Tuscaloosa lost an institution, The Tuscaloosa News lost an icon and I lost a friend | Deas

I don’t know how to write this. How can I do justice to a colleague of four decades, give or take a few years? How do you write about losing a friend, when you absolutely do not want to contemplate that he’s gone?

Cecil Hurt died Tuesday afternoon at UAB Hospital in Birmingham of complications from pneumonia.

I’ve had a few weeks to contemplate this after he first checked into a hospital and his condition worsened. But I couldn’t make myself believe it.

Now he’s gone and I don’t want to accept it.

I knew Cecil Hurt about as long as I’ve known anyone outside of my family and a few schoolmates, but I probably spent as much time with him as with any of them, family included. Long trips in cars together, passing the hours on the road. Shared hotel rooms and memorable meals. Joking around in press boxes and sweating out deadlines.

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Telling you Cecil Hurt was an institution isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know. He earned that status over those decades at The Tuscaloosa News, where he became more synonymous with coverage of University of Alabama athletics — football and basketball in particular — than any sports journalist ever has or ever will.

Listing awards he won for his writing, as numerous as they were, wouldn’t do him justice. I never counted them, and I can assure you Cecil never did either. He didn’t write for trophies or plaques, even though he was honored with plenty of them: He wrote for you. He was your window inside Alabama sports and around town.

Well, there is one achievement I can tell you about, which speaks not only to his talent and versatility but also to his place in Tuscaloosa. After the mile-wide EF4 tornado tore through Tuscaloosa in April 2011, killing more than 60 people in its path toward Birmingham, Cecil switched seamlessly from sports columnist to community columnist, venturing out into the damage and telling stories. He chronicled the recovery and helped a city heal. Our staff was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and Cecil was a big part of it.

When I first started writing for The Tuscaloosa News while I was still a student at Central High School, Cecil was beginning his career. He taught me the ropes, sometimes in pre-dawn hours while we answered phones from high school coaches calling in their games (The News was an afternoon paper in those long-before-the-internet days).

As my career took me to Birmingham and Nashville and then back to Tuscaloosa, Cecil rose at a young age to his position as columnist, with the title of sports editor. We worked side by side. And when I got promoted to executive sports editor in Tuscaloosa more than a dozen years ago and became his boss, nothing changed in our relationship. It didn’t matter if he was in charge or if I was. We were co-workers, but we were also friends.

That didn’t change when I moved back to Nashville and, last year, ended up again overseeing the sports department in Tuscaloosa (as well as Montgomery and Gadsden and the SEC coverage team for the USA TODAY Network). He was the first one I called. It meant we’d be working together, and we would talk two or three times a week, sometimes for an hour or more — sometimes about work, sometimes about other things, most times a mixture of both.

So what can I tell you about Cecil that you don’t know? I can share some stories.

No road trip with Cecil ever went without a discussion of professional wrestling, a shared passion. We would talk endlessly about Andre the Giant and Bruiser Brodie and Dick Slater and Brock Lesnar. There was the trip to South Carolina where Cecil surprised me with a lunch stop at Abdullah the Butcher’s House of Ribs and Chinese Food, a restaurant in Atlanta co-owned by a legendary Canadian wrestler (billed as being from the Sudan) who was best known for carving up his opponents’ heads with a fork. (I am not making this up.) The food wasn’t memorable, but we recounted that stop dozens of times over the years.

A few years ago, Cecil called and asked if I would drive with him to Tupelo, where there was a Sunday WWE show. We trekked to Mississippi and watched Roman Reigns and John Cena do their thing, and talked about the legendary Memphis wrestling feuds of Jerry “The King” Lawler and Bill Dundee and Andy Kaufman.

Lest you think Cecil wasn’t an intellectual, no librarian ever read more books than he did. I don’t think I ever saw Cecil without a book nearby, almost always high-minded literature. He would, often, bring a tome to the football press box with him and read during commercial breaks. Only Cecil Hurt could peruse Dostoevsky during a game and work a reference to The Brothers Karamazov into his account.

He had a talent for finding out-of-the-way food stops. We broke bread at an inland steak house while in Hawaii to cover Alabama football. Explored Cajun and creole in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Gorged on more steak at Doe’s Eat Place (including the time when Cecil, Michael Southern and I devoured 5½ pounds of steak in maybe half an hour at the short-lived branch in Oxford, Miss.). There was brisket in Texas and barbecue joints around the South.

Going to a bowl game with Cecil was always an experience. You’d walk around the host city or wander through a hotel lobby and readers would walk up to introduce themselves. They knew him from his words, recognized him from the mugshot that ran with his column, and just wanted to pay respect. He always made easy conversation and found commonalities that made them feel a connection.

On Twitter, he had more than 100,000 followers. It was on this social media conveyance that you could really get a glimpse into his wit and brilliance. In 280 characters he could capture the essence of a game, a play, a situation, usually making you smile or laugh out loud.

As a writer, Cecil could be funny and insightful and engaging, but he was often cryptic. Longtime readers would take in his words and try to decipher whether an embattled coach might be on his way out or whether the administration would stick with him. If he made a case that the coach’s tenure had run its course, you could bet the ax was about to fall.

Cecil became an institution not just by longevity but by keeping confidences and forging relationships. He never betrayed a source. He was around the legendary Paul W. “Bear” Bryant when he was a student worker in the sports information department at Alabama, and developed rapport and close contact with every UA head football coach from Ray Perkins, Bryant’s successor, to Nick Saban.

He was not only dedicated to his craft, he was tireless. The last column he wrote was composed from a hospital bed — he called me and said he wanted to do it. He planned to write off Alabama’s game against LSU, also from the hospital, but I had to tell him that we needed him to spend his energy on trying to get better, which he accepted begrudgingly. I remember him driving to Oklahoma City to arrive in time to cover Alabama softball winning its 2012 national championship; he wanted to be there and drove nonstop to walk into the press area right before first pitch. A couple of years earlier, he drove to New Orleans so he could write a column to capture the mood in the city when the Saints won the Super Bowl.

I had the fortune to edit more of Cecil’s words than anyone, I’m sure. I looked forward to seeing what he had to say, what perspective he could add to an event or what glimpse he could give into the nature of a situation or a personality. We spent hours discussing angles he might take, topics he might explore, approaches he might take.

I already miss reading those words. I already miss our conversations. I keep thinking of things we did together, trips we took, things he would say, stories we would tell over and again.

It’s easy to think of Cecil as a local journalist, a writer tied to his city by an anchor, and that’s accurate. But he dropped that anchor by choice. He had several offers to leave for bigger markets and outlets — I recently learned he once accepted a position with The New York Times; but, as with “Bear” Bryant, “mama called” and he elected to stay.

There will never be another Cecil Hurt. The Tuscaloosa News sports page — and website — will never be the same. We have lost a one-of-a-kind writer, one who helped us better understand not just athletes and athletics and what they mean in our lives, but also ourselves.

Our community has lost a valued voice. And I have lost a friend.

Rest in peace, Cecil.

The Tuscaloosa News invites its readers to share their remembrances of Cecil Hurt and his impact on them through his words and their interactions with him, whether in person or on social media. Send them to tdeas@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Tuscaloosa lost an institution in Cecil Hurt and I lost a friend