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flatrock writes:

in response to jpark001:

I agree with VolMoment and others here, what's really interesting about this puff piece profile of Wyatt's downfall is how the historian, and the old sportswriters he quotes, all play dumb as to the actual events that transpired to bring the Wyatt era down in the spring of `63. Events such as Wyatt, tipsy or worse, throwing sportswriter Alf Van Hoose in a Mississippi swimming pool during the spring `63 Skywriters tour, wallet in all, and being relieved of his coaching position soon thereafter and how the coach was then checked in to a Virginia facility and that if this Mississippi event had not happened he would have still been the head coach again in 1963 further prolonging UT’s football slide downward??? Events each of the quoted sports writers wrote about at the time (I’m sitting here with spring `63 newspapers covering the subject…) and probably discussed privately with the historian many times, but it’s better to sugarcoat Wyatt’s problems and blame Neyland’s 1962 scheduling and an outdated offensive scheme than tell the readers the actual back story of what was really going on then.

A missed opportunity to write something of historical substance for sure!

Hard to believe that an incident during a Sky-Writers Tour was ever taken seriously...The Tour was a flying, alcohol-fest. Most of the articles were written BEFORE the tour because the scribes realized they would be in no shape to string together a sentence, much less a paragraph or story!

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