The Most Amazing D-B Graduate You've Never Heard of

 

Best All Around - Paul Hug, D-B '27

(And that was the same year Bobby Dodd graduated)

This was originally supposed to be Question and Answer Number 7 in my D-B Quiz in last week’s column:

7. Why didn’t Bobby Dodd go to Vanderbilt?

He almost did, according to the Kingsport Times. UT wanted his teammate, running back Paul Hug, but not him so the two classmates went to Vanderbilt to enroll. UT relented and the two switched to UT. No one thinks Dodd could have gotten into Vanderbilt.

 

But after rereading it, I decided I needed to do more research. Did Dodd and his friend Paul Hug really intend to go to Vanderbilt? And more importantly, who was Paul Hug? I never heard of him growing up. And in Kingsport almost all old D-B football stars were revered.

It turns out Paul Hug was one of the most interesting D-B grads I had never heard of.

I initially had trouble researching him. That’s because his name was spelled both Hug and Hugg. And in one story, the one about Dodd and Hug “matriculating” at Vanderbilt, his name was spelled one way in the headline and the other in the story.

After I finally determined that he was Paul Hug, not Paul Hugg, I found a wealth of material.

I think the main reason I never heard of him growing up was that he wasn’t from Kingsport.

You may recall hearing the rumors that D-B used to recruit players from other towns. And then old timers would pooh-pooh that as sour grapes.

When my cousins in Greene County would tell me that D-B was so good in sports because Eastman would hire their daddies. I would counter that if Eastman was such a great recruiter, then they had incredible talent scouts, they could spot talent in a second grader: the basketball starters when I was a senior included Sam Bedford, John Penn, Larry Overbay and Tim Thayer. Sam and Larry were in my second-grade home room at Johnson Elementary and John and Tim were down the hall in, I think, Mrs. Kersnowski’s home room.

But to my surprise I discovered Kingsport did bring in players, at least in the early years.

Paul Hug was not from Kingsport. He was from Canton, Ohio. I was puzzled when I was researching him and I would find notes in the newspaper that “Paul Hug will be spending the holidays with his parents in Canton, Ohio.”

A 1929 story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel cleared that up. “Paul Hug arrived in Kingsport though his home is still in Canton. The high school coach had come from Canton and persuaded Hug to come to Kingsport, where he played halfback and end.”

The coach? The legendary founder of Kingsport athletics LeRoy Sprankle. When Sprankle came to Kingsport from Canton in late 1921, he convinced Robert “Bud” Hug to tag along from Canton. And a year later Bud’s younger brother Paul joined him.

I can’t find any reference to where the Hug brothers lived but I have heard for years about those rumored out-of-town players living upstairs in the fire hall on Watauga.

Paul Hug lived in Kingsport during the school year for four years before departing for college. He returned at least twice to visit his friend Harold Matthews. (Perhaps the Hug brothers lived with the Matthews family. Or in the fire hall)

And this is where Bobby Dodd enters the picture: Dodd and Hug weren’t just teammates, they were great friends.

Dodd to the News Sentinel in 1949: “Paul came down to Kingsport from Ohio and the folks around there sort of adopted him. He played four years and finished school a year ahead of me. But he waited for me to graduate so we could go to college together. And if it hadn't been for him, I would have never been offered a scholarship. Paul was the guy they wanted, not me. But he would listen to no offers which didn't include me.”

Again from the 1949 Knoxville News-Sentinel for Hug’s obituary (another reason I’d never heard of Hug; he died young):

“After completing their high school work, Hug and Dodd went to Vanderbilt but Dodd failed to meet scholastic requirements there so Hug came back to the University of Tennessee with him. For two years Hug and Dodd were inseparable. They played freshman ball together in 1927 and both pledged Sigma Nu. In 1928 they roomed together at the Sigma Nu House.”

They were part of a 1928 Tennessee team called the “Flaming Sophomores” because it had so many good sophomore players. (Those Flaming Sophs went on to compile a 27-1-2 record in their three years of varsity football at UT.)

1929 Tennessee football team (from Centre College game program)

But Hug was more than a football player.

Coach Robert Neyland told the News Sentinel that Hug was an exceptional student, “maintaining a very high scholastic average in addition to excellence in track and basketball as well as football.”

Neyland didn’t mention it but another football teammate, Fritz Brandt, did in a 1929 feature about the two UT ends. Hug was also a great boxer and wrestler.

The story noted, “Hug holds the heavyweight boxing and light-heavyweight wrestling titles (at UT). This year's schedule on the Hill doesn't include this activity. ‘I wish they'd have a tournament,’ says Fritz, eying Hug threateningly. ‘I'm glad they won't,’ Hug laughs. ‘As long as they don't, I get to keep the title.’”

Hug was named to the All-Southern football team in 1929. He was injured early in the ’30 season and played sparingly as a senior.

When he died in ’49, the News Sentinel wrote, “The play by which most fans remember Hug was the pass he took behind the goal posts from Roy ‘War Eagle’ Witt in 1928 to give Tennessee its first victory over Vanderbilt in over 12 years.”

Vanderbilt was the best team in the South for most of the twenties. When UT hired Robert Neyland, his marching orders were to get the Tennessee football program to the level of Vanderbilt.

Paul Hug's senior entry in the UT yearbook

(Scarbbean was a secret society)

Football star, track star, basketball star, academic star, champion boxer and wrestler. What else could Paul Hug have excelled at?

Believe it or not, crocheting.

The News Sentinel wrote about his skill with a needle in 1929:

“There's another little thing about Hug you should know. Looking at the fellow you'd probably think of everything else before crocheting would come to your mind. But that unheard-of gift in a college man of being able to mend his own clothes is one of Paul's most notable accomplishments and he frequently puts it to use. ‘I don't mind telling you about that.’ Hug says, somewhat defiantly. ‘I'm actually proud of that. You see, I had two brothers at home, one older and one younger, and when I was a kid both of them used always to be running around somewhere. I was the one who had to stay at home. My mother wanted to keep me busy so she taught me to sew and crochet and knit and all those things. And I can still do them. I can darn my socks and I could even crochet if I had to. That's something I'm proud of, too.’”

A 1936 feature in the Kingsport Times noted, “The beautiful Afghan - a 220-square Afghan in pastel shades - is Hug's masterpiece, but he has crocheted luncheon sets, tams, pocketbooks, sweaters, scarfs, a baby blanket and ‘tidies.’ Right now, when he isn't helping Shorty Propst coach the Southwestern (at Memphis) college football team, he works on a white crocheted dress in an intricate double shell pattern for his wife.”

The Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote, “Hug's first fame as a ‘fancy work’ star came when his needle work won several prizes at fairs in Kingsport. Tenn., his home town.”

Paul Hug crocheting in 1936 when he was an assistant football coach at Southwestern at Memphis. 

After graduating from UT, Hug got a job coaching football at Nashville’s Battle Ground Academy. The Nashville Tennessean named him the state’s best prep school football coach in 1933 (“he didn’t do much this year but watch him next year”).

He didn’t do enough the next year and got out of coaching, working for TVA for two years. But it was at BGA that he met his future wife, Jane Briggs. Her father was the headmaster.

In ’36 he was hired as an assistant football coach at Southwestern at Memphis. That was the same season the Southwestern team stunned Vanderbilt in Nashville, winning 14-0.

In 1939 he was named head football coach at Tennessee Junior College at Martin. During the war Hug served as a captain in the Air Force Special Services. He joined Chattanooga Boiler and Tank Company when he returned to civilian life. He had just been named purchasing agent when he suffered a heart attack and died in Sept. 1949.

He was 43.

His obituary was on the front pages of the Kingsport, Knoxville, Chattanooga and Nashville papers and was reported as far away as Miami and Tampa.

All the death notices mentioned what an exceptional athlete he was, beginning at Dobyns-Bennett and continuing through his days at UT.

In 1927 it was Hug, not Bobby Dodd, who was awarded the Bertram Borden Cup as most outstanding athlete at Dobyns-Bennett High.

The year after Hug graduated from D-B the Kingsport Times noted, “Hug holds a number of records, his chief football record being the high mark for touchdowns in one season. Last year Hug scored 27 touchdowns and broke Matt Lunn's record of 22.

“Hug's greatest records are in track. He holds the folowing K. H. S. records:

‘50 yard dash - 6.0 seconds.

‘100 yard dash - 10.6 seconds.

‘440 yard dash - 53.8 seconds.

‘Running broad jump - 19 feet, 6 3-4 inches.

‘Pole vault - 10 feet, 4 one halt inches.

‘Discus - 103 feet, four inches.

But he was more than an athletic star. And a star with the knitting needle. He was featured in three school plays during his time in Kingsport. He sang a solo of “All the World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” in the 1926 K Club revue that was so well received he was called back to sing an encore of “Sometime.”

I don’t think there was anything Paul Hug couldn’t do. A September 1926 issue of the Knoxville Journal, reporting on the prospects for the D-B football team, noted, “Paul Hug has learned to pass with his left hand.”

Of course he had.

 

Dobyns-Bennett's high scoring backfield of 1926, the so-called Pony Express - Hug is bottom right.

Is it true Bobby Dodd couldn’t get in Vanderbilt?

For the answer let’s turn to Dodd’s autobiography as described in a 1992 Times News column by executive sports editor Ron Bliss:

“In six years at Kingsport High School, Dodd only had 14 credits and needed 16 for graduation. But the principal, Charles Koffman, so wanted to see Dodd take his talent to college that he made a deal with him - pass all his classes as a senior and he'd graduate him.

“’Well, I'd never had any idea of going to college,’ wrote Dodd in his autobiography, Dodd's Luck. ‘But I realized, “If I'm gonna play any more football, I've gotta go to college.' So I told him I'd do it.”

“Dodd practiced 10 days with Vanderbilt before his grades came in. The Vanderbilt coaches were aghast and told him he couldn't stay.

“That pointed Dodd and buddy Paul Hug first toward Georgia Tech (which also refused to admit Dodd) and eventually toward Tennessee and General Robert Neyland, who played the two in a freshman game the day of their arrival.”