EDITOR’S NOTE: Every day until Aug. 29, Creg Stephenson is counting down significant numbers in Alabama football history, both in the lead-up to the 2025 football season and in commemoration of the Crimson Tide’s first national championship 100 years ago. The number could be attached to a year, a uniform number or even a football-specific statistic. We hope you enjoy.

Bob Baumhower is on a short list of former Alabama football players whose post-career accomplishments have outshined anything he ever did on the gridiron.

Not that Baumhower wasn’t a great football player; he certainly was. A two-time first-team All-SEC pick and two-time second-team All-American who started on a pair of conference championship teams under coach Paul “Bear” Bryant in the mid-1970s, the burly defensive tackle also enjoyed a stellar NFL career.

In a 10-year NFL career spent entirely with the Miami Dolphins, Baumhower was a five-time Pro Bowler, two-time All-Pro and a starter on two Super Bowl teams who is now a member of the team’s “Ring of Honor.” With fellow linemen Kim Bokamper and Doug Betters, linebacker Bob Brudzinski and safeties Lyle and Glenn Blackwood, Baumhower was part of the famed “Killer B’s” unit that led the league in total defense in 1982.

It was during Baumhower’s time in south Florida that his second — and more enduring — career took root. Impressed by the demand for buffalo wings he’d seen in Miami-area restaurants, Baumhower and a friend opened his first restaurant, Wings and Whiskers, in Tuscaloosa in 1981.

“The first (chicken wing) I had, I was just infatuated with them,” Baumhower told the Mobile Press-Register in 2003.

After retiring from football in 1987, Baumhower moved back to Alabama and went into the hospitality business full time. His first Bob Baumhower’s Wings Sports Grille (which also featured burgers, salads, seafood and other menu items in addition to wings) opened in 1992, and almost immediately became a staple of the state’s restaurant culture.

Baumhower’s company, Fairhope-based Aloha Hospitality, now operates more than a dozen restaurants. In addition to Victory Grille (a rebranded version of the original Wings), there is also Wing Fingers (a fast casual chicken outlet similar to Zaxby’s or Guthrie’s) and Dauphin’s, a fine-dining French Creole cuisine restaurant located atop a skyscraper in downtown Mobile.

Now 69, Baumhower — who self-deprecatingly refers to himself as “head fry cook” — has made Aloha Hospitality into a true family business. His wife, Leslie, and four children have all been heavily involved in the company over the years, with oldest son Spencer serving as president.

Baumhower many times has said that he owes his success in business to the lessons he learned during his time at Alabama. Like many who played for Bryant, he said his coach’s teachings nearly 50 years ago are still a part of his everyday life.

“He made me see a vision that I didn’t have for myself,” Baumhower told This Is Alabama in 2024. “Coach Bryant was about you being the best person you could be first, and then being the best football player you could be. So he was big on building character and discipline, appreciation, respect, all of those things. And to me, that’s the foundation of his success.

“… I took what Coach Bryant taught me and I applied it later, whether it’s when I went to Miami or now that I’m in the restaurant business. A lot of folks talk about the hospitality business being one of the toughest businesses there is. And it’s a challenge, I assure you. But I look at what he taught me and what he inspired me to be as a gift that keeps giving.

“I try to share the lessons he gave me with the people who work with me. Sometimes people listen; sometimes they don’t. But I feel like he really showed me something and that, without his teachings, I would’ve never been able to do the things that I’ve done. And that includes being a dad or a husband or all the above.”

Along with Baumhower, a handful of Alabama players have transcended the game. The first was probably Johnny Mack Brown, a standout halfback on the Crimson Tide’s 1925 Rose Bowl championship team who later went on to star in dozens of Western movies and who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Several former Alabama players have served with distinction in the military, perhaps most notably Don Salls. A fullback on the Crimson Tide’s 1941 national championship team, Salls had his football career interrupted by World War II.

Salls earned multiple battle stars as a U.S. Army captain during the Allied invasion of Europe, and received a Purple Heart after being wounded in battle in France. He returned home to complete his college career and later became head football coach at Jacksonville State.

Then there is Joe Namath, who for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s was as famous as any person in America. The star of Alabama’s 1964 national championship team, Namath parlayed his notoriety from quarterbacking the New York Jets to victory in Super Bowl III to a decades-long career in television and in film and as an advertising pitch man.

Many, if not most, Alabama football players will never be as well-known or admired as they are during the three or four years they wear the crimson and white. But Bob Baumhower and others have shown that there is not only life after football, but often a high degree of achievement and notoriety as well.

Coming Sunday: Our countdown to kickoff continues with No. 90, the time Alabama fans (sort of) stormed the field