NEWS SENTINEL FILE PHOTO

Tom Boerwinkle, right, Tennessee’s first 7-foot basketball player, poses with the late Ray Mears and a photograph of the 1966-67 Vols, who won the outright SEC championship.

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Sometimes one sports story leads logically into another.

The story about the Tennessee 1966-67 basketball team engendered a great deal of reaction. Here are two examples.

Last Monday, Mary Gwyn Shafer, a UT cheerleader in 1967, told me she was on the charter flight to Starkville for the Tennessee-Mississippi State game. She mentioned it wasn't one of the greatest flights she ever had, recalling one of her compatriots had kissed the ground when he deplaned. It was that bad.

Last Wednesday night, a choir member at church told of an experience involving Tom Boerwinkle at the old Austin Peay Administration Building on campus in the 1960s.

She recalled she was in a hurry and turned a corner to go upstairs. Going up the steps, she remembered hitting something roughly equivalent to a brick wall and being addled for a moment. There were two hands on her shoulders asking if she were all right. She said she looked up and there was the "biggest man I had ever seen."

Boerwinkle was coming down the steps at the same time, and they collided. It was a mismatch. Tom was 7 feet tall. She was 5-2. She said it was a memorable moment, based on what she could remember.

Tom Boerwinkle created a number of "memorable moments" at Tennessee, more than I could squeeze into an 800-word story last Sunday. His story is vintage Horatio Alger, rags to riches and all that.

When Tom was an SEC Legend at the 2003 basketball tournament, the SID gurus filed the following as background:

"A native of Independence, Ohio, Tom Boerwinkle was the first 7-foot player in Tennessee history. Boerwinkle was first-team All-SEC in 1967 and 1968 and in 1968 was named Helms Foundation first team All-America. He led UT in rebounding in 1967 (10.2) and 1968 (11.3). Boerwinkle was the fourth overall pick by he Chicago Bulls in the 1968 NBA draft. He played 10 seasons for Chicago (1968-78)."

No other player in Tennessee history has come farther from the day he arrived on campus than did Boerwinkle, fresh off the campus of Millersburg Military Academy in Millersburg, Ky.

The basketball experts of the early 1960s had all the standard responses to his signing, calling it, charitably, a "wasted scholarship." One college scout called him "the worst big man I've ever seen." Adolph Rupp said, "No thanks," but told Ray Mears Tom could probably play at Tennessee.

But Tom persevered for three years, then blossomed. When the Helms Foundation named its All-America team in 1968, Boerwinkle's name was on the list, just below UCLA's Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Tom spent the early part of his Tennessee career working and learning under the tutelage of Howard Bayne and Red Robbins, not to mention a broom-wielding Stu Aberdeen. It was either get better or hit the road. He got better.

Boerwinkle's time came in 1966-67, when Mears turned to him out of necessity to play center. The rest was history. His name is found liberally sprinkled across the Vol record books. He had 21 rebounds in successive games in 1968, at home against Ole Miss and on the road against LSU. He's seventh on the career rebounding list with 632, a 9.2 average. He shot 54.9 per cent from the floor in 1967 and 53.5 in 1968.

While playing for the Bulls, he blossomed the way he did at Tennessee. In 1971, he averaged 11 points and 14 rebounds, while playing against the likes of Willis Reed, Wilt Chamberlain, Abdul-Jabbar, and Wes Unseld. He grabbed 37 rebounds Jan. 8, 1970, against the Phoenix Suns at the old Chicago Stadium.

When the Knoxville Journal selected its all-time Tennessee team from 1953-83 era, there was Boerwinkle on the second team, among the top 10 players of that period. He was there, in pretty good company with Bernie and Ernie, Dale Ellis, A. W. Davis, Reggie Johnson, classmate Ron Widby, Danny Schultz, Jimmy England, and Gary Carter.

Sometimes people overlook a diamond in the rough, simply because it's rough. That doesn't make it any less of a diamond. Ray Mears and Bill Gibbs were trying to build a program at Tennessee and took a chance on Boerwinkle. He rewarded them abundantly. The big guy, known to teammates as "Bull," made his mark on the Vols and the SEC. Big man. Good story.

Having prepped at Millersburg, in Bourbon County near Lexington, he keeps everything in its proper perspective. Like most Vol fans, he has one specific memory of his time at Tennessee.

"I remember the wins over Kentucky."

There is one woman in Knoxville, the one hurrying up the steps at the Austin Peay building, who remembers Boerwinkle as the man who made sure she was all right the day they first "met" in Knoxville.

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 and Earl Hudson are working on a book about the nine Bluetick Coonhound mascots named "Smokey" at the University of Tennessee. He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called "The Vol Historian."

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.