Alabama lost one of its superfans, and I lost a great friend, in Mike Parker | Goodbread
I’ll call Mike Parker a superfan only in the purest, most rudimentary sense of the term.
He was, no doubt, the biggest Alabama fan I’ve ever known, so it’s a fitting way to describe him, although he had zero interest in launching a personal brand around his fandom. That he started Crimson Cover, a local radio and television show covering Alabama athletics, might sound contradictory to the notion of a humble superfan. But for Mike, Crimson Cover was never about him, only about the school he loved. Which is to say that he was nothing like the typical sports superfan who seeks to draw attention to self, go viral at any cost, and feed off any scrap of notoriety.
I said goodbye to Mike at a memorial service on Saturday morning — he was 42 — and he would’ve been glad to know that as the church gathering paid its respects, his Crimson Tide basketball team was putting the finishing touches on a 93-91 overtime win over Auburn.
Life dealt Mike the toughest of hands, but he played it with the toughest resolve.
He became quadriplegic in the summer of 2004 after a diving accident in Destin, Fla., while celebrating the Fourth of July. He was confined to a wheelchair for roughly half his life, but his personality refused to be confined to anything. In 2008, he convinced me to co-host Crimson Cover radio with him, having secured a small loan from a relative to pay for the airtime, because he had no advertisers. Within a year, he’d recruited former Alabama All-American defensive end John Copeland as a third co-host, and the three of us would become the best of friends. Soon after, he willed it into existence in its current form, a weekly television show on WVUA.Among the myriad of health issues related to Mike’s paralysis was a relatively constant battle with nausea, and back when Crimson Cover was strictly on radio, he’d arrive at the station most Saturday mornings with a large plastic bowl in his lap and looking a bit pale. He would warn us and apologize for what he was sure would happen during the show. But the moment the red “on the air” light came on, his nausea would vanish until the show ended, and he’d take the bowl home clean enough to put right back in the cabinet. I always likened it to the “clutch gene” that great athletes have when the game is on the line. Mike mentally locked out his nausea for the show the way Michael Jordan locked out distractions for game-winning shots. His parents saw it more as an indicator of how much he loved talking about Alabama sports. Either way, Crimson Cover broadcasts made him feel better than any prescription ever could.
So did watching Alabama football or basketball games. He never missed one on television, but I know he would’ve been to many more in person were it not for his paralysis. He hated his wheelchair about like how he hated Alabama’s rivals; not shy to curse either. At the visitation following his memorial service, the wheelchair he hated was appropriately turned upside down.
But that wheelchair also got him around to make Crimson Cover a reality.
In an era when growing an audience demanded savvy social media promotion, Mike — who cared so little about social media that he barely kept a Facebook page — did it the hard way. And for someone in a wheelchair, it was the extra-hard way. He went all over Tuscaloosa to grow the show’s audience by taking the brand to the streets. He secured deals for remote broadcasts of Crimson Cover radio and TV at local businesses all over town. BamaLand. Archibald’s BBQ. The Bear Trap. Northport Pharmacy. Wings U. The Purse Man. The Booth. Crimson Carpet and Flooring. Corks & Tops. Even BabyTalk in Northport, an infant/toddler emporium. Yep, Mike could talk Alabama football while pitching onesies and rattles.
On Saturday mornings in the fall, the radio show broadcast live from the Holiday Inn Express lobby on Veterans Memorial Parkway. That’s where the CBS broadcast crew used to stay when it was in town, and its announcing team of Gary Danielson and Verne Lundquist would often come down for the breakfast buffet, then sit in for a segment with Mike on the radio show.
Eventually, as the show transitioned from radio to TV at Mike’s behest, he maintained an integral role in planning its content, piloting its fun, off-the-cuff style on air, securing title sponsors, and more. Now, after 15 years and roughly 750 episodes on WVUA, Copeland and I will continue hosting Crimson Cover in Mike’s memory. But it won’t ever be the same.
Mike was a force of nature, and I wish I’d met him before his diving accident.
But I’m lucky to have met him at all.
