This could be another column about how we’re in the first big weekend of the college football season and how the sport has gone absolutely bat-dung crazy. I could write about the court case down In Baton Rouge where a judge ruled eligible for LSU two former Ole Miss players who were recruited right out of NFL training camps.
Rick Cleveland
Or I could write about how the SEC has filed a federal lawsuit in Birmingham against LSU and its coach, Lane Kiffin, the Snidely Whiplash of college football. But if you read this column regularly, you already know how I feel about that issue, the state of college football in general and Kiffin in particular.
Besides, you can read about all that, ad infinitum, on practically every sports website in America. Bottom line: Nobody knows where all this is headed.
Instead of rehashing, I write today to tell you that these eligibility issues are nothing new in college football. Such controversies have been going on since before this aging sports writer was even a gleam in the eyes of his daddy, a sports writer himself. In fact, my late father, Ace Cleveland, loved to tell the story that follows. Much of it comes from him.
Our story begins in 1948. Ace Cleveland, who would go on to a Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame career in sports writing and sports publicity, was a young sports editor of the Hattiesburg American, his hometown newspaper. Only a couple years before he had returned home from World War II where he served in the Navy, primarily in The Philippines.
His main beat was Mississippi Southern, a salty small college team coached then by Reed Green. The Southerners featured many World War II veterans and one young scatback named John Melvin “Bubba” Phillips. Ace – yes, I called my dad by his nickname – would tell anyone who would listen that Phillips was the best broken field runner to ever step on a football field. Ace called him Bubber.
“You should have seen ol’ Bubber,” Ace would say. “He was so quick and fast, nobody could tackle him. Hell, most people couldn’t even touch him.”
Quick story: Bubba Phillips, recruited by all the prominent Deep South football schools as a high school wunderkind in Macon, was en route to LSU to play for the Tigers. Someone alerted Green that Phillips’ bus would be making a pit stop in Hattiesburg. Green met the bus. Phillips’ luggage made it to Baton Rouge. Bubba never did.
Bubba was also gifted in baseball. In fact, that spring, he had signed a professional contract with the Detroit Tigers after an amazing workout in Detroit. But he still wanted to play football for Southern.
The rules were different then. Some college conferences allowed pros in one sport to play college sports in another. So Phillips’ eligibility that 1948 season was decided on a week-by-week basis.
On Oct. 23 of that year, the Southerners, as they were then known, were to play at Oklahoma City University, an undefeated team heavily favored because Philllips was ineligible for the game. Oklahoma City wasn’t in a conference but was trying to get into the Missouri Valley Conference, which barred professional athletes across the board. News reports all week said Phillips would not play.
Back then, it was a two-day bus trip from Hattiesburg to Oklahoma City, four days round trip. The newspaper couldn’t spare their one-man sports department to be away that long – and probably didn’t want to pay the travel expenses either.
So it was that on Oct. 23, 1948, Ace was at the Western Union Station in downtown Hattiesburg getting a play-by-play account of the game.
“It kept saying that this big ol’ lineman was scoring touchdowns and making long runs for Southern,” Ace said. “The guy was a guard, for goodness sakes. Here I was, 600 miles away from Oklahoma City and I knew who was wearing that guard’s uniform. It was Bubber!”
It was, indeed. Bubba Phillips scored on runs of 23, 48 and 95 yards and set up another touchdown with a 56-yard scamper. Southern won 55-20 on Oklahoma CIty’s homecoming.
Fast forward 11 years. Ace and his 6-year-old baseball-crazy son watched on TV as Bubba Phillips batted .300 for the Chicago White Sox in the 1959 World Series. Two nights after the series ended, Dad grilled steaks and our dinner guest was Bubber himself. I wanted to hear about the World Series and batting against Sandy Koufax, but they mostly talked about old times and certainly about the day Bubber ran wild while wearing somebody else’s jersey.
