Roy Exum
Rolling Stone magazine was found guilty of defaming a University of Virginia associate dean on Monday and, after Nichole Eramo’s lawyers proved malice in front of a federal jury, the judge awarded the woman $3 million in damages for sullying her reputation. As the three-week trial played out, I watched with great interest because over 50 years ago the entire South was entranced by a similar story in one of the top magazines of the day.
On March 23, 1963, an explosive story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post entitled, “The Story of a College Football Fix.” The story detailed how a businessman in Atlanta, identified as George Barnett, was allegedly trying to make a telephone call on Sept. 13, 1962, and somehow the line got garbled – suddenly he claimed he was listing to a conversation between Georgia football coach Wally Butts and Alabama football coach Bear Bryant.
At the time the Saturday Evening Post was easily one of the top magazines in the country, delivering millions of copies across America, and as a youthful sports writer back then, I wrote my very first column about the fix, allowing the story was a bunch of poppycock. In my 20s, I was already writing about college football and had gotten to know both Butts and Bryant. The claim was absolutely preposterous but – in the Deep South – football was already a religion and Saturdays were the Sabbath.
I’ll always believe the real reason behind the story of the fix was in fact a vendetta. The Post proclaimed before the story was published that “A great sport will be permanently damaged. For many people the bloom must pass forever from college football.” But the truth is it was all the result of a late hit between two football players. It was in mid-November and Alabama was hosting Georgia Tech at Birmingham’s Legion Field.
Georgia Tech and Alabama both had great teams in 1961 and during the game one of Tech’s captains, Chick Graning, saw a play ending and slowed, letting down his guard if you will. I’d met Chick – he played as a post-grad at Baylor for Humpy Heywood. He came to Baylor from Natchez and was a great one -- today he is in the school’s Hall of Fame.
Anyway, as Graning slowed, Alabama’s Darwin Holt put a vicious forearm right under the taller Chick’s face guard, knocking out five teeth, breaking numerous bones in his face and giving the Tech player a brutal concussion. Lord have mercy! Alabama won the game, 10-0, in a season where the Tide defense would allow opponents only three touchdowns in 11 games, giving up only 25 points all year.
But Atlanta sports writers were furious that Bryant didn’t suspend or even sit Holt, nor would the Alabama coach make a public apology. They ran a page-one picture of Graning swathed in bandages, further inflaming Tech’s crowd and the city of Atlanta proper. Shortly after is when one of the best writers ever, Furman Bisher, wrote a story in the Post, accusing Bryant of teaching brutality.
Tech wouldn’t play Alabama for years when the contract expired in 1964 and Tech’s legendary Bobby Dodd even took the Yellow Jackets out of the SEC, although many suspect Tech’s stringent academic requirements were more suspect. So, of course, Bryant filed a libel case over the brutality story but to be called a cheater in a well-respected national publication was more than Butts or Bryant could stomach.
After the story of “the fix” appeared, in which the Atlanta businessman said he heard Butts telling Bryant about formations and different Georgia players, Governor George Wallace was quick to bellow: “I don’t know anything about it but I’ll tell you this – the Saturday Evening Post is the sorriest authority on the truth.”
Bryant went on statewide TV, emotionally denying he didn’t even bet, and at the trial three Georgia players testified Alabama had no idea what plays Georgia would run. Alabama linebacker Lee Roy Jordan said he and his teammates were shocked when they heard about the story, testifying that practice the week of the Georgia game was no different and all they had to go on was the last year’s films. “What happened was Joe Namath went out there and ate Georgia alive. If there was a fix I would have known about it,” Lee Roy added, “and there was no such a thing.” (Alabama, favored by 17, won the game, 35-0)
Sports Illustrated covered the trial “that has the South seething” and said it was the biggest spectacle “that has generated such heated emotions since the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Tennessee” and castigated the Post’s vilification of two Southern football heroes as akin “to Clarence Darrow’s assault on the Genesis account of Creation.”
At the end of the two-week trial Butts was awarded $3 million, which was the largest libel settlement to date. When the haggling ended Wally got $136,000 tax free and there was no way the Post lawyers wanted to take on Bryant in Alabama – Bear eventually took $300,000 tax free but always claimed the allegation “cost me 10 years of my life” before he died in January of 1983. Coach Butts died 10 years earlier.
What was worst was that Bryant and Dodd – easily two of the best coaches ever in the game – despised each other afterwards and Bisher, the sports writer who moonlighted for the Post, always called the lawsuit “the lowest point in my career … people in Alabama still believe I wrote that story,” Furman would often say before he died in 2012. (Some Tiders still claim it.)
But the irony is that when the Post was teasing the story, the headlines yelled “the bloom must pass forever from college football” and several years later it was quite prophetic – the Saturday Evening Post, once so lush it had Norman Rockwell’s paintings on its covers – ceased publication. Some claim the Butts-Bryant trial brought down the giant but the magazine, which has since been revised as a monthly in a different format, was known to be in financial struggles before “The Story of a College Football Fix” was ever printed.
What will happen to Rolling Stone? Every magazine in America is struggling and all the giant newspaper consortiums are cutting staffs, trimming sections and offering less newsprint while charging more for subscriptions than ever. With the Internet, news instantly available on TV and social media, and our individual “microwave lifestyles,” periodicals as we know them are doomed but Rolling Stones’ credibility has taken a huge hit.
When readers don’t trust a source, all you need to do is remember the Saturday Evening Post to figure out what is next.
royexum@aol.com