This Alabama fan’s incredible journey to the Final Four
Longtime Alabama basketball fan Karl Stingily had waited for this moment since his college days at UA in the late 1970s, when he and his buddies would leave their dorm rooms to be the first in line when the coliseum doors opened.
So this past spring, when the Crimson Tide made a historic run to the Final Four of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the 66-year-old Stingily was there every stop along the way – from Spokane, Wash., to Los Angeles to Phoenix.
But Stingily’s personal road to the Final Four was anything but ordinary, and if not for the persistence of a patient wife, he might never have made it.
“I’ll take it a step further,” he says now. “My cardiologist here in Tuscaloosa very recently told me I was very fortunate to still be here.”
This is the story of that journey.
Karl Stingily, pictured here at the Final Four Fan Fest in Phoenix, fell in love with Alabama basketball as a college student at UA in the late 1970s and has followed the Tide all over the country ever since. (Photo courtesy of Karl Stingily; used with permission)
‘I always loved basketball’
Born in nearby Meridian, Miss., but raised in faraway Seattle, Stingily came to Tuscaloosa in the fall of 1977 to attend the University of Alabama, where he majored in accounting and fell in love with Bama basketball.
“I always loved basketball as much or more than football,” Stingily recalls. “So I was a huge fan of the program under Coach (C.M.) Newton and Coach (Wimp) Sanderson.”
As a student, he never missed a home game.
“Our deal was, we would eat dinner at Mary Burke (Hall) at 4:30, and we were in line to get into the arena at 5 when they opened the doors,” he recalls. “Back in the day, a portion of the student seats were behind the basket on the visitor side, so we would grab that first row.
“My responsibility was, I took an eye chart with me, and when there was a call I disagreed with, I’d lean over the rail and show the referee my eye chart. We had a really good time at the games.”
After he graduated from UA in 1980, Stingily followed the Tide from afar as a financial career with FedEx took him to work and live in Memphis, Hong Kong and Toronto.
Along the way, he suffered through his share of NCAA Tournament heartbreak.
He was in Houston in 1983 when an underdog Lamar University team boat-raced the Crimson Tide in the first round of the tournament, and he was in Louisville four years later, when Rick Pitino’s Providence Friars bounced one of the best Bama teams in school history in the Sweet 16.
Two years ago, he returned to Louisville and watched the San Diego State Aztecs send the top-seeded Tide packing in another Sweet 16 upset.
So, like a lot of lifelong Alabama hoops fans, Stingily wasn’t sure he’d ever live to see the day the Crimson Tide made it to the Final Four.
Until they did.
After Alabama beat Clemson to advance to the Final Four, Bama basketball fan Karl Stingily got a selfie with Tide center Nick Pringle, who had 16 points and 11 rebounds to help seal the win.(Photo courtesy of Karl Stingily; used with permission)
‘Maybe my happiest sports fan day ever’
After he retired last year, Stingily and his wife, Susie, moved from Colorado to Tuscaloosa, where his love affair with Alabama basketball began nearly 50 years before.
“One of the first things I did is go get on the list for season tickets,” he says. “It was very good timing.”
The fifth season under Nate Oats was a roller-coaster ride for Alabama fans, as the Tide entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 4 seed following a blowout loss to Florida in the first round of the SEC Tournament in Nashville.
Expectations for a deep NCAA run were not high — except for the ever-optimistic Stingily.
“That was a pretty disappointing game against Florida, but that didn’t change my mind at all in terms of the possibilities of that team,” he says.
After the NCAA Tournament pairings were announced, Karl and Susie packed their bags for what they hoped – and expected – would be a three-week trip.
Their journey began in Spokane, where their seats were in the same section with the families of the Tide players.
Karl got to know Nels Nelson, the father of power forward and North Dakota State transfer Grant Nelson.
“After we win the second game in Spokane and are going to LA (for the Sweet 16), I go over there to either high-five him or fist-bump him, and he goes, ‘Hey, give me a hug,’” Stingily recalls. “So that tells you something about the kind of guy he is.”
Susie, meanwhile, bonded with senior point guard Mark Sears’ mom, Lameka Sears, whose animated ritual every time he son stepped to the free-throw line made her a tournament celebrity.
“I was a previous ICU nurse, and she’s a nurse, so we actually talked about how we bring our faith into nursing,” Susie says. “The conversation wasn’t around basketball at all, but we really bonded over that.”
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After the Tide beat first College of Charleston and then Grand Canyon University to advance to the Sweet 16, Karl went to Seattle for a couple of days before continuing to Los Angeles. Susie, meanwhile, flew to the Denver area to be with her father, who was having surgery.
In LA, Karl sat in the nosebleed section at Crypto.com Arena for Alabama’s thrilling 89-87 upset of No. 1-seed North Carolina.
“I put that up against any national championship football game I attended,” he says.
For the Clemson game in the Elite Eight, he sprang for primo seats about five rows behind the Alabama bench.
After Alabama’s tense, 89-82 win, he got selfies with Alabama players Nick Pringle and Aaron Estrada, who came into the stands to exchange hugs and high-fives with fans and family.
“Maybe my happiest sports fan day ever was watching Alabama win the game and seeing the happiness of the players as they achieved their dream — but also mine as an Alabama basketball fan,” he says.
Karl Stingily dreamed of going to the Final Four since he became an Alabama basketball fan nearly 50 years ago. (Photo by Susie Stingily; used with permission)
‘I may miss the Final Four’
From Los Angeles, Karl went to Las Vegas, where Susie rejoined him, to spend a few – presumably relaxing — days before the Final Four in Phoenix.
“I had worked in Las Vegas for Caesar’s Entertainment as chief audit executive before retiring last year, so it was a logical place to hang out for a few days before traveling to Phoenix,” he says.
That Tuesday – four days before Alabama’s Final Four showdown with the UConn Huskies – Karl noticed something wasn’t right during a business lunch with a recruiter.
“While I was sitting at the table, I started feeling chest pressure,” he recalls. “And I started sweating like a pig all of a sudden. And I was very light-headed. I mean, this was not normal.”
Karl soldiered through his lunch, rationalizing that he had overexerted himself in his haste to make the meeting.
“I had really been rushing just to get there,” he says. “I’d been out running, and I ran hard. So part of me thought, I’m just reacting to the running because it was a fairly warm day in Las Vegas.”
Afterward, he went back to his brother Mike’s house, where he and Susie were staying, to take an afternoon nap.
When Susie – who had worked as an ICU nurse for 12 years – got there and heard what happened, her instincts told her that her husband had suffered a heart attack.
And she tried to convince him that, even though he said he felt better, he needed to go to the emergency room.
“What people don’t understand is the heart attack that kills you is often not the first heart attack that you actually had,” she says. “Had he gone out for one more jog or gone to the Final Four, it would have taken very little — you know, screaming, getting angry — to precipitate the finality of that heart attack.”
Karl, though, continued to brush it off.
“I didn’t tell her everything,” he admits. “It was already on my mind: Wait, I may miss the Final Four.”
Over his wife’s objections, he even went to a business dinner that night.
Karl Stingily celebrates with a Wendy’s Frosty after having a stent inserted in his right coronary artery the day before Alabama’s Final Four showdown with Uconn.
(Photo by Susie Stingily; used with permission)
‘You’re not going anywhere’
The next morning – three days before the game in Phoenix – Susie again pleaded with her husband.
You need to go to the hospital to get this checked out.
“I literally could not get him to go in,” she remembers. “I’m like, ‘Look at me. This is my area of expertise, and you’re not even listening.’”
Karl couldn’t be persuaded.
If I go to the hospital and they keep me, then I’m going to miss the Final Four.
Exasperated, Susie crawled back into bed that morning and pulled the covers over her head.
“What’s wrong?” Karl asked her.
“I’m done,” she told him.
“And it wasn’t until that moment – until I quit, until I literally said, ‘I’m done’ – that he agreed to go into the hospital,” she recalls.
Even then, she needed to negotiate with him to get him to agree to an electrocardiogram to check his heartbeat and a troponin test to diagnose whether he suffered a heart attack.
Let’s just go and get these two boxes checked, and then you can go to the Final Four and not worry about it.
“I had to sell it to him to get him to go,” she remembers. “But, in fact, I knew all of his symptoms meant he had had a heart attack.”
They got to the emergency room at Centennial Hills Hospital about 9:30 that morning, and the tests confirmed what Susie had known all along.
The more troponin that is released into the blood, the more likely it is a patient has suffered a heart attack, and Karl’s troponin levels were alarmingly high.
“His troponin came back off the charts,” Susie says. “He had had a really good heart attack, not just a mild one.”
The emergency room doctor delivered Karl the bad news.
You’re not going anywhere.
Karl Stingily finally listened when his wife Susie, a former ICU nurse, insisted that he get tested to see if he had suffered a heart attack.(Photo courtesy of Susie Stingily; used with permission)
‘Everybody was holding their breath’
Right away, a nurse put Karl on a heparin drip to clear some of the blockage in his right coronary artery, and he was admitted to the hospital, where he waited for an arteriogram.
As Wednesday became Thursday and Thursday turned into Friday, his hopes of realizing his lifelong dream decreased with each passing hour.
“I was told (the arteriogram) would be sometime on Friday,” he recalls. “And then Friday is starting to slip away, and I’m kind of doing the math in my head.”
By then, Karl and Susie had already missed the Friday flight they had booked from Las Vegas to Phoenix, meaning that if he got out of the hospital in time, they would have to drive.
Finally, around 3 o’clock that afternoon, the cardiac surgeon arrived to perform the arteriogram. He presented Karl with best- and worst-case scenarios.
The best result would be that Karl just needed a stent — a tiny tube that holds the artery open so the blood flows better – and might be able to check out sooner rather than later.
The worst outcome would be that he required open-heart surgery, which would mean a longer hospital stay and that he would most assuredly miss the Final Four.
Fortunately for Karl, the arteriogram — an imaging text that uses x-rays and a special dye to see inside the arteries – revealed that he needed a single stent.
His hopes buoyed, Karl decided to roll the dice and ask his doctor a favor.
I’ll do whatever you recommend, obviously, but my greatest hope is that I’ll still be able to go to the Final Four on Saturday.
The cardiac surgeon, an Indiana University graduate and a big college basketball fan himself, assured Karl that he would do everything possible to make that happen.
About a dozen members of the hospital staff watched the procedure, Susie recalls.
“Everybody was kind of holding their breath,” she says. “You could see the vessel on the screen, and when that vessel started filling with blood fully, the whole room clapped.”
They wheeled Karl back to his room for his post-op recovery, and Susie later treated him to a celebratory Frosty from Wendy’s.
Then, about 10 o’clock that night – less than 20 hours before tipoff – Karl’s cardiac surgeon dropped by to check on his patient.
“And Karl, of course, is still wondering about the Final Four,” Susie says. “I don’t think he realizes that he just had a major procedure done.”
The cardiac surgeon took his cell phone out of his lab coat and called the doctor who would be on call the next morning.
I want you to come see Mr. Stingily first thing in the morning because he needs to get to the Final Four.
Although Alabama lost to UConn in the semifinals, Karl Stingily, after all he had been through the previous four days, was just thrilled to make it to the Final Four. (Photo by Susie Stingily; used with permission)
‘My goal was to get there’
That next morning, while Karl was waiting to be discharged, Susie went to the airport to swap rental cars and to Walgreens to get his prescriptions filled.
In his room, Karl changed into a pair of blue trousers and a crimson golf shirt with an Alabama script “A.”
At 11 o’clock – less than seven hours before tipoff – Susie pulled up outside the hospital to pick Karl up for their five-and-a-half-hour drive to Phoenix. Karl sat in the passenger seat while she drove.
By the time they got to Phoenix, the closest parking they could find was about 15 minutes away from State Farm Stadium, so they parked the car and got an Uber.
Their Uber driver took them to a designated ADA pick-up spot outside the State Farm Stadium, where a golf cart picked them up and dropped them off at the handicap entrance.
“Karl still had his hospital band on, so I was able to show them he just got discharged from the hospital,” Susie says. “So they let us in the handicap door.”
Once inside, Karl took off like a kid at an amusement park.
“Slow down!” Susie yelled.
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They arrived during halftime of the preceding Purdue-North Carolina State game.
Karl had seats near his old college buddy Ken Edwards and Alabama superfan Dick Coffee III, who also had been at UA at the same time as Karl and Ken.
“They knew how important it was to make that Final Four appearance,” Karl says. “I don’t think they would have missed it, either.”
Coffee had sat with Karl in Spokane and again in Los Angeles but wasn’t aware of what had happened to him in Las Vegas. Nor did Karl talk too much about it.
Coffee did, however, suspect something was up when he reached out to Karl earlier and Karl told him he would be “a game-time decision” for the Final Four.
“I talked to him in between (games), and he said he was a game-time decision, but he didn’t really elaborate,” Coffee recalls. “I didn’t know it was a heart attack until later.”
With Susie by his side to make sure he didn’t get too excited, Karl remained calm throughout the game.
It didn’t even matter that much to him when UConn, on its methodical march to back-to-back national championships, ended Alabama’s unexpected tournament run that night in the desert.
Karl Stingily – after all these years – had lived to see the Tide make it to the promised land of college basketball.
“My goal was to get there, to see Alabama in the Final Four,” he says. “I was just ecstatic to be there. Everything we talked about over the past decades, and to finally be at the Final Four, in a way, that was enough.”
He knows, though, he wouldn’t have made it without Susie.
“She stuck with me because, believe me, I knew she was not in favor of us traveling to Phoenix,” he says. “She really watched over me.”
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