Roy Exum: Mordica - A Delicious Tale

  • Sunday, July 26, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Long before high school football players were rated by stars – a five-star player purportedly the best – and recruiting websites were unheard of, because back then, there was no internet, and the search for school-boy talent by college football coaches was a very intense word-of-mouth business. There were tales of how certain guys ended up at certain colleges that were hilariously funny.

Some coaches would “kidnap” kids, taking them to some secluded beach so other recruiters couldn’t find them.

Blackmail was popular (sign with us or we’ll unleash your family’s secrets) and I know of one governor who actually commuted a prison sentence because a child picked his state’s university.

Oh, it was something. There was a hotshot player in Florida who was being heavily recruited, but when word got out the poor guy had “a social disease” and was allergic to penicillin, colleges jumped off his bandwagon en masse. Not ‘Bear” Bryant.

Coach Bryant didn’t sign the ailing child, but arranged for him to be an inpatient at the VA hospital in Tuscaloosa, and, in a couple of months, he was miraculously cured. Then Alabama signed the guy and he turned out to be a dandy for the Tide. He even graduated, this despite not being able to date a girl under the fear of certain death for a long four years.

Billy Cannon, the Heisman winner at LSU? He wanted to go to Texas A&M in the worst way, but when he beat up a sex predator and left him chained to a tree in the swamp to die from bug bites, and the guy somehow got loose and pressed charges. Oh, glory, a judge in Baton Rouge, partial to “dem Tigahs,” put Billy on four years of probation that specifically stated Cannon could not leave the city for over three days at a time; that way he could play in “away” games, don’t you see?

The reason I bring this up is because word has reached me that Frank Mordica, one of the greatest football players ever at Vanderbilt, died the other day and finally there is a delicious story that can be told. Frank, who is still the second-leading career rusher in Commodore history, had about as much business going to Vanderbilt as a mule entering a beauty pageant.

Talk about a round peg going into a square hole! Frank grew up in a cold-water shack somewhere down around Tallahassee and came from a tough home life. But, at his position coach Boots Donnelly once said, “His feet were so good it would make your shoes squeak.” His grades could never have gotten him into Vandy and it was all but certain he would go to Florida after the way the Gators had wooed him away from rival Florida State.

But just before signing day, Vanderbilt coach Fred Pancoast (probably the best football coach the school ever had) told an assistant who was down recruiting another Florida player to drop in and see if Frank could somehow be begged into coming to Nashville. They could enroll him at Peabody under a new arrangement.

I’m trying to say the recruiter was the famed P.W. Underwood but I can’t find where “Dub” ever coached at Vanderbilt. I know he was an assistant at Tennessee, where legend has it, he got so fed up at practice one afternoon, he pushed All-American linebacker Steve Kiner out of the way and yelled, “I’ll show you how to play linebacker!”

Chip Kell, an offensive lineman at the time, said the offensive players clobbered Underwood so badly it broke his glasses and bloodied his face. “We thought we had killed him. You coulda’ heard a pin drop. But Coach Underwood struggled to his feet and could barely stand up. Suddenly he pointed at the wide-eyed Kiner: 'Boy, you got this position so screwed up not even I can play it!'”

But the best tale was how Underwood recruited Mordica. Maybe he was at Vandy for a short time, a few months between jobs or something, but the way the story goes, he got lost trying to find where Mordica lived. When he finally got there, a Florida track coach was recruiting the speedster with a masterful flourish.

The Florida coach had it all going his way. He was resplendent in a double-breasted blazer that had the Olympic rings embroidered on the pocket, a pair of white pants that were given to him at the most-recent Games, and he had gold rings on almost every finger – the Olympics, the SEC championship, the track Hall of Fame, or whatever. But his best feature was that he was black, like Frank, and was making all these outlandish promises. P.W. watched in despair, knowing his chances were somewhere between little and none.

Finally, Mordica’s dad broke in to offer the Florida coach and Vanderbilt’s Underwood a taste of adult refreshment. The two coaches went into a small galley kitchen when Frank’s father pulled a pint of “Spirit of ’76” vodka from the only cabinet. Suddenly the Florida coach went haughty. “Thank you but I cannot…my tastes are more refined. I like Absolut vodka or better, and I’m scared that would make me sick.”

P.W. didn’t skip a beat. “Mr. Mordica, that’s my favorite! That’s what I drink at home,” he reached for the bottle. “A toast to Frank’s future,” he grinned, twisting off the top and swallowing the top fourth of the bottle. Then he smiled broadly and handed the vodka to his host while wondering if his insides would be scorched for life, or, more pressing, if he should try to breathe.

What happened next was too twisted for color TV. Mr. Mordica’s face turned grey and he had to be restrained – by P.W., of course – from hitting the Florida coach. But he bellowed, oh did he ever – that nobody from Florida ever come to his house again or they’d be shot. Ol’ P.W. just happened to have a scholarship handy and both Mordicas signed it on the spot.

Of course, signing early was illegal but P.W. explained he wouldn’t have to come back two weeks later. Both Mordicas understood and P.W. took one last pull off the Spirit of 76 to show good faith, as did Frank’s dad.

Well, Frank showed up in Nashville and was dazzling from the very get-go. He started in the Commodore backfield in the second game of his freshman year. He rushed for 288 yards that season, and 449 the next, all behind lousy blocking by SEC standards, but as a junior he was sensational.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Mordica ran for two Vanderbilt records and one SEC record when he darted for 321 yards (304 net) and five touchdowns against Air Force. It was unfathomable. Vandy fans literally tore his jersey off, divving up strips of it to keep forever. “Lord, I’ve been waiting all my life for a day like this,” beamed the man of the hour.

Coach Pancoast pulled Mordica with three minutes to play, this out of respect to Air Force coach Bill Parcells. Had he not, Mordica would have probably set the all-time record for the most yards in one game. As Parcells would later say, “We tried but we have no one on our team that can possibly catch him.”

As things turned out Frank Mordica was a quiet, private person but was still popular with his teammates and earned a college degree, albeit from Peabody Teacher’s College. During his senior year he wound up with 2,632 career yards and became the most prolific rusher in Vanderbilt history, a record that would stand 33 years until Zack Stacy broke it in 2012 with 3,143.

Afterwards, he would say, “There wouldn’t be a Frank Mordica without Vanderbilt. I came from a real bad situation…Vanderbilt probably saved my life.”

After Frank graduated, his knees were too battered to play pro football. He joined the Navy where he spent the next 30 years, attaining the rank of a master chief petty officer. He died on July 18, at age 57, after suffering a massive heart attack while working out at a fitness center. His life was exemplary, from the first day he arrived in Nashville, but had it not been for a bottle of Spirit of ’76 vodka, there’s no telling what might have been.

royexum@aol.com

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