Some games get circled on the calendar. This one is carved into it. It’s the Third Saturday in October, Tennessee and Alabama, and for nearly a century it has carried a weight no other game on the schedule can match: the nostalgia, the grandeur and the respect. The winners light cigars. The losers wait a year.
Sometimes I wonder what it felt like in October of 1928. Tennessee hadn’t played Alabama in 14 years. Captain Robert Neyland, still 16 years away from earning his general’s star, was in only his third season as head coach. He was 16–1–1 in his first two years, but outside Tennessee he was just an Army engineer who had the Vols finally standing toe to toe with Vanderbilt. Alabama was the powerhouse of the South, fresh off two trips to the Rose Bowl and so heavily favored that some of its backers were betting $500 that Tennessee wouldn’t score at all. Alabama didn’t even think enough of the Vols to bring the game to Birmingham, where the Tide played its big ones in brand-new, 21,000-seat Legion Field. Tennessee got the little campus field in Tuscaloosa and a crowd of about 8,000.
Neyland didn’t see it that way. On the train ride down, he called his players into his compartment one by one and told each of them the same thing: man for man, they were better than Alabama. The night before the game, in their Birmingham hotel, a sophomore named Gene McEver made a promise of his own. He was going to take the opening kickoff back. The next afternoon at Denny Field in Tuscaloosa, he did exactly that, 98 yards straight up the middle.
The rest of the afternoon was a fight. Tennessee was outweighed by 20 pounds a man, and its captain, Witt, couldn’t play. McEver added a second touchdown on a fourth-down pass from Hackman, but Dodd was knocked out of the game, and a 130-pound substitute named Dutch Reineke came in and, as one Knoxville paper put it, “fought with Spartan fortitude.” Four times in the fourth quarter, Alabama drove within striking distance. Four times, Tennessee turned them back, and Reineke closed it out with a late interception. Tennessee won 15–13. The boys, the paper said, had won on “nerve or, more vulgarly, ‘guts.’”
Look at who was on that field and you understand why it meant so much. Bobby Dodd and Paul Hug came from Kingsport. Fritz Brandt was from Erwin. Quinn Decker and Hugh Faust grew up in Knoxville, and Buddy Hackman in Nashville. Even McEver, born in Birmingham, was raised right on the state line in Bristol. These were Tennessee boys, playing for their hometowns, their neighbors and their state against the giant of Southern football. A win like that didn’t just belong to the team. It belonged to Tennessee.
Back in Knoxville, almost nobody had seen it coming. The win came “as a surprise to nine out of ten among even the most enthusiastic supporters,” and local experts had been “almost a unit in giving Tennessee no chances at all.” Bettors around town were giving 20 points. Still, thousands followed every play on WNOX, which The Knoxville News-Sentinel broadcast across the state, and hundreds more crowded around radios set up in hotel rooms, cigar stores and furniture stores. For two and a half hours, the paper reported, business in Knoxville was “virtually suspended.” When McEver broke loose, “the fans who were left at home went wild.” Smiles replaced frowns. Men hugged men. Then they held their breath through every one of Alabama’s fourth-quarter drives. When it was over, the city broke into a jubilee it hadn’t seen since the Vols beat Georgia in 1925. “No wonder the old town went football mad last night,” one paper wrote. “All hail, Tennessee!”
Students paraded through the streets all night. At 8 o’clock the next morning, the special train car pulled into Southern Station carrying the team and the rooters who had made the trip, and the UT band was set to meet it and escort the squad home.
The papers called it “the greatest upset in all the football history of the Southland” and predicted “the story will thrill the nation.” The Tide, one editorial wrote, was left “crimson with the wounds of defeat.” Even Birmingham couldn’t deny it. “No greater upset will occur in the South this year than Tennessee’s startling victory,” wrote Zipp Newman of the Birmingham News. Before long, Knoxville drugstores were serving a “Hack and Mack” sundae in honor of Hackman and McEver, the new Touchdown Twins.
I’d give anything to have been there for any part of it: riding that train back to Knoxville, huddled around a radio in a downtown store as McEver broke loose, or standing at Southern Station that Sunday morning as the band escorted the winners back to campus. I wonder if Neyland and his “Flaming Sophomores” knew what they had just started. It was the first time the two teams ever met on the third Saturday in October, and we’ve been marking our calendars by it ever since.
Ninety-eight years later, the rosters look different and the stakes are higher, but the feeling hasn’t changed. And this year it gets a little more special. On October 17, for the first time in 56 years, to the day, Tennessee will wear orange and Alabama will wear crimson inside Neyland Stadium.
Cool air, changing leaves, orange against crimson. The cigars are waiting. Let’s write another chapter.