The Old Rivalry - Kingsport vs. Johnson City

 

It’s an old rivalry. And a fierce rivalry.

D-B vs. Science Hill.

Kingsport vs. Johnson City.

The two high school football teams face off tonight in the 99^th renewal of the rivalry.

D-B holds a 63-30-5 advantage, per Tom Price, official historian of D-B football.

But it turns out this rivalry didn’t originate on the football field. It actually began a few days before Kingsport High fielded its first football team.

It began as a baseball rivalry.

I wrote about it five years ago:

 

School’s in. High school sports are back: Football, girls and boys golf, girls and boys soccer, volleyball. And also back is the rivalry with Science Hill.

The football game is the last one of the regular season, Oct. 28, at Science Hill.

Yes, that rivalry sometimes gets overheated.

I don’t need to cite any instances. Everybody knows when D-B plays Science Hill it is intense.

This Kingsport-Johnson City rivalry goes back a long, long ways, almost a century.

The two cities compete for everything from retailers – Sam’s Club first opened in Kingsport then moved to Johnson City – to college satellite campuses.

But the most intense rivalries have involved sports. It didn’t start with Steve Spurrier in the early sixties.

It actually started on the baseball diamond.

Almost as soon as there was a minor league in the area Kingsport fielded a team. The Appalachian League had been formed in 1911 – when Kingsport was just a speck on the map - but disbanded four years later.

When the league was reformed in 1921 Kingsport was one of the charter members along with the Johnson City Soldiers, the Bristol State Liners, the Knoxville Pioneers, the Cleveland Manufacturers and the Greeneville Burley Cubs.

The Kingsport team was so popular its games – and controversies – were covered extensively in the Times. And there were some doozies, including one brouhaha with Johnson City that first season that reached all the way up to Major League Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who was baseball’s version of the Supreme Court.

The Kingsport Indians, as they were called, had a middling first half of that 1921 season – the league played two half-seasons with the two champions meeting after the season in a nine-game series for the overall league championship. The first half title went to the Burley Cubs.

The Indians came alive in the second half behind pitcher Sam Hall and finished 32-18, four games ahead of the Johnson City Soldiers.

What happened next may be what began the bitter century-long rivalry between the sports teams of the two cities.

On Tuesday. September 20, 1921, the Kingsport Times published its first ever special sports section. And on the front page was a picture of the Appalachian League second half pennant and under it the headline:

WON IN BATTLE BUT LOST IN THE POLITICAL SANCTUMS OF BASEBALL MAGNATES.

Sports editor Stony Smallwood wrote, “The Kingsport Indians, after winning the Appalachian League pennant for the latter half of the 1921 season by their playing on the field, were ruled out of their victory by a technicality.”

The “technicality” involved pitcher Hall who had been suspended from the Lakeland Highlanders of the Florida State League two years earlier and had never been reinstated by the commissioner. 

Why had Hall been suspended? Because of the flu.

“Hall did not report to the Lakeland club in the Florida State league in the season of 1920 because he was at the time sick with influenza. He was suspended and his name sent in as blacklisted. Then when the facts in the case became known the manager of the Lakeland club gave Hall his release, at the same time notifying Secretary Farrell of the national commission. Hall was then signed by Kingsport for the present season; his contract was sent to President Ellison, who signed it, and then to Secretary Farrell. The claim of those agitating the case against Kingsport now is that it was not sufficient for the Lakeland club to notify the national commission, but that it is necessary for a player to take the matter up personally in order to be reinstated.”

Smallwood then got on his soapbox. "In spite of the fact that the rap was not sprung until the season was practically closed, and in spite of the fact that Hall was signed by Kingsport in perfect good faith and himself signed in good faith under his own name, Mayor Ellison of Johnson City, president of the league, rendered a decision throwing out the games won by Kingsport with Hall participating and retaining the games lost by Hall.”

The Johnson City mayor’s ruling was overturned a week later by the league’s directors.

But it wasn’t over yet. The Johnson City team appealed and eventually the matter went to the desk of Kennesaw Mountain Landis, lord of all professional baseball, famous as the man who cleaned up the game after the 1919 “Black Sox” gambling scandal.

"For several days all Appalachian fandom waited with bated breath for the ruling. The decision, when it finally came, was a shock to Kingsport and according to various reports reaching here, somewhat a surprise to the other towns of the circuit. The decision of Landis took the pennant honors from Kingsport and gave them to Johnson City.”

And that’s when it all began.