The bolt of lightning that struck the Kingsport (Tenn.) Dobyns-Bennett High clock tower in the fall of 1962 is one of legend, all but destroying the school library and prompting this quote in the Johnson City Press from Steve Spurrier, senior quarterback at the time for rival Johnson City Science Hill: “That’s too bad, I know how they love their paint by numbers in Kingsport.”
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Two days later, Spurrier and the Hilltoppers stormed into Kingsport and rolled over Dobyns-Bennett, 63-14. It was 49-14 late but on consecutive possessions, Spurrier faked taking a knee — a knee he was ordered to take — and dropped back to heave long touchdown passes. Then, as the home fans booed, Spurrier pulled a Polaroid camera out of his sock, had a picture taken of himself in front of the scoreboard, gave the picture to the captain of the Dobyns-Bennett cheerleading team in exchange for her phone number and dropped a manila envelope into the mail on his way out of town while dodging a manure truck spill. It was addressed to the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association and had detailed evidence of recruiting, spying, academic fraud, mascot stealing and terrible sock-hop dancing that had taken place in the Dobyns-Bennett program.
“You know what they say,” Spurrier told the Johnson City Press after the game. “You can’t spell Kingsport Dobyns-Bennett without D-O-R-K.”
Ah, if only any of that were true.
Reality is a bit more mundane than that combination of “Back to the Future” and an imagining of Spurrier — the Head Ball Coach, one of the greatest to roam a sideline and one of the most infuriating to his opponents, too — as a young replica of the needling, touchdown-piling antagonist he would become. Still, there were shades of that glorious quipster in Young Spurrier. You don’t just find that as an adult, right? This was supposed to be Tennessee-Florida week, but the COVID-19 pandemic rearranged the schedule and bumped the rivalry game to Dec. 5, so instead we ask the question: Was Spurrier always that guy?
“Oh, yeah, he’d talk a little smack to you,” said Earl Lovelace, an all-state Dobyns-Bennett athlete from the time who knew the joy of beating Spurrier and the agony of losing to him.
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“He was always very confident,” said Spurrier’s older brother, Graham. “Let’s put it that way.”
He was, in the words of a Johnson City classmate, “cocky as all get-out.” Ross Spears, known today as an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, was an 11-year-old kid struggling to hit a baseball in the summer of 1958 when his parents hired 16-year-old Graham Spurrier to work with their son. Here’s what Spears wrote in a 2002 Washington Post column — shortly before Spurrier’s debut as Redskins coach — about the first session: “My new mentor brought along his little brother to run down the balls I managed to hit. The kid brother was 13. No doubt frustrated at having to spend a boring hour shagging a weak grounder or popup every few minutes, he kept up a singsong chatter of not-so-gentle insults from the vicinity of second base. He rarely had to leave that area because, as he kept reminding me, I couldn’t hit the ball out of the infield.”
“I don’t remember what I said,” Spurrier told The Athletic when asked to recall that scene. “Nothing serious. When we were kids we jived each other around a lot.”
That’s the thing about kids, especially that age, especially kids that age who are better than everyone else at sports: They’re liable to say things adults might think but wouldn’t be comfortable saying out loud. There was a TV show called “Kids Say the Darndest Things” about cute and hilarious things young children utter, but a junior high version might actually be funnier (and might require the occasional bleep).
The great thing about Spurrier — or the terrible thing if you were a Tennessee or Georgia or Florida State fan at the time, but let’s be honest, it’s a great thing now because you can’t help but look back and chuckle — is that he had little use for the inhibitions of most sporting adults. He made football more fun. Love him. Hate him. He was probably going to win, and then he was going to say something that made his people pump their firsts with even more vigor, his opponents descend into deeper seething, and everyone else laugh with a head shake that said: “I shouldn’t laugh, but how can I not laugh?”
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“You know, there’s this misconception that I talked like that all the damn time,” Spurrier said. “Which isn’t true.”
No. But the talking is part of his legacy, just like his 1966 Heisman Trophy at Florida as a quarterback who made the SEC reimagine passing offense, his 228-89-2 record at Duke, Florida and South Carolina, his 1996 national championship with a Gators program that again made the SEC reimagine passing offense, and the torment he delivered in particular to SEC East rivals UT and Georgia. It’s worth embracing and tracing.
Here are some of his greatest hits, run-on sentence mashup style: “Peyton Manning came back for his senior year to be a three-time star of the Citrus Bowl, because you can’t spell Citrus Bowl without U-T, and you know FSU stands for Free Shoes University, but the tragedy about 20 books getting burned at Auburn is that 15 weren’t colored yet, and the good thing about playing Georgia in the second game is you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”
Most of these gems and others, Spurrier said, were delivered at offseason alumni functions. His father was a Presbyterian preacher, and these were Spurrier’s congregations.
Florida quarterback Steve Spurrier confers with coach Ray Graves during a game against Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2, 1967. Spurrier, who won the 1966 Heisman Trophy, led the Gators to a 27-12 victory. (Associated Press)‘I mean, they hated him’
Joe Cowell first encountered Spurrier on the baseball diamond in Johnson City. Cowell was an 11-year-old batter going up against a 12-year-old pitcher.
“He struck me out on three pitches,” Cowell said. “I made up my mind right then that if I wanted to get on the right team, I needed to get on Steve Spurrier’s team. I ended up playing for his dad all through Babe Ruth league.”
The Spurriers had just moved to Johnson City from tiny Newport. The Rev. J. Graham and Marjorie Spurrier wanted more opportunities for their two sons and daughter, including in athletics. It was Spears’ coaching uncle who made it happen, finding a preaching opening for J. Graham. And as anyone who played for J. Graham could attest, he wanted to win. He told his players each season that, no, it’s not just about how you play the game.
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Dad instilled competitiveness. In Spurrier’s 2016 book, “Head Ball Coach,” there’s a section in which he details how his team, the Steinway Bears, lost a game to General Finance because of a blown call at second. Like so many of the most accomplished winners in sports, Spurrier has amazing recall on the losses.
Mom fed the sports obsession of a youngest child who would go on to be all-state in basketball, all-state in baseball and All-America in football. J. Graham forbade his children to play sports on Sundays. He was so devoted to the Lord’s day of rest, in fact, that he never attended any of Spurrier’s NFL games on Sundays during a 10-year career. One day he caught his sons playing ball after the morning service at the church “and he busted our tails,” Graham said.
“My mom, bless her heart, she was a very good mediator,” Graham said. “She finally talked him into letting us go play on Sundays. As long as we got back in time to clean up for Sunday night church. That was the deal.”
Spurrier was a lethal scoring guard on the basketball court. He was a star, along with Cowell, Tom Hager, “Choo” Tipton and others, on Science Hill baseball teams that won state championships in his junior and senior years — Spurrier dominating on the mound in the 1963 clincher. Those are still his favorite achievements as an athlete. Football was the third of his sports until coach Kermit Tipton opened up the offense and let Spurrier wing it all over the field. He grew up a Vols fan but he wasn’t signing up to run and punt in the single wing, even though UT basketball coach Ray Mears offered him a scholarship, too. He shunned the home-state school for Florida. And by then he was already a polarizing figure in east Tennessee.
“As much as he was loved around Johnson City, he was hated in the other schools (in the area),” Joe Biddle, a childhood friend of Spurrier’s and a former Tennessean columnist, said on “The Believer,” a 2014 ESPN documentary on Spurrier. “I mean, they hated him.”
Because he beat them, of course. Dobyns-Bennett traditionally dominated Science Hill in football back then, but Spurrier engineered wins as a junior and senior (the actual scores were 12-0 and 27-7). And because, maybe, there was a little bit of that Spurrier smirk and some of those biting words to go with it.
“People called him cocky, but that’s not the right expression,” said Cowell, who went on to play baseball at East Tennessee State and start his own investment and software development company. “He was not bragging. He wasn’t out ragging on the opponent or anything. He just expected to win. He exuded confidence. There’s a difference.”
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Either way, getting the better of him was a rare and precious commodity in those parts in those days. Lovelace was Spurrier’s basketball alter ego at Dobyns-Bennett, an all-state, high-scoring guard. He felt the burn as a junior in baseball when Spurrier pitched Science Hill to a regional finals win over Dobyns-Bennett, avenging two regular-season losses. The favor was returned in basketball when they were seniors — Science Hill rolled twice in the regular season, but Lovelace and company got revenge in the regional semifinals to reach the state tournament in Nashville.
“I remember I hit a couple of long shots and he said, ‘Hey, where’d you get that?’” Lovelace recalls of the banter on the court. “We defended him well that day, had everybody going at him when he got the ball. He was just such a competitor, it was a big deal to beat them.”
If there were hard feelings, they didn’t last. Spurrier was on his recruiting visit to Vanderbilt when Dobyns-Bennett played in the state tournament, and he stayed two nights in Lovelace’s room. Many years later, Lovelace — a South Carolina graduate who went on to be principal at Dobyns-Bennett — reached out to congratulate Spurrier for taking over Gamecocks football.
“He put swagger in our program,” Lovelace said. “In fact, in the whole university.”
Florida coach Steve Spurrier watches from the sideline during the Gators’ 35-29 victory over Peyton Manning and Tennessee at Neyland Stadium in 1996. (Jonathan Dan / Getty Images)A born needler
As Spurrier tells it, his reputation as a needler was born on the day he led Duke to an improbable share of the 1989 ACC championship. The Blue Devils infuriated rival North Carolina by coming back out from the locker room and taking a picture in front of a scoreboard with the final score on it: Duke 41, UNC 0. He tells the story in vintage Spurrier style.
“They tried to say we rubbed it in because we took the team picture on their field, but it was after winning the ACC championship — it wasn’t because we beat those guys. They were 1-10 that year,” said Spurrier of a win over Mack Brown in his first UNC stint. “Why would you celebrate beating a 1-10 team? Fortunately, they left the score up on the scoreboard. They should be mad at themselves for leaving it up there.”
Needling as strategy came in his return to Florida, where Spurrier received Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” as a gift.
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“It says, ‘If your enemies have nothing bad to say about you, then you have done nothing to disrupt their way of life,’” Spurrier said. “’If they speak nicely of you, that means they got the best of you.’”
He recalled a blowout loss at Tennessee in his first season of 1990, in the first meeting between UT and Florida with both ranked in the top 10. Spurrier won at Neyland Stadium in two previous returns, as an assistant and then head coach at Duke. He lost 45-3 on this night and was ripped for pulling starting quarterback Shane Matthews for the whole fourth quarter.
Again, Sun Tzu.
“When in battle it’s inevitable you can’t win, it’s smart to retreat and save your troops to fight another day,” Spurrier said. “Some UT people said we quit and blah blah blah. That was such a big win for them, I guess they celebrated until Alabama came in and beat them 9-6.”
That allowed Florida to win the SEC in Spurrier’s first year, though sanctions from the Galen Hall era meant the SEC did not recognize the championship. Here’s what was official: Spurrier beat the Vols in six of the next seven meetings, going 4-0 against Manning, a stretch finally broken by Phillip Fulmer’s 1998 national championship team.
“People called us arrogant, cocky, run-it-up thugs,” Spurrier said. “But you know one thing they weren’t calling us that they used to call us? They used to call us losers and they weren’t calling us that anymore. Our fans loved that.”
The good people of Johnson City, orange as their hearts were and are, had mixed feelings.
“It was split,” Cowell said. “There were people who grew up with Steve who appreciated him, appreciated what he was doing, putting us on the map. And there were guys who didn’t like ‘Can’t spell Citrus without U-T’ and all that. And quite frankly, UT fans sensed that if it was a gunfight and you had Steve and Phillip Fulmer out in the street, Phillip Fulmer loses every time. The fans came to expect it.”
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And the ones in Johnson City came to warm up to Spurrier with more ease when he wasn’t beating on the Vols (he went 8-4 with Florida and 5-5 with South Carolina). The Johnson City Press celebrated his 75th birthday with an article on his career in April. He still comes back to hang out with his buddies at times, including a reunion of the ’62 and ’63 baseball state championship teams two years ago.
“All those corny little jokes,” as Spurrier calls them, are the first things people think of along with football success when his name comes up, but he’s not a two-dimensional character. He’s a father of four and a grandfather who has been married to his wife, Jerri, since they were seniors at Florida in 1966. Even in that column calling Spurrier “cocky as all get-out” as a kid, Spears tells the story of a kind, motivational message Spurrier wrote in his high school yearbook in the spring of 1963 that stunned him and drove him to win a state championship in doubles tennis.
“Steve’s little note, coming when it did,” Spears wrote, “handed me along in a way he never could have imagined.”
Helping young athletes achieve what they didn’t think possible, long before it was his job, when he was better than most of them and knew it? You can’t spell Steve Spurrier without S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
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