Tennessee vs. Georgia 1968: Lester McClain's arrival

The sound rumbled through Neyland Stadium.

Lester McClain wasn’t sure what it was at first. As he trotted across the freshly-laid turf towards the huddle, there was no mistaking it.

It was applause, an ovation for McClain–Tennessee’s first black player in his debut in the second quarter against Georgia on Sept. 14, 1968.

“I felt like I was home,” McClain said. “Like I was a wanted child.”

McClain broke down a wall that day, and made the play that breathed new life into a Vols’ team that was clinging to it late. Tennessee’s brand new “Tartan Turf” was the stage for it.

There were so many storylines going into the game that the 17-17 draw brought on by the Vols’ two-point conversion with no time left on the clock wasn’t even the headliner.

Tennessee’s controversial playing surface, which caused a whirlwind of offseason chatter and columns in newspapers from Atlanta to Knoxville, was one. So was John Ward, whose voice for the first time would be heard on the radio calling a football game for the Vol Network.

Then there was McClain, who a little more than a year before was uncertain what his role would be for the program, or if he would ever have one at all. He found it against Georgia.

This is the story of a trailblazer, an iconic voice and the opening act of an overachieving team.

The ‘Antioch Kid’

The phone rang at the McClain home in Nashville the night before Antioch High School began fall camp in 1966.

Lester McClain answered. Dick Hays was on the other end.

Hays was about to begin his third season as Antioch’s head football coach, and asked McClain to come out for its first practice the following day.

McClain was new to the school. He attended Haynes High School–a 30 minute drive one way–from his freshman to junior year because it was the only black school in rural Davidson County.

But Hays was familiar with him. He had seen McClain run track at Haynes, and knew he was going to be at Antioch his senior year.

McClain showed up at 6 a.m. the next morning for sprints. That’s when he met Bill Garrett, a local pharmacist and Tennessee alum that oversaw Antioch’s early-morning conditioning sessions.

McClain didn’t know it at the time, but his journey to Knoxville was already in motion.

“Tennessee knowing me was because of Bill Garrett,” McClain said. “Bill was my angel. He did everything and tried to help me get there. He just believed in me for some reason.”

Garrett was friends with third-year Vols head coach Doug Dickey, and had told him about McClain. Dickey even came to visit him at Antioch during his senior season.

A meeting with Tennessee defensive coordinator Doug Knotts after a basketball game had seemingly dashed any hope McClain had of playing for the Vols, though.

“Coach Knotts told me, ‘We’re hearing a lot of noise that you’re interested in coming to Tennessee,’” McClain said. “I said, ‘Yes sir, I’m very interested in coming to Tennessee.’ He said, ‘Well, don’t want you to tell everybody you’re interested in the University of Tennessee, because we’re not interested in you.’ It was kind of a shattering moment there.

“It broke my heart. I went to go see Mr. Garrett about it. He said, ‘Just hang there. Good things always happen if you hang in.’”

Tennessee had been recruiting in-state star running back Albert Davis, who was a standout at Alcoa High School and had a long list of suitors. Davis picked the Vols and was in line to become the program’s first black player.

That’s when McClain came back into the picture.

Davis needed a roommate, and the coaching staff thought it would be best to pair him with a black teammate. On the eve of Tennessee’s 1967 spring game, McClain’s phone rang again. It was Garrett.

“He told me that I needed to go to Tennessee’s spring game, because he thought that I may get an offer,” McClain said. “Coach Dickey offered me a grant-aid scholarship. I was ecstatic about it.”

A week later, Garrett and Dickey flanked McClain inside his living room as he signed with the Vols. A few weeks after that, Davis’ scholarship was pulled after questions arose about his ACT score and McClain arrived on campus as the only black player on Tennessee’s ‘67 roster that fall.

“I still wanted to go. That’s what I wanted to do anyway,” McClain said. “I wasn’t going to go just because Albert wasn’t.”

“(McClain) was a wonderful guy,” Dickey said. “He was a Nashville guy, and he had a wonderful personality. And he could run. We put him at receiver. There wasn’t any doubt that he was going to have a good future with us.”

As for the immediate future, there was suddenly uncertainty about McClain’s living situation.

He went from being the roommate to needing to find one, a question that was difficult to answer for a black player at a southern college football program in the late 1960s. Incoming freshman quarterback Jim Maxwell, another Nashville native who played at Two Rivers High School, was picked to room with McClain that first season.

“I never thought about it being a problem, because the kids at Antioch took to me being an ‘Antioch kid,’” McClain said. “I thought it was going to be like that in college. I guess that put pressure on Jim Maxwell. He did the best he could in dealing with it. And he took a little bit of harassment from his friends because he was sharing a room with me. But, he’s a good guy. You had to adjust to a new environment.

“I wasn’t going to question what it was like. The opportunity was there and I wanted to take advantage of that opportunity and try to make the best of it.”

McClain was more concerned about the football part of it. He knew he needed to adjust to the speed and physicality of the SEC. Jimmy Weatherford reminded him of that from day one.

McClain went up against the All-SEC 5-11, 186-pound junior defensive back from Dalton, Georgia every day in practice that freshman season. As McClain was starring for the Vols’ freshmen team, Weatherford was making him a better player during the week.

“I got introduced to Jimmy Weatherford,” McClain said. “Once you put on pads, man, you meet Jimmy Weatherford. Jimmy prepares you to play varsity football. And if you’re not prepared to play varsity football, Jimmy would run you home.”

By the eve of his sophomore season in 1968, McClain was beginning to get the best of Weatherford just as much as he was getting bested by him. He was ready.

“Anybody that played with Jimmy will tell you that it wasn’t a fun life working against him, but I had a lot of fun working against him,” McClain said. “He was tough. You took a whipping until you learned how to whip him back. It was a great relationship.”

McClain had an idea that he was going to play two weeks before Tennessee’s nationally televised 1968 opener against Georgia at Neyland Stadium.

He can’t remember who he roomed with on the eve of the game, but McClain does remember that he wasn’t nervous. He was prepared. Civil rights marches in downtown Nashville his freshman year in high school helped him learn to block out a lot.

“I was prepared for all of that,” McClain said. “A lot of the kids would leave school and go downtown and march and demonstrate in the civil rights movement. We had been told when you go down there and demonstrate, you’re going to get spit on, cigarettes burns and they’re going to call you everything but a child of God.

“I saw all of that. Heard all of that. I knew that it was part of overcoming. It was just part of what you had to do.”

The controversy of ‘Doug’s Rug’

Joel Eaves asked the question to anyone that would listen.

For two months the Georgia athletic director fumed to newspapermen about the new turf being laid at Neyland Stadium that summer.

“Why didn’t (Tennessee) bring it up at the SEC Meeting in Biloxi?” Eaves would say.

His counterpart, Tennessee athletic director Bob Woodruff declared he didn’t know that the synthetic turf known as “Tartan” was coming until at least June 10–a month after those SEC meetings and still more than three months before it would be played on when the Vols and Bulldogs would meet on Sept. 14, 1968.

There hadn’t yet been a college football game played on such a surface before the ‘68 season. Tennessee and Wisconsin were set to be the first.

“Coach Woodruff had been in contact with the 3-M company in Minnesota,” Dickey said. “And they had come up with something called, ‘Tartan Turf.’ We went up there and they had a piece of it laid out there and one of them big ‘ol Minnesota Vikings defensive lineman did a knee drop on it. And Woodfruff did a knee-drop on it, because he was a big ‘ol man himself. So, we decided it was soft enough that we could live with it.”

Tennessee might’ve lived with it, but Georgia wasn’t going to–at least not at first.

Woodruff dispatched a telegram to SEC schools on June 17, informing them of the school’s decision to install the new turf. In it, he touted it as a “progressive move” that would be “duplicated throughout the country” in coming years.

LSU athletic director Carol Maddox wired back that they were following “your progress with interest.” Florida’s Ray Graves said that he had no objections, neither did Ole Miss’ Tad Smith. Auburn asked for a sample.

But Eaves strongly opposed it. So did fourth-year Georgia head coach Vince Dooley.

Dooley and his coaching staff made the same trek to Minnesota to test out the turf when they found out Tennessee was going to have it installed. They turned down an invitation from Dickey to practice on it at Neyland Stadium days before the game.

“I told Coach Dickey that I thought the new field gave Tennessee an advantage,” Dooley told the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s Tom Siler. “I still feel that way.”

The turf and the offseason feud between Tennessee and Georgia even inspired aspiring poets, too.

David C. Burrow of Savannah, Georgia opined in the News-Sentinel a poem titled Tennessee’s Turbulent Turf.

“What plot is this?” the coaches cried,

‘It’s injuries that we fear.

An ankle twisted on that turf,

Will plague us all year.’

“To think the Dogs would have to play on unfamiliar soil,

And knowing what this game would mean,

Made all good Georgians boil.”

A few days later, a Col. Tom Rogers from Knoxville penned a rebuttal under the title of Georgia’s Graveolent Gripe.

“But, if it will make you folks feel better,

Then go ahead and cry;

Yea, Georgia Bulldogs, we salute you

Who are about to die.

“And when the final score is in,

On that Saturday P.M.

You won’t have to blame the loss on Dooley,

Just blame it on 3M!”

Georgia’s team bus arrived outside Neyland Stadium on Friday before the game. Players piled out and immediately ran down to the field to inspect it.

After a team walk-through, Dooley approved.

“It is a beautiful field,” Dooley told reporters. “It looks good and it feels good. But it is different. It is not grass. And it will take some getting used to.”

Tennessee players, meanwhile, had plenty of practice on what writers dubbed “Doug’s Rug” to prepare themselves. The speedy Lester McClain said it made him play quicker, but a fall on it left a lasting impression.

“If it was hot, the turf was 10 degrees or more hotter,” McClain said. “But you also had to wear a sleeve on your arms and even on your knees, because if you hit that turf and slid, it would take your skin right off.

“We fought off those tartan burns the whole time we were there. But it was fast. Believe me, it was a fast turf to run on.”

A drive for the ages and ‘really special’ finish

Lester McClain heard Johnny Mills’ voice in his head as the ball came towards him.

It was fourth-and-3 and Tennessee was down to its last chance, trailing Georgia by eight with two minutes. Bubba Wyche rolled to the right side of the field and spotted McClain running towards the sideline at midfield.

“My main concern was looking at the ball, catching it and putting it away,” McClain said. “I remember (freshman coach) Johnny Mills used to tell me, if you’re running and drop the ball, you might as well keep on running out the stadium. So, I just wanted to make sure I caught it and held it, because I didn’t want to be the one that was running outside the stadium.”

The cool, calm McClain gathered the ball in and turned up field before being pushed out of bounds. It was enough to keep hope alive for the Vols.

Tennessee didn’t have much of it moments before.

Jake Scott returned a Herman Weaver punt 90 yards for a Bulldogs touchdown that put them ahead 10-7. The Vols regained some momentum after linebacker Steve Kiner brought down Mike Cavan in the end zone for a safety, but it was short-lived.

Bruce Kemp broke through the left side on a run that went for 80 yards and Georgia led, 17-9. Tennessee’s back was against the wall. Then Wyche took over.

The Vols’ senior quarterback from Atlanta was already a hero before that last drive. He stepped in for injured Dewey Warren in the first part of Tennessee’s 1967 season, helping lead the way to an SEC title that year.

“I had a lot of confidence in Bubba Wyche and I knew Bubba had a lot of confidence in me,” McClain said. “In practice sessions, I ran routes with him. He threw to me regularly. It was just a good situation with Bubba.”

After linking up with McClain, Wyche hit Mike Jones for 20 more yards. But seconds ticked away and time was running out as the drive started to move backwards. Tennessee was in one of those “last chance” scenarios again on fourth-and-goal from the 21.

In a do-or-die huddle, Wyche came up with a route for Gary Kreis, who hadn’t caught one all afternoon. A few seconds later, Wyche dropped back and fired a pass over the middle of the to Kreis. He caught it in the end zone with no time left.

The Vols still had to go for two, so Wyche went back to a familiar spot: the middle.

Wyche back-peddled as Ken DeLong cut towards the goal line with a defender on his hip. The pass fit into the window and DeLong fell into the end zone for the game-tying score.

“It’s tied! And that’s the way this football game comes to an end,” Ward exclaimed from the radio booth inside the Neyland Stadium press box and through radios across Tennessee.

It was the first of many memorable finishes Ward would call for the Vol Network alongside Bill Anderson over the next 30 years.

“John was one of the most imaginative guys,” Dickey said. “He was terrific for the University of Tennessee.”

It was an especially memorable finish for Tennessee’s ‘68 team, which entered the game with tampered expectations after losing several key pieces from its SEC championship run in ‘67.

That team continued to overachieve. Georgia went on to win the league, but the Vols won their next five games, including triumphs of Georgia Tech, Alabama and UCLA. Their lone regular season blemish was a loss to Auburn in Birmingham.

A humbling defeat at the hands of Texas and Darrell Royal’s wishbone in the Cotton Bowl offered up plenty of motivation for 1969.

Most of the players on that team, including McClain, returned to claim the Vols’ second SEC crown in three years.

“It was certainly like a win,” McClain said. “The fact that we came back under the circumstances, I think the great thing was that we had worked on that touchdown play and that two-point play over and over again. There it was, time for it to happen and it was executed perfectly. To be a part of that, it was really special.”