Tennessee football's first game at LSU 96 years ago launched Robert Neyland legend, killed a governor
It was perhaps a bad omen for LSU football when the governor’s seat was empty at kickoff against Tennessee, especially since he lay on his death bed three miles away.
In 1926, there was no bigger Tigers fan in Louisiana than Gov. Henry Fuqua.
And there’s no way he would choose to miss LSU hosting the Vols and first-year coach Robert Neyland, a World War I veteran who carried a reserved confidence into his first road trip.
Fuqua, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, native, had been a student at LSU. His brother-in-law was the university president. As governor, he gave a pep talk to the football team before the Tulane game. And because Fuqua arranged for state funding to finish Tiger Stadium two years earlier, a faction of LSU fans wanted to name it Fuqua Field.
But the governor was an unexpected no-show when Tennessee beat LSU, 14-7, that Saturday afternoon. Two days later, Fuqua was dead, the Vols were praised nationally and Neyland was on the fast track to becoming an iconic coach.
On Oct. 9, 1926, Tennessee’s first game at LSU didn’t seem monumental. But it launched a legendary coach, jumpstarted a series and signaled the death of a governor.
No. 8 Tennessee (4-0, 1-0 SEC) returns to Tiger Stadium to face LSU (4-1, 2-0) on Saturday (noon ET, ESPN). It will be their 34th game in a series that includes some classic battles.
But newspaper archives and books tell the colorful story of an almost forgotten era before the SEC, when the Vols made their first trip to Baton Rouge 96 years ago.
Robert Neyland needed to earn his stripes against Tigers
Neyland was already respected, but the Vols didn’t know yet how good he was.
The Tennessee yearbook credited three factors for the successful 1926 season: Neyland’s coaching, improved footing at Shields-Watkins Field and especially “good weather conditions.”
It didn’t take long for Neyland to surpass sunny skies in that ranking, and the win over LSU started the process.
He was hired as Capt. Neyland and promoted from backfield coach to head coach after one season. A week before the 1926 season, he got another promotion to major in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In 1952, he retired as Gen. Neyland with a claim to four national titles as one of the most iconic coaches in college football history.
Neyland was famously tabbed as head coach to beat in-state rival and national power Vanderbilt. But there were other foes on the rise.
In 1925, Neyland’s lone season as an assistant, Tennessee was routed 34-7 by Vanderbilt. But a week later, LSU quietly came to Knoxville and earned a 0-0 tie on a rain-soaked field in their first meeting.
It was the only Southern Conference game the Tigers hadn’t lost, and they hosted the Vols in 1926 hoping for a long-awaited win.
30 gallons of Tennessee water on a train to Baton Rouge
The Knoxville Journal reported Neyland was in the “most jubilant mood” of his tenure before the Vols boarded a train to Baton Rouge. When they arrived, he said Tennessee would beat LSU if “there was an equal share in football luck, and his players did not lose spirit.”
Clearly, his confidence didn’t consider LSU’s size advantage. The Tigers’ 11 starters averaged 176 pounds to Tennessee’s 173 pounds. That was enough evidence for the Associated Press to deem the game too close to call, as it was “not being predicted by even the sagest of sports observers.”
The Vols looked for any possible edge. They arrived in Baton Rouge with 27 players, three coaches, trainer, manager, doctor and 30 gallons of Tennessee water.
The Knoxville Journal reported that Tennessee believed “bad water caused a loss of efficiency, and Coach Neyland took special pains” to protect his players from drinking Louisiana water. They would need every drop.
Secret practices, scouting and gamesmanship
LSU circled the Tennessee game on the calendar.
Two weeks earlier, coach Mike Donahue locked the gates during LSU practices. He was criticized for bland game plans in blowout wins over Louisiana Normal and Southwestern Louisiana, so the Shreveport Times said he closed practices to rid the team of distractions from “sideline coaches.”
The real reason was that Donahue wanted to hide from Neyland’s scouts.
It was a savvy move by Donahue, a former Yale quarterback and innovative veteran coach. He had coached Auburn to great heights over 18 seasons, even surpassing predecessor John Heisman.
A few tidbits leaked from LSU practices. The Monroe News Star reported Donahue had introduced “bushels of new tricks” to his players. The International News Service said the Tigers had new formations and plays just for this game.
Meanwhile, LSU had scouted the Vols well enough to give its junior varsity team an entire Tennessee playbook. Some reports gave LSU a slight edge because its jayvee offense couldn’t move the ball on the varsity defense during a week of intrasquad scrimmages.
The Tigers’ optimism was swelling, and Donahue needed to show his value.
LSU had lured him away from Auburn with a $10,000 salary, making him the highest paid coach in the South, and added the title of athletics director.
Neyland only had a one-year contract as head coach. The year before, he was paid $750 as an assistant, and he also had to serve as ROTC instructor. It was money well spent. Nathan Dougherty, chairman of the Tennessee athletics board, later called Neyland’s hiring the “best decision I ever made.”
Despite LSU’s secrecy, Neyland was satisfied with the scouting report he got from Hal Blair, the captain of Tennessee’s 1921 team. Neyland dispatched Blair to LSU’s game a week earlier and believed there was nothing to hide.
But when the Vols got to Baton Rouge, Neyland also closed his practice to reporters and the public.
‘We’re gonna bend Tenn’
The Shreveport Times reported a “huge throng” of 8,000 fans packed Tiger Stadium. That sounds laughable compared to the current capacity of 102,321.
But college football wasn’t king yet, not even in the South. And the sport wasn’t always taken seriously.
On the day Tennessee played LSU, undefeated Navy split its roster into two squads and swept a doubleheader over Drake and Richmond. And Stanford beat an amateur San Francisco club team en route to a share of the national title under coach Pop Warner.
Instead, pro sports dominated the headlines. In 1926, Bobby Jones won the U.S. Open in golf, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion in boxing and Babe Ruth led baseball with 47 home runs.
In early October, sports pages across the country paid the most attention to an epic World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees. Game 6 even got equal placement as the Vols’ victory on the sports page of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
There was certainly passion for college football, but it was concentrated in college towns. Before the game, LSU students drove through campus with placards on their cars that said, “We’re gonna bend Tenn.”
Tennessee fans got play-by-play accounts from announcements made at Shields-Watkins Field, where a crowd was gathered to watch an exhibition game between Central High and the Vols freshman team for 50 cents a ticket.
James Patrick Roddy Sr., who founded Knoxville’s first Coca-Cola bottling plant in 1902, arranged for telegrams to be sent from Tiger Stadium. Announcers read the game summary, one play at a time, as Tennessee fans imagined the action.
In Baton Rouge, the International News Service reported Gov. Fuqua would attend the game, which seemed to be a no-brainer considering his usual level of support. His absence ultimately proved important and shook Louisiana in the aftermath.
Before SEC, schools aimed to break out
There were long-term stakes at play.
The SEC formed in December 1932 in Knoxville. In the years before, Tennessee and LSU took steps to separate from regional schools destined for inferior football futures.
In 1924, Centre College, now a Division III school in Danville, Kentucky, routed the Vols 32-0 en route to a Southern Conference title. Neyland was hired after that season.
LSU also had reasons for urgency. In the 1920s, its rivalry with Tulane was suddenly tightening. And when the Tigers hosted Tennessee, they had a 0-8-1 record in three seasons in the Southern Conference, the predecessor to the SEC.
Playing the Vols amid a home crowd was their best chance to break that skid.
“To beat Tennessee has become an obsession among the LSU players because they realize that the standing of their institution in the conference depends to a great extent on the outcome of Saturday’s tilt,” AP reported.
LSU moved its campus to its current location in 1926, and the school was ready to break out. Tennessee thought it might have the right coach for a conference title run, but he was still unproven.
It was a crossroads for big schools with big plans for the next century of college football.
Robert Neyland won internal fight, then won over team
Tennessee’s players were not Neyland’s guys, at least not yet.
A few months earlier, only six players had shown up at Neyland’s first spring practice as head coach, according to his account in “Football as a War Game: The Annotated Journals of General R.R. Neyland.” Instead, they were playing baseball and running track for the coaches Neyland had replaced.
In 1925, Tennessee coach M.B. Banks was sick during the Georgia week, and Neyland impressed the athletic council in how he ran a military-style practice as the interim.
When Neyland was elevated to head coach, Banks was relegated to coaching baseball and assistant A.W. Hobt took over the track team. It took Neyland threatening to quit that spring before his first football team assembled.
A 34-0 win over North Carolina the week before the LSU game earned some support for Neyland. But there were doubts that he could win a tough road game against a well-coached team.
The News Sentinel described the 34-year-old Neyland as a “smiling West Pointer” and “not yet a man of destiny like most coaches.”
But it concluded that could change in one game: “Watch the Vols against LSU and then rest easy.”
Vols’ first game at Tiger Stadium finally arrives
The Vols were stingy and strong. They blocked three punts, allowed LSU to gain only three first downs and marched down the field with a fleet-footed ground game.
Tennessee took a 7-0 lead when Allyn McKeen blocked LSU’s first punt, and John Barnhill recovered it in the end zone for a touchdown. The pair later became successful coaches.
Barnhill served as Neyland’s longtime assistant. And he filled in admirably as head coach while Neyland returned to military duty during World War II. McKeen coached Memphis (1937-38) and Mississippi State (1939-48), leading the Bulldogs to the only undefeated season in school history in 1940. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Neyland replenished his lineup with key substitutions to hold the lead.
Among them was Louis “Farmer” Johnson, a heavyweight boxer and ferocious lineman. He was later an assistant coach at Vanderbilt and Tennessee and introduced Johnny Majors to Neyland in the early 1950s when the future star player and coach of the Vols was in high school.
Bob Bond, another reserve, may have been concussed. The News Sentinel reported the Tennessee tackle took a “blow in the head which placed him in a state where he knew little and cared less.” But he returned to the game because the injury “was not permanent.”
LSU tied it 7-7, converting a Tennessee fumble into a 15-yard TD pass from Babe Godfrey to Everette Haynes.
Colorful language, characters capped the win
The Vols started the second half with a steamrolling 70-yard march.
“The Vols opened the third period with the fight of a dozen drunken Micks,” the News Sentinel reported, using a derogatory term for Irish. Donahue, an Irish immigrant, had no counterpunch to stop the Vols’ best drive of the day.
Tackle Dave McArthur opened holes, and fullback Dick Dodson ran through them. They were an unlikely pair and sometimes combative.
In the book “Tales of the Tennessee Vols,” former News Sentinel sports writer Marvin West recounted McArthur and Dodson facing off in an amateur boxing match in 1927. Dodson fractured McArthur’s nose, but the lineman left with $350.
Jimmy Elmore, the future Knoxville mayor, broke a 25-yard run. It was a welcomed sight because he was limited by a toe infection.
“Jimmy is no more effective with a football than Alvin York with a machine gun, and his absence from the game would indeed put the Vols at a disadvantage,” the News Sentinel reported before the game.
Quarterback Billy Harkness, another future Neyland assistant, completed back-to-back passes and scored on a 1-yard TD run to secure the 14-7 win.
Fighting KKK led to governor’s death after game
As the Vols returned to Knoxville, news of Gov. Fuqua’s whereabouts started to surface. He had spent the weekend in bed, coincidentally, at Knox Mansion, just down the street from Tiger Stadium.
His illness started Friday night and worsened during the game.
Fuqua’s wife was attending an event in Mississippi and wasn’t told of his condition. After all, it had happened before. Fuqua missed the opening of Tiger Stadium, the project he helped push through, because of the flu.
Reports said Fuqua appeared to age 10 years in a few months during a contentious campaign.
The son of a Confederate colonel, Fuqua vehemently opposed the Ku Klux Klan and pushed through legislation that suppressed the group’s growth. And that fight took its toll.
Fuqua died on Oct. 11 due to severe internal gastric hemorrhages. He was 60.
Donahue held a brutally physical practice after the Tennessee game. But when news broke of Fuqua’s death, LSU suspended classes and events to observe a state of mourning.
Fuqua was an ardent LSU supporter. And because of family ties to administrators, he was allowed to attend classes as a 10-year-old and later as a serious college student.
The Tigers returned to practice and finally got their long-awaited Southern Conference win that Saturday, beating Donahue’s former Auburn club 10-0. Today, Donahue Drive at Auburn and Mike Donahue Drive at LSU run alongside both football stadiums.
Another death after LSU game?
Despite hydrating with Tennessee water, players returned to Knoxville “eight to 12 pounds” lighter because of intense heat during the game, the Knoxville Journal reported. So Neyland told his players to skip a few practices to recover.
They basked in their big victory, but the adulation wasn’t immediate.
The day after they returned to Knoxville, newspaper headlines were dominated by Game 7 of the World Series. Babe Ruth was caught stealing for the final out, tagged by Rogers Hornsby, in the Cardinals’ win.
But one day later, national wire services started tabbing Tennessee as the new frontrunner in the Southern Conference title race. The Vols and Neyland had arrived.
“They look like champions,” AP reported.
Neyland proved himself in that 1926 season, beginning with the win over LSU. After posting an 8-1 record, he was hailed in the Knoxville Journal as the coach who “brought Tennessee football before the nation.”
Tennessee rewarded Neyland with a two-year contract extension, hoping he could get the Vols to the top. He only needed one year, capturing the Southern title in 1927 and going almost unbeaten until 1933.
Then LSU got its revenge, beating the Vols 7-0 in their second trip to Tiger Stadium. And once again, reports of a death came in the wake of the game.
Tennessee’s “Shorty” Needham, a 170-pound guard, had been crushed by 275-pound LSU lineman and Olympic shot putter Jack Torrance, and he was carried off the field.
Rumors circulated that Needham had died on the train headed home. When the team took a pitstop in Mobile, Alabama, reporters rushed on to seek a comment about the player’s death and yet another bad omen in the Tennessee-LSU series.
Instead, Needham rose from his bunk to their surprise. Then Neyland allowed him to send a telegram assuring his parents that no one had died after this LSU game.
The next day, a headline in the Knoxville Journal read: “Needham’s injury is exaggerated; very much alive.”
Needham died in 2005 at age 94, the oldest living Vols player at the time.
Six months later, Tennessee beat LSU 30-27 in overtime, its last victory in Tiger Stadium.
Reach Adam Sparks at adam.sparks@knoxnews.com and on Twitter @AdamSparks.