That Day One of Us Took the Field

Last weekend, watching the football games on TV from our self-quarantine, I found myself reflecting on three aspects of the wider world of spectator sports…

1.    How much we missed these contests when this 2020 season was upended for safety’s sake. How even now we struggle to follow the daily updates on player illnesses and further shifts they cause to schedules and standings.

2.    How extraordinary are the elite athletes we watch who play these games at the highest levels.

3.    And how – down deep – some of us lesser-abled humans watching their extraordinary feats and sometimes dream of joining them on the field of play ourselves. (No way, right?)

Then suddenly I flashed back to a spring day half a century ago when one of us (not me) did exactly that, actually living the dream if only for a few heart-stopping moments, upon a hallowed field in Knoxville.

It was the day of the 1968 “Orange & White Game,” the popular intra-squad football classic at the University of Tennessee. The hero of this story was my friend Bill Preston, graduate of Nashville’s Overton High School. He had come up with an audacious idea, and in short order it was coming to pass.

Bill was now a student at UT. He also worked summers, holidays and some weekends back in Nashville at The Tennessean city newsroom. That’s where I met him one Saturday morning, together with Tom Gillem, also a young UT student who would become another life-long friend.

In Knoxville, Bill was already one of the Nashville newspaper’s “campus correspondents.” On other campuses, so were John Hemphill, Frank Sutherland, John Haile and Kathleen Gallagher (at Vanderbilt), Tom Ingram (at Lipscomb), Dwight Lewis (at TSU), and me at MTSU.

I soon came to realize that Bill was one of the best feature-writers of our generation – the kind of story-teller I wanted to be – and also one of the most enterprising, as you will see.

For Bill, it all began in an airport bookstore, where he had bought a copy of Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback. Its author George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, had somehow talked the management of the NFL’s Detroit Lions into letting him see action at quarterback in part of one game – so that he could write about it from the inside.

Bill’s own idea was just as audacious: Could I do in Knoxville, home of the Vols, what Plimpton did with the pro team in Detroit?

This had never been done in Knoxville. In fact, it might have been quickly dismissed as preposterous by the ruling powers over UT football. The Tennessee Volunteers, under the Head Coach Doug Dickey, were then in one of their many storied up-cycles of national football glory.

The 1967 squad had won the Southeastern Conference championship, and Tennessee was named national champion by Litkenhouse. Dickey was named the “SEC Coach of the Year” and his 1968 team again included large names in the college game (superstars like Bubba Wyche, Richard Pickens, Lester McClain, Kenny DeLong), some of them All-Americans. This sport is also physically dangerous, of course, especially for an unqualified non-athlete who could be seriously injured.

But the powers that be in UT’s athletic department granted Bill’s request. 

This week I caught up by phone with several who were involved, including Coach Dickey, the team captain Dick Williams and also Mike Jones, the standout defensive back from Nashville’s Stratford High School. They each shared with me what they remembered from the ‘68 spring game.

Dickey told me he had never heard - before or since - of another such request from news media, but he felt it was the type of event that could generate positive goodwill for the program.

Mike, only a year younger than Bill Preston, recalled the team meeting where the UT coaches announced that a reporter would appear briefly in the spring game.

“I was afraid he was going to get hurt,” Mike told me. “We’d just won the SEC championship, so you had a lot of guys out there in the spring game trying to make a name for themselves, not holding back. I said that to Bill. I remember he kinda laughed.”

Bill explained to me later how the UT coaches had prepared him for what was coming. Their game-plan: Sometime in the second half, he would be sent in to quarter-back two plays. First, a textbook hand-off to the tailback. Next, he would throw a pass.

“For the hand-off, the coach told me, ‘When you get the ball, make one quarter-turn to your right, and stick the ball out. The tailback will be there and do the rest. Don’t over-think it.’ It sounded almost easy.”

The hand-off never happened. Mike Jones was the tailback and more than ready, but at the snap, Bill fumbled the ball. He immediately jumped on it, saving the possession. (Mike, normally on the defensive squad, was the running back for this spring game, replacing Richmond Flowers Jr. who was away hoping to qualify for the Mexico City Olympics). On the next play, Bill made a successful toss to the receiver Kenny DeLong.

“I just remember how fast everything happened,” Bill told me after the game. “Those guys are very good.”

On Tuesday, I spoke with Bill’s roommate that year, Charles W. Bone, now a Nashville attorney. In 1968, he and Bill shared an apartment at 1808 White Avenue. Charles recalled how the excitement mounted among Bill’s friends as his gridiron debut drew near.

“I was finishing my first year of law school,” Bone remembered. “I think what Bill did is what journalism used to be about. It was about what was really important – and, my goodness, what was more important than Tennessee football! The feature story Bill wrote about it was a creative piece. Journalism has always been rewarded by hard work and creativity, and this was both.”

Charles continued, “Obviously that game is not what first comes to mind now when we think about 1968 and all that happened that year – Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam – but what Bill did was a ray of sunshine in the midst of turmoil and crisis. And it brought us some joy.”

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Bill Preston died in 2005. By then he’d had a long career in newspaper journalism, a lifetime of storytelling, and decorated service in the first Gulf War.

The colorful feature story he wrote about his day in the sun in 1968 survives in the digital collection of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. It was titled “I Was Only a Paper Vol!” It was the cover story on May 26, 1968, in the Tennessean’s Sunday magazine called Young World.

Read it here. And enjoy!

© Keel Hunt, 2020