Roy Exum
I graduated from high school during the first week of January of 1968. I had a somewhat unusual secondary education, being how I went to five different schools and my parents never moved. Now’s not the time to get into all of that, other than to say I balked at authority and that the best lesson I ever learned was to have a whole lot of fun regardless of circumstance. My grandfather owned the Chattanooga News-Free Press and I had worked all kinds of jobs since I was age 12.
Earned a dollar an hour for the longest, and I was raised doing construction, farming, and “finding the squeaky wheel” through my junior year in high school. That’s when it was decided I needed to “use my mind” and, in the summer of my 17
th year, I was placed in the newspaper’s “toy department.”
Yes, I started covering high school sports 63 years ago and I still adore “the Friday night lights.” I have lived a richer life than anyone can compare. I used to relish covering games at schools that had kicked me out. They were scared to death of what I’d write. I never had the first day of classroom training but I loved every second. We had some older guys – one proof-reader in particular – who were better English teachers than are at Harvard and Yale. I would read Hemingway, O’Henry, Shakespeare and every sports story I could find. Once a week I would literally read Sports Illustrated from cover to cover, never dreaming that one day I would almost run back to a hotel room in New York City so nobody would see me cry after they offered me a job.
In the beginning our sports section was awful. It was built around Allan Morris and Austin White, who were like fathers to me. When I wrote a good story, they beamed. When I stunk it up they spent hours encouraging me to shine. By the time I was 20 I was hiring writers as fast as I could – we were in a kill-kill battle with the Chattanooga Times and the plan was to become the best sports section in the South. Allan covered UTC sports like a blanket and “Whitey” was the best ever with the Vols. I realized Chattanooga was unique because, geographically, we had UT, Vandy, Alabama, Georgia, Georgia Tech and a surprising number of other college fans in our “reading zone,” for lack of a better description.
This was when newspapers were in their zenith. There was no Internet as we know it. This was before ESPN or CNN. The first football game I covered was Clemson at Georgia. I took a portable Royal typewriter, a jug of glue that was the original ‘cut and paste,’ and after the game cut-and-pasted paragraphs together. Then I raced to the Rexall Drugs in downtown Athens, bounded up the back steps, and handed my story to “Miss Peg.” She ran the Western Union office above the drug store and we would wire what I had written to Chattanooga. As the printer in Chattanooga would chatter what Miss Peg typed, it made a “ticker tape.” Somebody would rush the tape upstairs to our composing room, they would feed the tape into a Linotype machine, and it would spit our nine lines of one-column type in a minute.
Well, it wasn’t long before I learned if I would take Miss Peg or others like her in Tuscaloosa, Nashville, Baton Rouge, Auburn or wherever, a cellophane-wrapped box of chocolates, not only would my story go to the head of the line but that darn near all those weekend Western Union women taught school during the week. Man, they could make my first paragraph sound like an Emily Barrett Browning sonnet. Never underestimate the power of a Whitman’s Sampler. But I get ahead of myself …
That summer, at age 20 and having no idea where Baton Rouge was or how to get to Auburn, I called ‘Bear’ Bryant at Alabama and set up a meeting where I could introduce myself, tell him that this little paper in Tennessee was “expanding our coverage,” and … “Coach, I am scared to death I can’t pull this off but I want to try and I really need your help.”
The greatest line in the English language, especially the South, is “I am scared … I want to try … I need your help.” He told me he’d give me 30 minutes, to come on. But “Coach” gave me four hours. He called other SEC coaches. He wanted to read what I wrote. He gave me more ‘news bits’ than Kellogg’s made corn flakes and, while I’ll never know when it started, my name was on the daily practice list. Practice closed to the media? No matter … my name was on still the list for years after Coach Bryant quit coaching.
While I apologize for taking so long to “set the stage,” I must tell you I have watched more games between Tennessee and Alabama as “an insider” than just about anyone who is still alive. I have been in the dressing room with the players of both teams for the Lord’s Prayer. I have seen and heard and watched what this game carries with it that no other rivalry can equal. The “Third Saturday in October is sacred in Tuscaloosa and in Knoxville. I’ve heard an Alabama player say, “This Saturday is Election Day, and woe be to the man who fails to cast a vote.”
I’ve stood beside Johnny Mayors on Tennessee’s practice field, this after dark … watching kickers boom balls into a black void … and heard him fret, “What am I leaving out?” Johnny has a rehearsed litany about turnovers, the kicking game, avoiding penalties that is the same every year but not until an hour before kickoff would he carefully write each in chalk, the muscles in his lower jar tensing more with each new line and every freshman fearing a panic attack.
Usually the first of any week is spent working out the knots and smoothing the bumps from the Saturday before but, on both campuses, laughter over lunch is gone. The players take great steps to hide any injuries. Before the Monday practice at Alabama – as surely as the swallows return to Capistrano – Bryant would slowly walk through the locker room, it as hushed as a tomb, and every player can vividly remember him softly whistling the tune, “Love Lifted Me.” I swear it’s true – I’ve personally watched from a corner, and heard him do it.
Wednesday before Saturday’s game (this year in Tuscaloosa, 9 p.m.) is the last hard day of practice but it always seemed to me the tension got greater and greater. By this time in the season every athlete was in the zone. For years I thought Alabama’s angst was driven by the fact that Bryant, who was an assistant at Vanderbilt before he coached at Kentucky, was a little miffed he never beat a General (Robert) Neyland team but down through the years the better answer was that Alabama and Tennessee played more alike than any other two teams in the conference. You would have thought Auburn and Georgia would have had that – at one time it seemed like every Georgia coach had played for Auburn (Vince Dooley) and every Auburn coach had played for Georgia (Pat Dye) – but it was the natural rivalry that made the Alabama-Tennessee game what it will always be.
Alabama’s arch-rival was Auburn – the Iron Bowl at the end of the year – and while every first grader had to be for one of the two state schools from the beginning, almost every Alabama player who didn’t have “state blood” would tell you the Tennessee game was bigger. “They play like we do. They are tough like we are. They are disciplined. They are always ‘up’ when the game starts. It’s a man-to-man brawl out there,” is what any player on either side of the ball will tell you even today.
Outside of the UT-Bama game, my favorite game was Alabama-Auburn back when the two teams would play at Legion Field. Some genius decided to cut the seating in Birmingham into four pie-shaped sections so half of the Alabama and Auburn fans would sit on each side. You had four equal parts – half of each school’s faithful facing one another with the opponent on either side. That way the crowd’s roar never stopped. Of course, in the ‘70s there wasn’t as much national recruiting as today and TV didn’t dictate the game like it does now. It was like everybody in the stadium was neighbors, a lot of high school teammates facing one another and town reunions all over the place before the game. How big was it? There was never an instate funeral on an Iron Bowl Saturday; all the clergy was “pre-occupied.”
Auburn’s great outside rival was Georgia and the reason is those two schools are as alike as Tennessee-Alabama. The Kentucky and Vanderbilt teams didn’t catch up with UT for years, and by design according to some legislators. LSU’s ticket sales skyrocketed when Arkansas and Texas A&M came into the SEC. South Carolina had a built-in deal with Clemson, the Georgia game being the Gamecocks’ measure. What never made sense was the Bobby Dodd-Bryant feud left Georgia Tech as an orphan and Bobby Bowden didn’t want the FSU empire threatened week after week by either the SEC or the old Southwest Conference.
I watched 30-plus Alabama-Tennessee games in person and have seen almost 60 if you throw TV in, too. And, yes, Alabama comes first in the pairing of the two for purely alphabetical reasons. I’ve had UT people argue that for years, saying “our state school” should always come first – “it’s the Tennessee-Alabama game, you fool” -- , but the Associated Press Style Book says the alphabet decides between any two schools and we sold a heckuva lot of newspapers in north Alabama back then.
My favorite game? There is no way to say. My longtime pal Al Browning wrote an entire book on one game - “The Third Saturday of October” is actually the title. Al was the sports editor for the Tuscaloosa News before he was hired by the Knoxville News-Sentinel and UT’s boo-birds never let him forget it. But the mid-80s we had over 20 or 25 sports writers, mostly young kids who hadn’t been ruined by journalism schools, and every Friday night we’d try to cover every high school game and then fan out to SEC games the next day. I was phenomenally lucky with the guys I hired and one day I’ll try to do a story on the lot of them. I still love every one of them and to see each one turn out to be so fine is a heavenly reward.
I can remember so many times when I would take one or two of “my pups” to a big SEC game where they would sit in the press box for their first time. I got a bigger kick out of it than they did and, of course, they would all get a little nervous as we parked. I’d tell them, “Just act like you’ve done this before. It’s a snap,” and instantly each would be hooked for life. Most of the Southern sports writers that I knew would share quotes after games so they became fast friends with my guys. Mingling in those crowds was fun for all of us. One night it was after midnight by the time we walked back to the car to drive back home and one of my yearlings blurted out loud: “Can you believe this! And what’s really awesome is I am getting paid to do it!”
Gosh, there are a million stories I can dredge up and this Saturday night, when the Vols play the Tide in the nation’s late game, it is with God’s richest blessing I’ll sit back in my chair and … “act like I’ve been there.”
royexum@aol.com