Freddie Kitchens' Alabama dream crashed into reality and set him on a course for Cleveland: 'Built in Bama' Chapter 4

Dave Martin, Associated Press

Freddie Kitchens (left) as a redshirt sophomore in 1995 with Alabama coach Gene Stallings. Kitchens eventually won the starting job for the last two games of 1995.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Freddie Kitchens’ one-time Tuscaloosa future lies in a former car dealership’s empty lot, where a lifelong quarterback had decided to leave football behind and heed the call of options outside the game.

When Kitchens spoke to Cleveland Browns fans last month for the first time as their coach, he let them in on his Tuscaloosa tears. Kitchens told the story of how at age 23, he was finished with the game that had defined his life.

He was selling cars. Then football pulled him back.

For the best high school quarterback in the state, Kitchens’ dream didn’t become reality at the University of Alabama. In college, Kitchens couldn’t just outwork disappointment or beat back losses with his arm. The taunts and the sacks, the suspension and the benching, the probation that hit the program and cut scholarships and sucked away talent -- that didn’t mean Kitchens regretted his time at Alabama.

It meant he had something left to achieve. In Cleveland, he has the chance to live a dream he never imagined. That became possible when the only dream he ever knew faded in Tuscaloosa.

If Kitchens had satisfyingly lived out his football fantasy 20 years ago, what would have been left for the new coach of the Browns to chase?

Doug Lesmerises, cleveland.com

The Nissan dealership where Freddie Kitchens worked selling cars in 1998 after graduating from Alabama. Kitchens worked on a different lot, as the dealership has moved locations in the last 20 years.

In his hometown, Kitchens sprinkled his first 18 years of talent and toil with enough luck to create the one outcome he and his father truly desired:

For Freddie to play quarterback at Alabama.

When the middle-school quarterback moved to a new home in sixth grade, Kitchens’ father would yell hello to the couple jogging past, putting in 10 laps around the neighborhood loop.

Randy Ross and his wife, Ann, often visited Ann’s mother, who lived just a couple houses down from the Kitchens family. Ross was a former college quarterbacks coach who recently had taken a new job ... as the football recruiting coordinator at the University of Alabama.

Born into Crimson Tide football, Kitchens suddenly found the doorman to the program on his little street in Gadsden. This one was simple. Bama wanted Kitchens, and Kitchens wanted Bama.

“After watching Freddie grow up, it was just a special treat to have Freddie on our team,” Ross told cleveland.com. “After knowing what he’d come through, it was amazing just to watch his dad on those Saturdays walk in the stadium, so proud of him.”

It was meant to be. But no one told the Alabama offensive line. After five years, Kitchens wanted almost nothing to do with the sport that had defined his life.

He played baseball as a freshman, but an arm injury forced him to give up his second sport. In his senior year, he returned to baseball, finishing his college athletic career as a middle reliever in an attempt to wash away the football.

During his final spring, he was walking to a baseball game when he was stopped by an NFL scout. Kitchens had turned down every offer of individual workouts from NFL teams.

Now, it was Alabama’s Pro Day.

“You working out, Freddie?”

“Nope,” Kitchens said. “I’m done.”

Doug Lesmerises, cleveland.com

Freddie Kitchens' jersey from his time as Alabama's quarterback hangs in the football team room at his his alma mater, Etowah High School.

In the fall of 1997, Kitchens quarterbacked Alabama. In the fall of 1998, he worked at Magnolia Nissan BMW in Tuscaloosa selling cars. On the weekend, he washed FedEx trucks and listened to the Crimson Tide games on the radio.

Kitchens never had made money that good. He was only 2.4 miles from Bryant-Denny Stadium, but he felt a world away.

“It would almost bring me to tears listening to it,” Kitchens said. “I don’t know that I ever wanted to coach, but I knew I couldn’t live without the game of football.”

That building on Greensboro Avenue where he worked is now an empty lot, the dealership undergoing a name and location change in the last two decades. There is nothing to relive. The sales force at what is now Townsend Nissan moved on without him.

A visit to the gleaming current showroom revealed a world where Kitchens could have made a life. Only a woman in the parts shop vaguely remembers working with him, but success dripped off the sales people and football filled the air. Someone’s son played at Alabama. Another is connected to the program through marriage. Alabama-Auburn debates never grow old.

Kitchens isn’t the only former Tide player to have sold cars there, and with a smile and a story about that Auburn win in ‘96, Kitchens could have kept customers lined up year after year.

They don’t hang salesperson of the month plaques any longer. But when they did, Kitchens’ name was up there.

A happy life was there for the taking, maybe a healthier life of less stress and shorter hours.

If he had been a national champion or a beloved local legend, maybe Kitchens would have embraced it. Maybe he’d own his own dealership by now. Maybe he’d host a talk radio show like Jay Barker, the starting quarterback when Kitchens arrived at Alabama. Barker owns a national title ring and a place on the Birmingham airwaves since 2001.

Kitchens didn’t have that. So he entered the coaching world the next year, in 1999, and began to chase something else.

Read the entire five-part series on Freddie Kitchens, reported from Alabama. 

Catch the first three chapters on his father, his community and his high school football exploits.

“Freddie took a beating.”

Talk at a high school basketball game at Etowah High School has drifted toward Kitchens’ college days, and the phrase has returned. It’s how his friends remember what happened when Kitchens went to college.

In high school, Kitchens was tough. At Alabama, he was forced to prove it.

“He played with some awful teams at Alabama,” said Larry Foster, his high school baseball coach. “Freddie would be hit before he took two steps. When that man was a senior, I used to pray for him because I thought he was going to get killed.”

What led him back to baseball? What led him to the dealership?

The beginning of the dark days of Alabama football.

Kitchens committed to Alabama in December 1992, 10 years after Bear Bryant’s last season and 11 days before Alabama finished off a 13-0 national championship season with a win over Miami in the Sugar Bowl. Gene Stallings had returned Alabama to prominence.

By Kitchens’ senior season, Stallings was gone, and Alabama went 4-7 under first-year coach Mike Dubose. Over the next decade, Alabama suffered through four coaches and four losing seasons before Nick Saban arrived to revive the Tide.

Kitchens was there as the program began to come apart at the seams.

In stories over the years catching up with Kitchens’ coaching career, his time as the Crimson Tide quarterback is seen as something to overcome, not something to celebrate. He was 15-9 as a starter, but the nine losses hang heavy.

"It's pretty amazing to be the worst quarterback in Alabama history and end up third on the all-time passing list. It’s all about perception, " Kitchens told famed Alabama writer and radio personality Paul Finebaum in 2000.

“To most fans,” Finebaum wrote in that column, “Kitchens wasn’t a quarterback; he was a punchline.”

The twists of Kitchens’ career are seared into the memories of loyal Alabama fans. Only a synopsis is required to explain how bad luck, tough breaks and self-inflicted wounds could lead a man away from football -- and then motivate him to get out of the wash bay and back on the sideline.

After Alabama was placed on probation in August of 1995, hit with a bowl ban and a loss of 26 scholarships over the next three seasons, Kitchens, a redshirt sophomore, was arrested for public drunkenness days later. The charges were later dropped after he paid a fine, but he was suspended for the first two games.

When he won the starting job in 1996, the Tide went 10-3, with Kitchens leading a game-winning drive to beat Auburn. Alabama made the SEC Championship, and after a loss to Florida, beat Michigan in the Outback Bowl. But he threw as many interceptions as touchdowns (14), his weight was a year-long topic, and Stallings retired after the season.

In 1997, he started as a fifth-year senior but was benched at the end of the year, ostensibly for missing a team bus while signing autographs. He was called off the bench in the Auburn game and led a comeback. But on a third-down swing pass in the final minute to fullback Ed Scissum, Kitchens’ high school teammate at Etowah, Auburn forced a fumble, recovered and drove for the game-winning field goal.

Alabama finished 4-7, its worst record in 40 years. Bruce Arians, later one of Kitchens’ NFL mentors, was fired as the Tide’s offensive coordinator for calling the play. And Freddie went off to baseball.

AL.com

Freddie Kitchens throwing a pass during a game against Southern Mississippi in 1997. Kitchens went 15-9 as a starting quarterback at Alabama.

Rama Jama’s stands cross the street from Alabama’s football home at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Rama Jama’s is a palace in its own right, a hamburger stand regularly featured on ESPN and decorated from floor to ceiling with the greatness of the Crimson Tide.

It’s difficult to find Freddie Kitchens in there.

An artist’s rendering of the drive he led to beat Auburn in 1996 is tucked behind a booth in one room. If you stride inside and look down before you place your order for a shake or all-day breakfast, there’s a 8-by-10 of the old quarterback autographed by Kitchens. He’s there, part of the Crimson past. But it’s easy to miss him.

In his hometown in Etowah County, every piece of and person in the community reflects a fundamental truth of Kitchens’ upbringing. His stories are everywhere, and he carries Etowah County with him.

Tuscaloosa was a moment in time. For Alabama fans, it’s a forgettable time. For Kitchens, it’s a transitional one -- the clear end of everything he fought for, and the uncertain start of what came next.

Whatever happened there, Big Freddie Kitchens loved it.

He soaked up the life his son had achieved. Every Saturday, Randy Ross emerged from the locker room and saw the quarterback’s father with a smile on his face.

“To just see Freddie and be around Alabama football for those years, Freddie’s dad couldn’t hold it in,” Ross said. “You could see it. It was all over him.”

Whatever happened there, Little Freddie Kitchens needed it.

“In my fairy tale life, my last game at the University of Alabama would have been winning a national championship,” Kitchens said. “So it didn’t end up being what I wanted. But I would never trade that for anything. But me not moving on and playing elsewhere wasn’t a concern to me, because that was my dream. That was my ultimate goal.

“It was never to play in the NFL, just like it was never to coach in the NFL.”

When one dream falls short, you never know where the next dream might lead you.