Fred Russell

Frederick McFerrin Russell was born in Wartrace, Tennessee, in 1906, grew up in Nashville, and went to Vanderbilt twice: once as an undergraduate and once for a law degree. He passed the state bar in 1929 and then declined to practice. The Nashville Banner hired him in 1930, and he was still on its payroll when the paper printed its last edition on February 16, 1998. That is sixty-eight years as sports editor of a single newspaper, a figure that has no real competition in American sports journalism.

His column ran first as “Sideline Sidelights” and later simply as “Sidelines.” By the Banner’s own count he wrote more than twelve thousand of them. After the paper closed he contributed briefly to the rival Tennessean, mostly to finish what he had started, and retired once he had completed his seventieth year in the business.

Russell covered baseball, the Masters, the Kentucky Derby, title fights and four Olympic Games between 1960 and 1976, but college football was the beat that defined him. From 1949 to 1962 he wrote the Saturday Evening Post’s annual “Pigskin Preview,” which for a generation of readers was the authoritative forecast of the season to come. He served on the Heisman Trophy committee for forty-six years and ran its Southern region for thirty of them, chaired the College Football Hall of Fame’s Honors Court from 1964 to 1991, was president of the Football Writers Association of America, and in 1964 president of the National Football Foundation.

The football connection that mattered most to him was personal. He met a young Alabama assistant named Paul Bryant on a train to the 1937 Rose Bowl, and in 1940 helped bring Bryant to Vanderbilt as an assistant coach. The friendship lasted nearly fifty years, which is to say until Bryant’s death.

Grantland Rice was a fellow Tennessean, a fellow Vanderbilt man, and Russell’s boyhood idol. The two became friends in the 1930s, and when the Sportsmanship Brotherhood created the Grantland Rice Memorial Award in 1957, Russell was the first person to receive it. He had already, a year earlier, helped establish a sportswriting scholarship at Vanderbilt in Rice’s name; in 1986 the university added Russell’s name to it, and the Fred Russell–Grantland Rice Scholarship still exists.

Red Smith called him the first practical joker who never hurt anybody with his practical jokes.

The jokes were part of the reputation. The best-known was an April Fools’ story in 1965, run on the Banner’s front page, reporting that a planned extension of the Natchez Trace Parkway would cut through the golf course of a Nashville country club. A satisfying number of members believed it. Red Smith, who traveled with Russell for years, treated him as a peer, and among sportswriters of that generation there was no higher compliment.

The Associated Press Sports Editors gave Russell the Red Smith Award in 1984, the fourth year of the honor. By then he had already collected the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award and the Bert McGrane Award, both in 1981, and the year before the A.P.S.E. call he had taken the National Turf Writers’ Walter Haight Award. The National Sports Media Association added him to its hall of fame in 1988. Tennessee’s sportswriters made him a charter member of their own hall, and Vanderbilt put him in the inaugural class of its athletics hall of fame.

The honors that were not plaques may say more. He used his standing with Governor Buford Ellington to help secure state money for athletic facilities at Tennessee State University, whose track coach Ed Temple was a friend. As a young reporter he had interviewed Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig; as an old one he was still filing.

Russell’s wife Katherine, known as Kay, died in 1996 after sixty-three years of marriage; the Banner died two years later. He kept working past ninety anyway. He died in Nashville on January 26, 2003, at ninety-six, survived by four daughters and by a scholarship, an award, and a press box full of people who had learned the job by reading him.