Rubin Earl Grant 1957-2025
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Matthew 5:16
By Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Rubin Earl Grant was the very embodiment of letting his light shine.
Rubin’s stories about high school sports graced this space in Over The Mountain Journal—first as a freelancer and for the past eight years as sports editor. He spent his professional journalistic career shining a light on others, often for their exploits on the court or the field, but in other areas as well.
On Thursday, June 26, at Mountain Brook Community Church, the light was shone on Rubin as a sanctuary full of colleagues, friends and relatives bid him farewell.
Rubin died on June 18, 2025. He was 67.
As parishioner Carol Smith made her way to greet his family, she glanced to her left to a pew about six or seven rows from the front of the sanctuary. That, she said, was where Rubin could be found every week, cheering on the preacher of that day with hearty “Amens.”
“He was a great man,” she said, “and a great friend.” No one in attendance would have argued either observation.
Born in Montgomery on August 3, 1957, Rubin was an outfielder on Montgomery’s George Washington Carver High School baseball team and wanted to be the next Willie Mays. “He realized he would have more longevity in a career as a writer,” Kevin DeLaney said as he opened the service. “Aren’t we all thankful for that.”
Rubin would go on to cover the Birmingham Barons and was inducted to the Barons Hall of Fame, one of several such honors bestowed on him.
Rubin stood out as a student at the University of Alabama, becoming the first Black sports editor of the Crimson White student newspaper. He told the truth in his writings there, writing in his first column his senior year that legendary coach Bear Bryant should retire.
“You can imagine,” Rubin’s Birmingham Post-Herald colleague Ray Melick said, “he was the first sports editor of the Crimson White to get left off the team plane.”
Melick recounted that Rubin earned the nickname Rue The Prep Guru because of his knowledge of high school sports and his wonderful ability to deliver stories about it. High school athletes whose names would become household words were introduced to the world through Rubin’s writings.
“He was the first to write about a guy from Bessemer named Bo Jackson,” Melick said. “Rubin got Bo Jackson in Sports Illustrated’s Faces in the Crowd, the first national exposure for Bo Jackson before anyone else knew about him.”
Rubin introduced other future stars to his Post-Herald readers, including a future Heisman Trophy runner-up in David Palmer, a future NFL linebacker in Cornelius Bennett and an amazing point guard out of Phillips High School named Ennis Whatley.
“Enimo,” as many knew him, remembered that Rubin’s story was his coming out party during his freshman year with the Red Raiders. “He wrote a real nice article on me,” Whatley said speaking from his home in Howard County, Maryland. “He was one of the guys that I met early in my career, and he took care of me and just really wrote very positive things about me.”
Cary Estes, another former Post-Herald staffer, recalled the chaos of collecting and compiling high school football reports on Friday nights in the fall. “You’re taking phone calls, and half the people you’re talking to on the phone don’t have all the facts and stats, and I’m getting frustrated,” Estes recalled. “Then Rubin comes in after he’s covered his game, with a smile on his face. ‘Hello, Mr. Estes, how you doing?’”
“He was calm in that sort of chaos,” Estes recalled of Rubin.
Tim Kallam, senior pastor at Mountain Brook Community Church, delivered a fitting eulogy of Rubin. After the service he reminisced about his friend who “had not gone from life to death … but life to life.”
After 18 years at the church, Kallan couldn’t remember his first encounter with Rubin, “but very quickly I was drawn into a really deep love and respect for him, his big smile and his hug and embrace,” the pastor said. “One thing that really struck me is he wasn’t here long before he was standing at that door greeting people as they came in the door.”
Kallan continued, “But the thing that I realized quickly is that he was a man who ran deep—deep in his faith, deep in his knowledge of scriptures, deep in his love for people. You just were immediately just drawn into that love.”
Likely many of Rubin’s readers didn’t know about his other calling, as a licensed Baptist preacher. But many were blessed with the morning devotionals—Do You Know What Time It Is?—that he distributed via email.
But even to those who didn’t receive those emails, Rubin’s light was evident. Melick apologized that his talk at Thursday’s service was supposed to be about Rubin’s work as a journalist. “But here’s the thing,” he said, “you couldn’t separate Rubin the sports writer from Rubin the child of God. They were the same. In a business filled with doubters, Rubin’s faith was obvious. It wasn’t in your face, but everyone knew what he believed.” Rubin Earl Grant let his light shine, not to bring attention to himself but, as Matthew 5:16 said, to glorify his Father in heaven.
