All photographs capture a moment in time, the actions and feelings of the participants frozen forever on film.

In this photo in particular, a football coach sits tall on the shoulders of three of his players, his eyes cast just to the left of the camera’s lens, his white Alabama football sweater, gray slacks and black Nike sneakers wet from having been doused in ice water. A slight smile creeps onto his lips.

The smile is not one of jubilation, but more one of relief.

That was the moment on the night of Dec. 1, 1988, when Associated Press photographer Lisa Davis’ camera caught Alabama football coach Bill Curry, just after his Crimson Tide team had beaten Texas A&M 30-10 at Kyle Field in College Station, in what had come to be known as the “Hurricane Bowl.” The decision by Curry and Alabama’s administration to postpone the game from its original Sept. 17 date due to fears over the approach of Hurricane Gilbert — which turned out not to hit anywhere near central Texas — had made the Crimson Tide coach into something of a national laughingstock.

Not that Curry’s critics needed the ammunition. He’d been an unpopular choice as Alabama’s coach when hired prior to the 1987 season, a Georgia Tech man taking over a program whose fans, players and boosters had a deep-seated hatred for the Yellow Jackets.

And by the time Alabama faced Texas A&M in that postponed 1988 game, Curry had a mediocre 14-8 record in two seasons. Included in that ledger were a pair of losses to arch-rival Auburn in which his team had scored a total of 10 points.

The Crimson Tide played perhaps the finest all-around game of Curry’s tenure on that night in College Station, featuring among the greatest individual performances ever by an Alabama defensive player. Thirty-five years later, Curry says he doesn’t feel any sense of vindication from that victory, because he has never since regretted the decision to postpone the game.

“There really should not have been any controversy at all,” Curry, now 80, said in an interview this week with AL.com, “because what we had, if I remember correctly, was the largest storm in the history of the North American continent approaching that area of Texas. I had (players’) parents calling me terrified, ‘are you going to take my son and your team into that storm?’

“I called the National Weather Service, I called Delta Airlines, where I had friends. Everybody said ‘don’t you dare put anybody on a plane and go close to that.’ So I called A&M and said ‘we’re not going to be able to get there,’ not without also risking all of our (fans) who love to take trips with the team. There was no controversy about that in my mind.”

The man on the other sideline that night has a different view of things, as you might expect.

Jackie Sherrill, then in his seventh season as Aggies head coach, questioned Curry’s motives at the time and still questions them now. Complicating the matter is that Sherrill is a former Alabama fullback who has been close friends with then-Alabama athletics director Steve Sloan since their playing days under Paul “Bear” Bryant in the mid-1960s.

Sherrill pointed to the fact that Alabama quarterback David Smith had injured his knee in practice on Tuesday, Sept. 13, four days before the Crimson Tide was originally scheduled to face the Aggies. He would have definitely missed the September trip to College Station but was able to heal in time for the re-scheduled game in December.

“They had lost their quarterback the week before, but you know, that’s part of the game,” Sherrill told AL.com this week. “Curry and their offensive coordinator, they were pushing to cancel the game because they had lost their quarterback. And then, just so happened, by the time we played the game, our quarterback had gotten hurt and he couldn’t play.”

Whatever the ultimate motivation, the fact remains that Alabama called off its trip to Texas on the day before the game. Former Crimson Tide safety Lee Ozmint remembers that the team might have actually been ready to load the buses for the airport before they were called into a team meeting and told the game was a no-go.

Though Curry took much of the heat publicly, it seems counterintuitive he could have made such a decision without the blessing of his athletics director. He said as much now, though Sherrill — who was also Texas A&M’s AD at the time — remains dubious.

“The mistake I made, I should have called Steve (Sloan) and said ‘You come. If we don’t play, then I’ll pay for your travel,’” Sherrill said. “But I didn’t do that, because we would have played if they had come.”

Hurricane Gilbert ripped its way through the Carribean during the second week of September in 1988, devastating Jamaica on Sept. 12. The storm then surged into the Gulf of Mexico, becoming a Category 5 hurricane packing 185 mph winds and measuring more than 550 miles in diameter.

Hurricane tracking was then not as precise as it is now, so Gilbert hitting along the Texas Gulf Coast — where it might then veer northwest toward College Station — was certainly a possibility. Curry and his Alabama bosses decided not to take any chances and called off the team’s flight to Texas.

“We wouldn’t have had a problem getting into College Station, I don’t think,” former Alabama center Roger Shultz said. “I think (Curry) was more worried we’d get stuck out there a couple of days and wouldn’t be able to get back because of the storm.”

As we now know, Gilbert eventually made landfall along the Yucatan Peninsula in extreme southern Mexico. It then weakened significantly before making another landfall at La Pesca on the Mexican mainland as a Category 2 storm on Sept. 16, the day before Alabama had been scheduled to play Texas A&M in College Station, some 575 miles away.

Indeed, Sept. 17 was a beautiful day on the Texas A&M campus, barely a cloud in the sky. Kyle Field remained silent, however.

“Since we didn’t play that day, I remember sitting around Bryant Hall watching college football all day,” Shultz said. “And on ESPN, they took a camera and showed the Texas A&M stadium and bunch of guys were in there playing touch football, and it’s like a ‘Chamber of Commerce’ day. And I thought ‘Oh crap, they’re going to drill us for this. This looks bad.’”

The birth of the ‘Hurricane Bowl’

In 1988, Tim Brando was the 32-year-old host of ESPN’s College GameDay, then in its second season on the air and more closely resembling a traditional network pre-game show than the traveling football carnival it would become in later years. The one-hour show aired from ESPN’s Connecticut studios, with commentary and analysis on all the day’s big games from Brando, former Indiana and Louisville coach Lee Corso and former Pittsburgh sports information director Beano Cook.

The first on-campus edition of GameDay was still five years away; Corso wouldn’t make his first “headgear pick” until 1996. In the fall of 1988, current GameDay co-host Kirk Herbstreit was still quarterback at Centerville (Ohio) High School in the Toledo suburbs.

Thus, opportunities for edginess and “buzzworthy” moments on College GameDay weren’t all that common at the time. When the Alabama-Texas A&M game ended up being postponed by a hurricane that never happened, Brando and company seized the day.

“Jackie Sherrill was one of Bear Bryant’s boys, and Jackie knew that Bear did not like Bill Curry,” Brando said. “He also knew that a lot of Alabama fans did not like Curry. … We sent Corso to A&M on the day the game was supposed to played and we had a two-way set-up interview between Sherrill and Curry.

“And Jackie’s basically calling him out, saying ‘well, if you’d done your homework, you would have known that it’s going to be sunshine.’ And we’ve got Corso there at the stadium with blue skies, perfect weather. It was just surreal for me as the studio host. We had both coaches on the air, and they were really taking some shots at each other. They were throwing haymakers.

“Curry was taking this ‘I’m above reproach’ attitude — ‘I’m just protecting my team.’ And Sherrill was saying ‘I don’t know why you’d not want to come and play the game now, unless of course, there are some (injured) players you don’t have.”

The Alabama-Texas A&M game was eventually re-scheduled for Dec. 1, a Thursday night, then a novel concept in college football. It could have easily been scheduled for that Saturday — which in the days before conference championship games included only the annual Army vs. Navy showdown and a few other stragglers — but for whatever reason ESPN chose the spotlight of a Thursday night.

Along the way, someone dubbed the game the “Hurricane Bowl,” and enterprising business owners in College Station began selling commemorative hats and t-shirts. The local Chamber of Commerce instigated a Hurricane Bowl parade and a Miss Hurricane contest, while local bars offered “Flaming Hurricane” beverages.

Shultz still has a Hurricane Bowl hat, which he says he got an Alabama student manager to go buy for him from a concession stand.

The re-scheduled game fell a week after Texas A&M had beaten arch-rival Texas 28-24 on Thanksgiving Day, and six days after Alabama had lost 15-10 to Auburn in the Iron Bowl the following Friday. But in that game against the Longhorns, the Aggies had lost their own starting quarterback, Bucky Richardson, to a season-ending knee injury.

Several former Alabama players interviewed for this story remembered some gamesmanship by Sherrill and Texas A&M on the night before the “Hurricane Bowl.” Punter Chris Mohr recalled that someone had dumped ice all over the playing surface at Kyle Field after the Aggies’ final practice, meaning the Crimson Tide had to go elsewhere for its pre-game walk-through.

Shultz and Ozmint said Alabama was not even allowed to use Kyle Field on the night prior to the game due to the Aggies’ traditional “Yell Practice.” Shultz said the Crimson Tide dressed across the street in what appeared to be a “P.E. locker room.”

Though Alabama was 7-3 and Texas A&M 7-4 heading into the “Hurricane Bowl,” both coaches were under duress for different reasons. The Aggies had been placed on NCAA probation and had received a one-year postseason ban in September after being found guilty of 31 violations within the football program.

Five days before the “Hurricane Bowl” (and the day after the Iron Bowl), Brando reported on College GameDay that Alabama boosters were ready with $2 million to buy out the remainder of Curry’s contract. Though Roger Sayers, Alabama’s university president, flatly denied the story in a hastily called press conference, Brando says now he’d gotten his information from some influential Crimson Tide backers during a speaking engagement in Alabama a few weeks earlier.

“I talked to some people when I was down there, and I learned through some sources that I met there that, regardless of how good the team was that year, they wanted Bill out badly,” said Brando, who now calls college football games for Fox Sports. “They were actually sending letters and making phone calls back and forth trying to get up a collection of money to buy out Bill and his staff. … I said it on the air, and it turned out to be my first real controversy as a host. Newspaper columnists all over the state of Alabama ripped me. … The funny part is that most fans and viewers didn’t realize I was from Louisiana and had a good handle on how the SEC works. I think they thought that since I worked for ESPN and was in the Northeast, that I was just some guy from New York who didn’t know anything about college sports.

“But the fact of the matter is a large portion of the Alabama fan base didn’t like Curry because he couldn’t beat Auburn. And in the first week of December 1988, he had just lost to Auburn for the second straight year. And that was a problem.”

Said Curry, “My status was a matter of conjecture every day I was there.”

Derrick Thomas invades Texas

Dec. 1 wound up being another clear day in College Station, albeit at 35 degrees quite a bit colder than the game’s originally scheduled date. And once the Crimson Tide and Aggies took the field, the “Hurricane Bowl” quickly transformed into the latest edition of the “Derrick Thomas Show.”

Alabama’s All-America linebacker was well on his way to one of the greatest defensive seasons in college football history in 1988. He’d end that year with 27 sacks, 39 tackles for loss and 44 quarterback pressures, all Alabama program records and unofficial national marks (sacks didn’t become an official NCAA statistic until 2000).

The 6-foot-4, 230-pound Thomas had been a one-man wrecking crew in wins earlier that season over Penn State and Kentucky, and played at that level if not better against Texas A&M. He totaled seven tackles for loss, recovered a fumble and sacked Aggies fill-in quarterback Lance Pavlas five times, causing Pavlas to tell ESPN 30 years later he was lucky to escape with only a “hurt ego.”

“Derrick Thomas was not a regular mortal,” Curry said. “He had what seemed like supernatural talents. If we ever had to discipline him for cutting class or whatever by making him get up in the morning and run, he’d get done and wouldn’t even be tired. He’d say ‘coach, that helps me with my conditioning.’ … He was the best football player I ever coached, by far.”

Sherrill knows something about great linebackers, having coached 1980 Heisman Trophy runner-up and future NFL All-Pro Hugh Green at Pittsburgh. He said Thomas — who won the Butkus Award as the country’s top linebacker in 1988 and went on to a Hall-of-Fame career with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs before he died at age 33 in 2000, shortly after being paralyzed in a car accident — was the only player he ever saw who was in Green’s league.

“Hugh Green, to me, will always be one of the 11 defensive players on the all-time college football team, forever,” Sherrill said. “And Derrick is right there with him. He had a great game, there’s no question. He, by himself, really dictated the game.”

But as Ozmint pointed out, Alabama’s entire team was playing at a high level on that night. Smith completed 13 of 20 passes for 156 yards and two touchdowns, while Murry Hill ran for 74 yards and a touchdown and Philip Doyle kicked three field goals.

In addition to Thomas’ nine tackles, fellow linebacker Keith McCants (11) and Ozmint (10) both made double-digit stops. John Mangum added an interception for the Crimson Tide.

“Coach Curry was always really strict about what we wore on the field during games,” said Ozmint, now head football coach at Arab High School. “He didn’t want you wear a bunch of wristbands or writing anything on your tape or anything like that. But before that game, for whatever reason, he told us ‘ya’ll wear what you want.’ I think we were able to let our hair down a little bit because of that, and we played a great game in every phase.

“Derrick Thomas played outside his mind that night, but there was a lot of guys that played very well that night.”

Shultz said Alabama set the tone early. Burly fullback Robert Stewart — later an All-America nose guard for the Crimson Tide after switching to defense — hauled in a short pass from Smith and barreled over a Texas A&M defender on his way to a 10-yard touchdown that gave Alabama a 7-0 lead with 9:07 left in the first quarter.

“Go back and watch the highlight,” Shultz said. “The Texas A&M guy hits him about the six-(yard line) and it’s like bug splatter on a window. He just carried the dude right into the end zone for six yards.”

Alabama led just 13-10 after three quarters but pulled away with 17 points in the final period. The Crimson Tide returned to Texas later that month to beat Army 29-28 in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, ending the season at 9-3.

Here are highlights of the “Hurricane Bowl.” By the way, that’s Brando and Corso on the call for ESPN:

With the Aggies ineligible for the postseason, the “Hurricane Bowl” wound up being Sherrill’s last game at Texas A&M. Though not directly implicated in any of the NCAA violations, he resigned at season’s end and was out of college football for a year before resurfacing at Mississippi State in 1990.

“It was not a memorable way to go out at A&M,” Sherrill, now 79, says with a chuckle.

As the clock ticked down on Alabama’s 30-10 victory, Mohr and two teammates — Thomas and defensive tackle Steve Turner (later a Birmingham firefighter who died at age 40 in 2006) — hoisted Curry onto their shoulders for a victory ride off the field.

Mohr — who went on to punt in three Super Bowls for the Buffalo Bills — can be seen in the photo of that moment, raising his right index finger in the air in the universal sign of victory. He says now that the gesture was one of both appreciation and defiance.

“Coach Curry had been under such criticism and Jackie Sherrill had been doing all that talking,” Mohr said. “So me and Derrick and Steve Turner were right there and I just said ‘let’s pick him up.’ So we picked him up. We just wanted Jackie Sherrill to be able to see it.”

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has covered college football for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.