Two nights before the Bryant-Denny Stadium light show lit up the southwest edge of the Alabama campus during the Crimson Tide 's 41-34 win over Georgia , the Bama Theatre marquee on Greensboro Avenue lit up downtown Tuscaloosa.
The premiere of a movie roughly eight years in the making — "Do Right: The Stallings Standard" — was at hand, and the buzz around the theatre was palpable. Former Alabama football coach Gene Stallings, now 89, arrived more than an hour before the documentary film about his legacy as a coach and advocacy for children with special needs, and he barely had a moment's peace before the show began.
How could he? The line of moviegoers waiting to shake Stallings' hand in a meet-and-greet photo opportunity stretched so far — from one end of the theatre's red-carpet lobby to the box office foyer — it looked like a Jalen Milroe autograph line on Fan Day. Several of his former Alabama players, including John Copeland, Josh Swords, Kareem McNeal and Griff Redmill, were on hand. The show got started about 10 minutes late because Stallings wasn't about to turn away the last of the movie's supporters who had waited to wish him well.
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Stallings has a 1992 national championship to his coaching credit, but it doesn't come up when I ask him about his life's greatest accomplishments.
"Top of the list is my children," he said. "But right behind that is the RISE program, because it gives youngsters that have Down Syndrome or other learning disabilities an opportunity to live life as fully as they can."
Stallings, of course, championed the RISE Center in Tuscaloosa, an early childhood education program primarily serving kids with developmental disabilities, because his late son, John Mark Stallings, was born with Down Syndrome.
As the theatre filled, Stallings himself was one of the last to be seated — he hadn't seen the 90-minute film in its entirety before Thursday night − and the documentary kept an appreciative crowd riveted. Produced by Dr. Chandra Clark and Dr. Michael Bruce of the Alabama Journalism department, the film recounted Stallings' coaching career as an Alabama assistant under legendary coach Paul W. "Bear" Bryant from 1958-64, to his eventual head coaching jobs at Texas A&M, the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals, and finally back at Alabama.
Throughout, however, the documentary continually weaves in anecdotal and testimonial substantiation of Stallings' advocacy for the RISE Center, and his special relationship with his son. John Mark Stallings not only had Down Syndrome, but was born with a heart defect as well. At the time of John Mark's birth (1962), mainstreaming the education of children with developmental disabilities was unheard of, and doctors recommended full-time institutionalization. The coach and his wife, Ruth Ann, refused. Largely through Ruth Ann's tireless efforts, John Mark developed into a level of independence never thought possible. Doctors had predicted, according to the film, he might never walk or talk.
Eventually, he did both, and much more.
John Mark Stallings worked at the Bryant Museum, and as an assistant to former Alabama athletic trainer Bill McDonald during his father's tenure as head coach from 1990-1996. He attended every Crimson Tide practice, knew every player by name, and built relationships with many of them. He died in 2008 at 42 years old. Gene Stallings, with help from a pledge of $1 million from Alabama steel magnate Pete Hanna, had a new RISE Center facility built in Tuscaloosa in 1994, and successfully worked to expand the program around the country. Today, the vast majority of RISE students are mainstreamed into kindergarten.
In the spring of 1993, as an Alabama senior, my then girlfriend and now wife prodded me to take an undergraduate course in Human Environmental Sciences titled Marriage and Family. Gene Stallings came to speak to the class one day, fresh off the 1992 national championship, and the lecture hall filled with students expecting insight from an undefeated 13-0 season. Instead, the coach told a very different story about John Mark, and a golf cart that he had accidentally wrecked by steering it into a tree behind the Stallings home. John Mark had spent the rest of the day in his bedroom, distraught over the accident and worried his father would be angry about the damage to the cart.
To anyone's knowledge, however, Stallings never angered a moment in his life where John Mark was concerned. And when he came home and saw how upset his son was, the coach came up with the perfect way to express that the golf cart damage was of no consequence.
"I asked John Mark if the tree was OK," Stallings, to my best recollection, told our class. "I knew that old tree was just fine, but that was my way of telling Johnny the golf cart wasn't important to me."
What was important was his family, even over football.
And "Do Right: The Stallings Standard" drives that point home better than any other.
" Do Right: The Stallings Standard" will next be shown at 2 p.m. on Nov. 3 at the Love Civic Center in Stallings' hometown of Paris, Texas. Reach Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: New film captures bond between ex-Alabama coach Gene Stallings and son John Mark | Goodbread
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