Every life is filled with paramount moments that pass in a flash and only come into perspective with time. This is just one of mine..
It was the season opener of the 1975 campaign against the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga Moccasins at venerable Dudley Field on campus. If it wasn’t for the attached photo courtesy of the Vanderbilt Hustler photographer who took it and gave it to me sometime later that year, this play may have been lost in the mist. Perhaps remembered only by me and my ever-loyal roommate, Reed Trickett. But it’s not and over the years through all the moves and changes of my life, this picture periodicallly surfaced and has survived preserved personal myth.
I believe the pass was from Fred Fisher, our all-conference quarterback my sophomore year. But as I found out at some point over the last fifty years, Fred got hurt in that game and it might have been David Culley that threw the ball. We may never know. I believe it was the first half of a tightly contested game. The thing I absolutely do remember about the play is when I broke my post over the middle and knew that I had beaten the safety, I got a rare kind of excited: something good was about to happen.
But alas t’was not to be. The ball was overthrown or underrun by about a yard. Just another incompletion. That we won the game 17-7 wont be recalled by anyone, and an incomplete pass in the first half even less. But it was a good start for a season that would end up taking us to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee and the 17-14 victory over the hated Vols. That we remember: Go ‘Dores.