On a warm autumn morning, Greg Byrne, Alabama’s director of athletics, decided to leave his corner office and sit outside, soaking up the sun, watching student-athletes walk by, still under an indoor mask mandate.
“Easier to see faces,” he noted as he greeted (by name) a swimmer from Sweden, a softball player from Oregon. “It’s important.”
A year earlier, Byrne was in very different circumstances. He had just received word that the Alabama football coach, Nick Saban, had tested positive for COVID-19. What’s more, the same round of athletics department testing had confirmed that Byrne was positive as well, although he hardly needed the notification.
”I was symptomatic,” Byrne said. “All the old sports injuries, and I was not a great athlete so I had some, started to ache. I started having a fever. I had fatigue like I’d never had before. And here was Coach (Saban) 68 years old, and I’m wondering if he’s feeling the same.”
Saban’s test turned out to be a false positive, although an ailing Byrne didn’t know that for four long days. A month later, Saban had a true positive and missed coaching in the Alabama-Auburn game.
“That didn’t change our approach as a department. We’d been proactive since the first cancellations. When masks were being pushed in the summer, Coach Saban did a ‘mask up’ video that got 4 million clicks on our website.
”The toughest part were those very early days when we had to tell the spring sports players and coaches to go home, the season was over. Brad Bohannon (the Alabama baseball coach) looked like I had hit him between the eyes with a bat.
One of my regrets is that I went on ‘Finebaum’ and didn’t stress how sick it really made me. I wasn’t flippant about it but I didn’t talk about how bad I really felt. That may have only affected one person in his audience but that’s still one person and I wish I had done that.”
One and 100: Click above to read more stories about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the South.
Editor’s note: This story was written by late Tuscaloosa News sports columnist Cecil Hurt this fall. Hurt, 62, died Nov. 23 in Birmingham after complications from pneumonia.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Greg Byrne, University of Alabama athletic director