way you can get out of the way if you have to.'"
Jokes for days
A new official once wandered into the dressing room before practice and, in something of a rite of passage for first-timers under Conyers, got taken for quite a ride. The old-timer explained it was a sad day because his brother-in-law, a doctor, had lost his medical license in a disciplinary hearing.
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"Gosh, Eddie, I'm sorry to hear that. That's awful," came the response, and with that, the hook was set. Conyers would drag out the story a few more minutes before revealing that his brother-in-law was found to have had relations with one of his patients.
"Oh, no," said the unwitting newcomer, as other officials who knew better turned their backs to hide their laughter. Perhaps Conyers had once pulled the same joke on them.
"Yup," said Conyers, "It was a real shame, because he was a heck of a veterinarian."
For as long as a sucker was hooked, Conyers could string out made-up stories like that one.
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"If Eddie was telling a story with me around, I had to be on guard," said UA team chaplain Jeremiah Castille with a laugh. "I'd say, 'OK, Eddie let's keep this one clean.'"
Conyers is beloved by the lengthy line of officials who've worked Alabama practices over the years. Former UA quarterback David Smith, who coordinates SEC crews to officiate scrimmages around the league, said he'll frequently get requests from officials to be assigned to Alabama scrimmages just so they can go to Tuscaloosa and see Conyers.
"Part of it is, I think, they're not sure if they'll get to see him again," Smith said.
And part of it, of course, is being around one of the funniest people to ever wear the stripes. But it could be hard to tell when he was serious and when he was joking. He'd sometimes tell the crew to prepare to be chewed out by Saban, and why, only for no such chewing to ever come. When an official would ask Conyers for a recommendation, he'd crack, "I'll be sure to tell them you're a great official when you're sober." When he turned 90 years old in the spring of 2018, Saban pulled the team together after practice to wish him a happy birthday. Conyers told the team, "I appreciate this guys, but I wish you'd have kept it quiet, because all the girls at Innisfree think I just turned 23."
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Conyers has turned his wit into a heck of a side hustle as a public speaker in high demand. He gets booked, still now at 97, for quarterback clubs, rotary clubs, alumni clubs and any other event that can be anchored with a few good laughs. And while gatherings of Alabama football fans are very much in his wheelhouse, he can work any kind of room. Former Mobile County District Court Judge Judson Wells once saw him speak at an Alabama alumni club meeting, and knew he could also be a hit in a different setting.
"I brought him to the Robert Trent Jones (golf) facility in Birmingham when it was new, maybe 2005 or 2006, for a judge's conference, and there were 200 judges there, " Wells said. "He had them rolling in the aisles. And there were Alabama fans, Auburn fans, judges who didn't care about football, it didn't matter. He's fall-down funny as a speaker. He comes in blazing."
Shaw, who went on to become SEC coordinator of officials and is now the national coordinator, said he once worked an Alabama A-Day game at which a picture was taken of he, Conyers and fellow official George Ranager. Weeks later, a copy of the photo arrived to Shaw in the mail, with a note from Conyers that read, "To a great football official. Also pictured: Shaw and Ranager."
Part of the fabric
Saban couldn't recall a road trip in his 17-year tenure as coach that didn't begin with Conyers and his wife, Peggy, meeting the team at the Tuscaloosa Airport to wish them well before they flew out. Without fail, they'd greet the team before it boarded and stayed until the plane taxied off the runway. The couple didn't begin doing that when Saban arrived − they waved Crimson Tide teams out of town more sporadically for many years prior − but never missed a trip with Saban's teams.
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"When I first came here, I had never been in a program where there were people like that. Cedric (Burns) is the same kind of guy," Saban said. "I'd never had somebody like Eddie or Cedric, who was there every day. And I mean every single day at practice for 17 years, and was an important part of it."
For Saban, that's what makes Conyers a walking institution in the Alabama football tradition. He is a throwback, to be sure, but more than that, a living connection to the program's history. Of the five Alabama head coaches honored with bronze statues outside Bryant-Denny Stadium, Conyers can harken back to the careers of four of them. Heck, Alabama's first national crown in 1925 only beat Conyers out of the womb by three years.
In an era in which coaches at well-heeled programs collect data in the most digitalized, high-tech ways, Conyers always turned in penalty reports after practice − who committed them, what kind of infraction and in which practice period it occurred − with hand-written notes. Still today, he submits a hand-written note of which officials worked at each practice so that payments are accurate. Only one other person in the program avoided using computers as much as possible; the only other one who had that luxury: Saban himself.
"What I handed the players was always done by hand. And the drawings were done by hand," Saban said. "I guess Eddie and I are both old-school that way."
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For Conyers, it's been a dream of a ride as a diehard Alabama fan who still lives just walking distance away from the practice fields. For all the Crimson Tide fans who've tried to steal a glimpse of practice from the wrong side of the fence, he's managed to spend 60 years on the fun side. He's let a countless number of fellow officials get past the fence through those decades, curating the crew flagging every practice from Bryant to DeBoer.
He and Ingram never got in any trouble for their fence breaches in the mid-1940s. Ingram was best friends with coach Frank Thomas' son, Hugh Rowe Thomas, after all, so the family tie got them an easy pass.
Now, it's Eddie who's part of the family.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at [e-mail]. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Eddie Conyers: Six decades of thrills and spills with Alabama football