By Lee Davis
Usually when driving on Columbiana Road, I’m on the way to a meeting at the office of the Over the Mountain Journal. While driving, I might be thinking about the meeting, daydreaming or listening to a song on the radio.
All that changes when I drive by the campus.
The campus, of course, is where the old Berry High School stood for three decades before moving to Hoover High School in 1994. And when I see the campus, Bob Finley always comes to mind.
Finley was the head football coach at Berry from 1968 until his death on July 31, 1994. His on-the-field record was 198-87-5 with two state championships.
That’s a fine worksheet, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story of his influence and legacy.
In many ways, Finley was the founding father of Over the Mountain high school football–and perhaps Over the Mountain high school athletics as we know it today. Almost as soon as Finley became head coach, he brought Berry’s program to statewide prominence and created the great rivalries with Shades Valley, Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills and others that filled stadiums on Friday nights and planted the seed for the intense competition that now covers South Jefferson County and spills over to North Shelby County.
And unlike some football coaches at the time, Finley was sincerely interested in the development of other sports, including girls’ athletics. When the position of head basketball coach for the fledging girls’ basketball program came open in 1985, Finley–as athletic director–could have assigned someone else the job or hired from outside. Instead, he took the job himself and made the Lady Bucs a regular participant in the state playoffs.
It’s a tragic irony that Finley drew his final breath while working at the old school’s football field on a steaming afternoon 20 years ago last week. The coaching staff was just weeks away from completing the transition to the state-of-the-art facilities at the sparkling new Hoover campus. But Finley–who almost certainly could have delegated the hot, dirty duty to others–was working hard to maintain the old field which carried his name when he collapsed and died of a heart attack.
Finley gave his life to Berry High School until–literally–he had nothing left to give.
My personal memories of Finley stretch back to the years I was a team manager at Mountain Brook in the early 1970s. Coach Finley was the commanding authority figure on the opposite sideline when the Spartans played Berry.
A few years later, I met Finley for the first time. I’d just been hired as a sportswriter for a weekly newspaper, and interviewing him was among my first assignments. It didn’t occur to me to call and ask for an appointment; I just showed up at the school.
Coach Finley didn’t know me from Adam, but you never would have guessed it from our conversation. Before I could ask one question about Berry’s team, Finley was asking about me–a 22-year-old he’d just met. He offered congratulations for getting the job and wanted to know about my background and family.
Coach Finley even expressed sympathy for the man who held the job before me.
“He seemed to have about 20 jobs at once,” Finley said. “I’m so glad he hired you to help him. I can tell that you are going to do a great job covering Berry and all the other Over the Mountain schools.”
Finley was a busy man. His team had won the state championship during the previous season. Fall practice had just begun. There were probably a thousand things on his mind, but Finley took the time to make a young (and nervous) young reporter feel special on his first interview.
Frankly, I don’t remember much that he said about his team that day, but I’ll never forget our meeting.
As the years passed, my respect for Finley grew even greater. In 1980, Berry suffered an excruciating defeat 24-21 defeat at the hands of Shades Valley at the Mounties’ stadium. I interviewed Finley at the bus as the team was leaving, and it was clear the loss was weighing heavily on him.
But as Finley always did after a defeat, he praised the winners and promised that Berry would work hard and be better the next week. I didn’t think any more about it at the time.
When I came to work the following Monday, there was a message for me to call him. When we spoke, Finley apologized if he had sounded harsh toward me in any way on Friday night.
“That was a tough loss, but you have a job to do,” he said. “I hope you know that I am always happy to talk to you, win or lose.”
I replied that while his call was greatly appreciated, he had said nothing to me after the game that required an apology. After we had hung up, I stared at the telephone, once again in awe of the man’s class. Here was Coach Finley–in the immediate aftermath of what was probably the most disappointing loss of the season–making the effort to call a reporter to apologize for something he might have said.
It’s a paradox that when I think of Finley, the old Berry gymnasium comes to mind as much as the football field. That’s because I recall covering basketball games at Berry and seeing the coach diligently sweeping off the floor at halftime. At many schools, that was a job for the team’s student manager. But no task was beneath Finley if it made Berry High School a better place.
Many have wondered how successful Finley would have been at Hoover and whether he could have matched the incredible record that later coaches Rush Propst and Josh Niblett brought to the program. There’s no way to know for sure, but I think he would have done extremely well. Certainly, high school football in Alabama is in a different world compared to 1994, but Finley had that special characteristic of leadership that transcends time and generations: Whether you coached under him, played for him, taped his players’ ankles or even covered his team for the local newspaper, you wanted to please him, not because you feared him, but because you respected him.
Nobody wanted to go to bed at night thinking they had disappointed Bob Finley that day.
In many ways, Bob Finley is a symbol of another era. It was an era when a high school team was thrilled to have its games broadcast–on local radio–and opposing coaches would meet at a neighborhood pizza restaurant to rehash the game.
The times have changed, but the class and dedication that Bob Finley brought are timeless. So as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of his passing, let’s also celebrate his legacy that still lives today.
