BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Ron Ingram has been involved in Alabama high school football for more than four decades. He’s seen everyone from Bo Jackson to Julio Jones, and he isn’t shy about sharing his opinions.
Especially when it comes to David Palmer.
“Inch for inch, pound for pound, he’s the best player Alabama’s ever had in the state,” said Ingram, formerly the preps editor at The Birmingham News and now the director of communications for the Alabama High School Athletic Association. “Every game you went to see, he did something extraordinary.”
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Thirty years ago, Palmer helped lead Alabama to the 1992 national championship. Before that, he dazzled spectators and baffled opponents on inner-city Birmingham fields. His greatness has been lost in the age of Nick Saban producing Crimson Tide All-Americans at an unprecedented rate, but those who saw him in person never forgot it. They enthusiastically recall how “The Deuce” did things on the football field that didn’t seem possible.
Standing short of 5 feet 8 and around 160 pounds, Palmer used his size to his advantage in ways that made people do double-takes. Gene Stallings, his coach at Alabama, once said Palmer could run full speed under a card table. In the open field, he made would-be tacklers come up grasping air. Opponents made it a habit of punting and kicking the ball out of bounds to avoid putting the ball in his hands.
Palmer went viral before going viral was in the American vernacular. Long before the advent of social media, he owned Friday nights on the field for Jackson-Olin High School and then the airwaves later that evening when Birmingham-area television stations showed his highlights.
Prior to Hudl, YouTube and athletes posting their best plays to Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, local television affiliates were the only place to catch the standout plays from all the games in your area. In that day and age in Birmingham, Palmer was king.
Palmer caught 61 passes in his final year at Alabama. (Courtesy of UA Athletics)‘He can’t be this good’
Palmer’s prodigious career started even before he became a mainstay on Friday night highlight shows. He first played organized football at 6 years old for the Ensley Broncos. That’s where the legend began. At the age of 10, people in the community knew his name. Other coaches and players talked of him like those who propagated Paul Bunyan folklore.
One tale says that Palmer once scored 10 touchdowns in the Shug-Bear Bowl, a youth game named after Auburn and Alabama coaching greats Ralph “Shug” Jordan and Paul W. “Bear” Bryant.
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Sam Shade, who would later be a teammate of Palmer at Alabama and himself had an eight-year NFL career, remembers the first time he, as a member of the West End Panthers, played against Palmer.
“So the very first game of the season, you know, we’re gonna play against David Palmer and back then you didn’t have social media, right? You didn’t see guys on video,” Shade said. “Didn’t know much about him. But obviously the guys on the team had played against David for a couple years before that, and so that’s all they were talking about. The whole week was David Palmer this and David Palmer that. And I’m sitting there, you know, I was always competitive from an early age and thought I was a pretty good player. And I’m saying to myself, ‘He can’t be this good.’
“And long story short, we get to the game, and we kicked the ball on the opening kickoff, and I literally watch him catch the ball and he looked like a video game. Running through our guys, and next thing you know, it was a touchdown. And then that’s when I said, ‘Man, this dude is good. Really good.’”
They would eventually team up together on a dominant youth league team that further told of Palmer’s greatness. Palmer joined not only Shade, but also Robert Davis, who went on to be named Alabama’s Mr. Football the year after Palmer and played at LSU.
As the new arrival, Palmer was searching for a position. For the Ensley Broncos, Palmer played quarterback and running back, but his new team had a quarterback and had Davis at running back.
“So I just had to play another position, which wasn’t a problem for me,” Palmer said. “Because I thought I was talented enough to do anything.”
The famous trio split up for high school, with Palmer going to Jackson-Olin, Shade to Wenonah and Davis to Homewood.
The legend of Palmer took off from there.
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“Well, you started really hearing about him in youth league football,” veteran Birmingham television anchor Mike Dubberly said. “You heard these legendary stories about his exploits in youth league ball and, ‘Have you heard about this kid? Oh, man, just wait till David Palmer gets to high school.’”
‘The most incredible play I’ve ever seen’
Larry Headrick coached at Minor High School and vividly remembers game-planning for Palmer. He’d called his coaching friends and gotten a good scouting report. He decided to punt and kick the ball out of bounds every time, without exception.
“At that time our punter Bobby Emerson was a two-time first-team All-State punter,” Headrick said. “He averaged about 47 yards a punt. So we have our game-plan meeting with our kids, and I think that kind of hurt Bobby’s feelings. He said I can punt it anywhere you want and we can cover it, and I said, ‘No Bobby, we’re not kicking it to him.’
“If you kicked it to him, he was gonna score in the kicking game. He was going to score one or two touchdowns every week in the kicking game. He was kind of like you blow up a balloon and let it go, that was kind of like when he was running. Let me tell you something, you won’t be able to tackle him. You can’t even play two-hand touch with him. I’ve never seen a kid as quick as he was. One of our parents said this kid is quicker than the word of God.”
With his older brother, Robert, David Palmer helped lead Jackson-Olin to the first playoff berth in school history in 1988 as a sophomore. He played flanker, quarterback, tailback, safety and punt/kick returner. He was an honorable mention all-state wide receiver in 1988, honorable mention defensive back in 1989 and first-team all-state quarterback and running back in 1990.
Although he was talented and excelled at every position he played, the return game became the calling card of his career. He had three punt returns for touchdowns his freshman season at Alabama and led the NFL in punt return average in 1995 with 13.2 yards per return. He was a weapon.
It’s a skill he says he sharpened playing a backyard game with kids in his neighborhood.
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“The first game I played, we call it ‘Hot Ball,’ where you can get anything, a can, a ball, and you just throw it up in the air and whoever catches it has to outrun everyone,” Palmer said. “Everyone playing the game is coming after you, and it could be 13, 14 people. They’re going to attack that guy. So I think that’s where I picked up my skills on being elusive. I could see everything.”
The conditions didn’t matter, either. His performance was the same, rain or shine, on natural grass or artificial turf.
Josh Bean covered high school football in Tuscaloosa, Mobile and Birmingham for more than a decade. He was in high school when Palmer was making a mockery of defenses. He made Bean’s high school team look silly too.
“It had rained almost all day and it rained almost the whole first half,” Bean said. “And so the idea was that maybe those conditions would help us against him because he was such a good open-field type player. But what it really exposed was his balance and body control and his quickness. After, I don’t know, the first quarter, the field was basically this sloppy, muddy mess. And he was running around out there like he was playing on a parking lot and everybody else was running around like there was this sloppy mess.”
Those who watched Palmer play all came away with the same impressions. Palmer wasn’t big. He wasn’t the fastest. There was nothing about him that stood out until you tried to tackle him. His ability to make defenders miss was what made him special.
And it’s something those who saw him insist you couldn’t truly appreciate unless you watched it live. Maybe that’s because he didn’t have the speed of a Jaylen Waddle or the size of a Julio Jones. For whatever reason, Palmer’s excellence needed to be experienced in person to be fully understood.
“People today, they just really can’t appreciate his uncanny brilliance as a performer you know, unless you saw him in person,” Dubberly said. “It’s totally different. TV highlights just don’t do it justice. When you watch it on TV or you see a highlight you don’t see the entire field. So you don’t see what he saw, like he saw the whole field and how he set up the defenders. And he just made them look silly. I mean, he really made them look ridiculous.”
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One high school play stands out above the rest. If you covered Birmingham-area high school football in 1990, the play has become imprinted on your brain. It’s a play recounted over and over again when people tell the story of Palmer.
In October at Legion Field, Palmer lined up at quarterback at the 44-yard line against Bibb County.
“He dropped back to pass but was covered up by two college-bound defensive ends,” Ingram recalled. “He shook loose from one grasp, evaded another and spun out of the mess some 10 yards behind the line of scrimmage. He ran to his left reaching all the way to the far hash as four other guys came at him and missed. He twisted out of another guy’s grasp and ran toward the right corner of the field with two defenders with angles on him. Somehow he sensed the two tacklers closing in at about the 7-yard line. He stopped and they flew by him and he walked into the end zone for the touchdown. It was awesome.”
Watch at the 17:35 mark:
Dubberly, when asked his favorite Palmer memory, conjures up the same play.
“So he drops back to pass, receivers are covered, and the next thing you know he does this like, Harry Houdini, shifty, Johnny Manziel-type thing to escape three tacklers and starts off running and scrambling,” Dubberly said. “He breaks about two or three more ankles and gets down the sideline, and right about at the 10-yard line you see these are a couple of defenders coming in with really good angles on him. It doesn’t look like he sees them and he just stops on a dime. And they just fall right in front of them sliding across and he just looks at them falling across and just walked in the end zone.
“It was the most incredible play I’ve ever seen.”
For years the debate raged in Birmingham about who was better: Palmer or his former youth league teammate, Robert Davis. Both won Mr. Football and both went on to play for SEC powerhouse programs, so it might be splitting hairs, but the discussion was real.
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Shade said a member of the Homewood coaching staff once told him they were convinced their star running back, Davis, was better than Palmer. So sure that when their schedules lined up that Jackson-Olin played on a Thursday night and Homewood played Friday, most of the Patriots coaching staff went to Palmer’s game to put the argument to bed in their minds once and for all.
They got their answer, but it wasn’t what they expected.
“Once they saw David play live, there wasn’t any more talk about Robert being better than David,” Shade said.
Palmer guided the Mustangs to their second-ever playoff appearance in his senior season. His 1990 statistics hold up pretty well after more than 30 years. He rushed for 2,001 yards and 26 touchdowns and threw for 1,960 yards and 16 touchdowns. He had five return touchdowns. He had nearly 4,000 yards of total offense, and that doesn’t include the mountain of yards he compiled as a returner.
Even in a 35-29 loss to Central Tuscaloosa in the second round of the playoffs in the final game of his high school career, Palmer racked up a staggering 368 all-purpose yards.
“Believe it or not, he did something this extraordinary virtually every time I saw him play — and I saw him maybe 20 times in his last three seasons at Jackson-Olin,” Ingram said. “He was no doubt the best pound-for-pound player I have ever seen — and I have seen the best the state of Alabama has had to offer for the last 40 years.”
David Palmer was the first Alabama player to finish in the Heisman top three. (Courtesy of UA Athletics)‘I chose to stay close to home’
Prior to his senior season, Palmer was held back in local recruiting rankings because of his size.
“I had something to prove in the state of Alabama,” Palmer told the Birmingham Post-Herald at the time. “I should have been ranked higher than I was.”
By the end of his senior season, Palmer couldn’t be denied. He was named Mr. Football in the state of Alabama. The Post-Herald ranked him as the state’s No. 2 recruit as signing day approached. Palmer’s decision came down to Alabama and Gene Stallings or Florida State and Bobby Bowden.
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One had only been at his program for one season and posted a 7-5 record, and the other was coming off his fourth 10-win season in a row. One had an offense reminiscent of three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, and the other was one of the most inventive in the country.
Palmer chose Alabama for both football and personal reasons. But his heart nearly had him in Tallahassee playing for a guy from Birmingham.
“I was very excited to go to Florida State. That’s where I wanted to go because they passed the ball all the time,” Palmer said. “But I had other considerations I had to think about. I had three kids, so I just chose to stay close to home. I felt Alabama gave me a better option than Florida State. Bobby Bowden had told me when he came to my school that he was gonna redshirt me. I didn’t want to be redshirted. So I chose to stay close to home. I knew if I went to Alabama, I could get on the field faster than I could at Florida State.”
Once Palmer arrived in Tuscaloosa, it didn’t take long before he made an impression. Alabama heading into Palmer’s freshman season of 1991 wasn’t what the Crimson Tide are today. The 1991 season was a turning point for the program in which it went 11-1, preceding the 13-0 national championship season of 1992.
It became clear quickly that Palmer was the most dangerous offensive weapon the run-first team had. He let it be known in his first-ever scrimmage.
“I could never forget it, that first scrimmage at the stadium, and everybody had been talking about how good David was,” All-American defensive end John Copeland said. “You know, we’d had practice and all that, but none of the punt and kickoff was live so you never got a chance to see it. Well, at this particular scrimmage, me and Eric (Curry) were sitting on the sidelines, and I told Eric, I said,’ Look, come on, man. Let’s watch this. You know, everybody said he’s really good. Let’s watch.’
“They punt the ball to him, and oh my God. This little ol’ bitty kid made college football players look like they were playing junior high football. Nobody touched him. He was like a little water bug. You know, he’d be there for a minute and next minute he’d be over there and next second he’s over there. I mean, it was amazing.”
This was the era of Alabama football when the offense was one-dimensional. The team won the national championship in the Sugar Bowl against an explosive Miami team on the back of the defense and a straightforward running game. Jay Barker, the starting quarterback, threw for 18 yards. In other words, Palmer was about the only skill-position who would fit in perfectly in this age of Alabama football. He could nearly do it all.
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“He was never going to blow anyone away with his 40 time, but you never saw anybody catch him from behind,” former Alabama offensive lineman William Barger said. “But he just had so much shake and bake and was so dynamic. You know, he could have played every position on offense outside of the offensive line. I mean, that’s how talented he was.”
Palmer broke out nationally in 1993 as a junior, compiling 1,278 yards from scrimmage to finish third in the Heisman Trophy race, springing him to the NFL as a second-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings, where he had a seven-year career largely as a return man.
These days, Palmer keeps a low profile. He doesn’t like talking much about his exploits or how good he was. He knows what he accomplished, and he’s content that those around during that time can tell stories of his exploits.
Still, he gets a little wistful that he missed this era of Crimson Tide football, one that has seen its players win the Heisman Trophy in back-to-back seasons, with four since 2009.
“Seeing everything going today, man, I’m kind of upset with my mother for having me so early,” Palmer joked. “I would enjoy playing in these offenses. When I was in college, we had a run-oriented offense because our coach was old-fashioned, and the offenses weren’t very creative. But in today’s offense? Man I don’t know if a stat of mine would be reached. And the quarterback that they have? Wooo.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of UA Athletics)
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