From front to back, the 2007 Tennessee Football Media Guide covers 208 pages, more pages than in Hartsville’s phone book, fewer than Knoxville’s. It used to be bigger, more the size of a metropolitan area directory, until downsized by NCAA fiat.

It’s short on the essentials of plot, but a careful perusal can elicit nuggets satisfying the most curious of columnists. As a case in point, there was the note on p. 11 referring to a “50-yard sand pit called “Stucky Beach,” named in honor of former strength coach John Stucky, who died in April that caught my attention.

Sometimes, during lulls in the action on Shields-Watkins Field, there’s a tendency to let the “minds-eye” scan the east sideline, looking for head coaches Bob Neyland or Bowden Wyatt, maybe even Jim McDonald, or Deanie Hoskins, the groundskeeper who carefully tended the Shields-Watkins Field turf.

You might check out the Vol Network booth and see Edwin Huster, senior or junior, overseeing the radio broadcast. If you really look closely, you could spot Lindsey Nelson (without the famous sports coat) calling the game.

John Stucky, who observed each game ever so clinically, “belongs” on the east side. There was no towel waving, no histrionics for him. That wasn’t his style, wasn’t his personality.

In the high-pressure world of Tennessee football, John had the title of assistant athletic director for physical development. That title is much too complicated. His official biography called him “intense.” That may have been true, but only to a point.

John was really always a calming influence, who seemed to have found “inner peace,” no matter what else might have been happening. You didn’t know John very long until you realized he was a man of exceedingly high character and integrity. He had a “presence” that made everybody around him better.

He was “unflappable.” He may not have read Kipling, but he always kept his head while all about others might have been losing theirs. If a man’s life (Feb. 17, 1948 – April 12, 2007) can be defined as a “dash between two dates,” John made the most of his dash.

Over the years, I have found myself thinking about the lessons he taught everybody he met.

John may not have said a great deal, but he was a great deal.

He wouldn’t have liked being called a great man. He didn’t think of himself that way, but he was.

He was on the Vol staff during a glorious run from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s. It would be easy to talk about the wins and the championships, but the young men who trained under him (and a few of us geezers who knew him) are better for the experience.

I remember writing about the 2001 Florida game in Gainesville, a game the Vols won despite being a prohibitive underdog. At a critical point, when things weren’t going well, I found John through the binoculars on the east sideline. His composure and demeanor were reassuring. I remember writing about his “indomitable spirit” as part of the winning edge the Vols had that day.

I always felt close to him as well because of our 1948 birthdays (his in February, mine in July). I believed there was a kinship, a connection that’s hard to explain. We had lived through the same ebbs and flows of history, the moments of our lives each of us never forgot.

I knew John wasn’t well near the end of his Tennessee tenure and in the years following, but he never let it crush his spirit.

We will never know what else he could have offered, what else he could have meant to us. What he did during his lifetime will have to suffice. And it does.

There were times in nearly 19 years within the confines of UTAD that coaches and other staff members were there, and, if you weren’t careful, you could get close to them, become their friend… and then they were gone. Sometimes it all happened very quickly. Ken Donahue was one. John Stucky was another. These were “passages” in life, those days never to be forgotten.

I thought about a conversation with his wife, Jeanne. I remember mentioning how much John’s example meant to me. What she said in response is engrained in my consciousness: “He feels the same way about you.”

When Opie Taylor killed the mother bird with his slingshot and had to raise the three orphaned baby birds himself, he felt sad when they grew up and he had to let them fly away.

“The cage seems empty,” Opie told Andy after doing so.

“But don’t the trees seem nice and full?” Andy said. He seemed happy.

Life seems nice and full because John Stucky was with us.

Tom Mattingly is the author of “The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006” (2006), to be published in second edition in 2008, and “Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years” (1998). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called “The Vol Historian.”