Fred Russell

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This article is about the sportswriter. For other uses, see Fred Russell (disambiguation).
Fred Russell
Fred Russell c. 1975
Fred Russell c. 1975
BornFrederick McFerrin Russell
(1906-08-17)August 17, 1906
Wartrace, Tennessee
DiedJanuary 26, 2003(2003-01-26) (aged 96)
Nashville, Tennessee
OccupationSportswriter
Alma materVanderbilt University
SpouseKatherine (Kay) Early
ChildrenKatherine Early, Ellen Fall, Elizabeth Lee, Carolyn Evans

Fred Russell (August 27, 1906 – January 26, 2003) was an American sportswriter from Tennessee who was sports editor for the Nashville Banner for an unprecedented 68 years (1930–1998). Russell's sports column, "Sideline Sidelights" along with his cadre of reporters, was in a fierce rivalry with Nashville's better-funded paper, The Tennessean , for decades until the Banner closed in 1998. Russell received national prominence from 1949 to 1962 with the well-known Saturday Evening Post in which he wrote an annual "Pigskin Preview" as the herald of each college football season.

He was a storyteller, with a style reflecting his sense of humor. He authored several books about sports and sports humor. Outliving most of his contemporaries, he counted as friends many sports greats of the twentieth century including Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Red Grange, Sparky Anderson, Bobby Knight, Bear Bryant, Archie Manning and George Steinbrenner. Russell interviewed Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Lou Gehrig. He was inducted into National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. He was a member of the Heisman Trophy Committee and president of the Football Writers Association of America. He built long-lasting and trustful relationships with coaches, players and other writers in the business. He served as chairman of the most powerful group in college football, the Honors Court of the College Football Hall of Fame, responsible for selecting College Football Hall of Fame members.

He was a long-time friend and protégé of fellow sportswriter and Vanderbilt alumnus Grantland Rice. The university established the "Fred Russell–Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship" in their honor. For over fifty years, the scholarship has attracted some of the nation's top journalistic talent to Vanderbilt. Russell's active sportswriting career spanned 70 years during which he wrote over 12,000 columns. He died in 2003 at age 96.

Early life[]

Russell was born in 1906 in Wartrace, Tennessee, about 60 miles southeast of Nashville. His parents were John E. Russell and Mable Lee McFerrin Russell, who later moved the family to Nashville.[1] John E. Russell Jr. was his older brother. Russell's father started a newspaper, the Wartrace Tribune but it was short-lived; he became a salesman for a wholesale grocery company.[2] Russell’s mother was a music composer[a] and author of the "Vanderbilt University Waltz".[1][4] Russell attended Nashville's Duncan College Preparatory School for Boys,[5] which was located at a site now occupied by Vanderbilt University's Memorial Gymnasium.[6] Even since his youngest days, he had loved the sports pages.[7]:6 He wanted a job as a newspaper office boy but it only paid three dollars per week and he could make much more by working at a soda fountain downtown at the United Cigar Store.[2] He saved enough over a year to enter Vanderbilt in the fall of 1923.[7]:6 He was a member of Kappa Sigma Fraternity, and a varsity baseball player.[8] He played second base and pitched.[9]:227 He later attended Vanderbilt Law School, passed the state bar exam, and was listed in the class of 1929.[7]:6 He worked at a title company for 18 months and found out pretty quickly that "it was not the most exciting kind of work".[7]:18 He was offered a job at the Nashville Banner ; first writing obituaries, then working the police beat, then covering Vanderbilt football.[7]:18 Regarding the football coverage Russell said, “I got the luckiest break in the world in June of '29. . . in weeks, I knew that I never wanted to do anything else."[7]:18 The following year, he became the sports editor of the Banner, replacing Ralph McGill who left to go to the Atlanta Constitution.[3] Russell would be a member of the Banner staff until the paper closed in 1998. Over the next 68 years, Russell wrote over 12,000 columns, most of them in his column "Sideline Sidelights ".

National prominence[]

Russell's active career was in the so-called Golden Age of sports—a period beginning in 1920s when newspapers were a principal form of media and news.[10][11] The events Russell regularly covered were: college football; amateur and pro baseball; the Masters Golf Tournament; the Kentucky Derby; championship boxing; college football bowl games, including The Sugar Bowl and The Rose Bowl; and The Olympic Games (1960–1976).Russell gained national exposure in the mid-twentieth century for writing a widely-read annual college football article, the "Pigskin Preview", for The Saturday Evening Post. His relationship with the Post began when the magazine wanted to do a story on the University of Tennessee's new football coach, Bob Neyland, who had in 1939 created arguably one of the greatest football teams ever assembled: undefeated, untied, and un-scored-upon in the regular season.[7]:67 The magazine wanted a southern writer, and chose Russell. His article, "Southern Engineer" appearing in the issue leading up to the highly anticipated 1940 Rose Bowl (Tennessee vs. USC), put Russell on the national scene in sportswriting recognition and credibility and led to the Post hiring him to write the Pigskin Preview series each year from 1949 to 1962.[7]:67

Grantland Rice scholarship[]

Grantland Rice is widely regarded an influential pioneer of the sportswriting world[12] and he was Russell's boyhood idol.[7]:52 They first met in the 1930s and remained longtime friends even though Rice was 26 years older. They were both raised in Nashville and both graduates of Vanderbilt University. Rice worked for about three years at the Tennessean from 1907 to 1910.[13]:200

Russell (L) and Grantland Rice, sitting on a park bench c. 1950

In May of 1954, when Rice was in declining health, Russell recalled a memorable lunch with him at Rice's regular corner table at Toots Shor's restaurant in New York.[7]:51 With sportswriter Bill Corum, they swapped stories extending all afternoon until five o'clock with Schor himself in on some of them.[7]:61 When Rice died two months later, Russell and Corum developed the idea of creating a Rice scholarship and, in 1956, the Grantland Rice Scholarship at Vanderbilt was begun. [7]:205 Endowed by the Thoroughbred Racing Association (TRA),[b] the scholarship is awarded annually to an incoming first-year student with an interest in sportswriting. The scholars were never "required" to be sportswriters, and Vanderbilt did not have a school of journalism.[7]:210 From the beginning, Russell was involved in the administration and selection process of the scholarship. In 1986, after Russell had been closely managing the endeavor for 30 years, Charles J. Cella, a past president of the TRA, further endowed the scholarship with a $500,000 gift in honor of Russell,[3] changing its name to the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship.[7]:210 For over fifty years, the scholarship has attracted some of the nation's top journalistic talent coming out of high school.[7]:205 Some of the more well-known recipients have included Skip Bayless, Roy Blount, and Andrew Maraniss.[7]:206 The scholarship fell on hard times in the 1990s when the university reduced the award to $10,000 yearly to prolong the life of scholarship. With rising tuition costs, the later scholarship was roughly one quarter of the full package earlier recipients received.[7]:214

College Football Hall of Fame[]

In the 1960s, Russell became involved in the National Football Foundation (NFF). This organization, founded in 1947, is responsible for the College Football Hall of Fame. Members of the hall are selected by the NFF's "Honors Court", said to be the most powerful group in college football.[7]:80 Russell served as chairman of the court from 1964 to 1991, a role perfectly suited for him because he had, according to writer Andrew Derr, "an instinctive sense of fairness and prudence" along with significant experience in college football and relationships with the coaches and administrators. [7]:80 Derr said, "From Paul Bryant to Archie Manning, Frank Broyles to Lee Corso, Johnny Majors to Lou Holtz, Russell had relationships with all of them."[7]:81

A difficult decision came to Russell and the committee in 1959, when LSU's Heisman-Trophy winner Billy Cannon was scheduled to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but pleaded guilty to a counterfeit scam after FBI agents recovered $5 million in fake $100 bills buried on Cannon's property.[14] Russell chose to rescind the hall of fame invitation. Cannon was eventually inducted in 2008.[14]

Sense of humor[]

One of Russell's trademarks was his humorous and entertaining style in his columns, books, speeches and stories. He was a ringleader of a group of friends around the nation who engaged in some hilarious antics with practical jokes. New York Times sports columnist Red Smith said, "He is the first practical joker who never hurt anybody with his practical jokes".[3] [7]:170 Many of these are chronicled in a book about Russell, Confessions of a Practical Joker, written by Jim Harwell.[15] One of the famous ones was an April Fools joke in 1965 in which Russell splashed a story on the front page of the Banner sports page on April 1st (April Fool's Day) reporting that newly-passed legislation would mean that the Natchez Trace Parkway would be extended directly across the golf course of a Nashville Country club of which Russell was a member.[7]:170 There was a large map and details with quotes from city officials.[7]:170 The gag became legend, and a copy of the paper hung in the club for over 50 years.

Perhaps the most quoted and often remembered story: Russell was in a hotel lobby on one his many out of town trips. A heavy-set woman distracted him by her obnoxious and rude behavior to the clerk at the front desk. At the end of her tirade, she ordered a wake-up call at 7 a.m. Overhearing this, Russell called her room the next morning just before 7 and said "It's 7 o'clock, the sun is shining, temperature is in the 70s and it's time to get your fat ass out of bed".[7]:176 His three sports humor books, I'll Go Quietly (1944), I'll Try Anything Twice (1945) and Funny Thing About Sports (1948) were collections of humorous stories from sports.

The Banner vs. the Tennessean[]

An example of Russell's column in the Nashville Banner, October 29, 1936

In a two-newspaper town, competition between the journalists can be stiff. In Nashville, The Tennessean was the morning paper including Sundays; the Nashville Banner was the afternoon paper. In 1937, the two papers formed a Joint Operating Agreement to reduce costs by putting both in the same building and using the same printing presses.[7]:146 The result was that the competitors kept their separate editorial identities but worked in close proximity; the tension was palpable.[7]:146 Russell, the Banner sports editor, had a lock on the inside happenings of Vanderbilt athletics and many more contacts nationally than did the Tennessean. For Russell, the end game was clear: get the story, protect your sources, and make sure nothing leaked from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning after the Tennessean hit the stands.[7]:153 If there was going to be a new coach hired, Russell knew it first, and likely had a hand in determining who the candidates would be.[7]:153 Tennessean reporter Jimmy Davy, who endured the underdog status longer than anyone at the Tennessean, said "That kind of influence drove us crazy. . . that he was so inside with everything."[7]:152 But, by having the Sunday edition, the Tennessean had the distinct advantage of having two editions to report on Saturday's games before the Banner had a chance. The net effect of the competition was that both papers were better off with the rivalry in place (which resulted in more aggressive reporting and better writing) than in a one-newspaper city.[7]:156

Influence and legacy[]

In 1955, his a 25th Anniversary of writing at the Nashville Banner, the newspaper held an invitation-only gala for him that included more than 600 guests.[16] The celebration included a host of sports personalities, writers and stars such as Red Grange, Bear Bryant, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Red Smith. Invitees included a senator, two congressmen, the mayor, General Neyland, the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, the president of the Sugar Bowl, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, and many coaches and athletes.[16] As for the secret of Russell's success in having friendships with top sports figures, biographer Andrew Derr said, "Confidentiality was the foundation for that type of friendship, and Russell was unwavering in his ability to keep his word.[7]:137 College hall of fame player and coach Johnny Majors said, "You could talk off the record with him and you knew you wouldn't be reported unless he cleared it with you. I would tell something to him that I didn't want anybody else to know at the time. . ."[7]:137

In 1998, the Banner folded and it was assumed that the 92-year-old Russell would retire. Instead he was hired to write a weekly column for The Tennessean. He completed his 70th year as a journalist in 1999, then retired. Russell penned his last sports column for the multi-author book Nashville: An American Self-Portrait in 2001.[17]:35 His byline thus appeared in nine different decades.[17]:35

Baseball[]

As a baseball writer for 30 years in the middle of the 20th century, Russell often spent an entire month covering spring training each year. He and fellow sportswriters such as Red Smith would often travel together and stay with players in Florida at hotels like the Soreno Hotel in St. Petersburg.[18] After the games, their wives drove to the next town while the two men sat in the back seat with typewriters crafting their columns.[19] Russell interviewed Ty Cobb many other of baseball's greatest stars.[20]Sports Illustrated reported that in the 1930s, Russell interviewed Babe Ruth as Ruth played bridge with Lou Gehrig.[21] He covered the Yankees, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Track and field[]

Russell was one of the primary journalists who covered Tennessee State University, whose women's track team, the "Tigerbelles", achieved success in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.[22] Wilma Rudolph, coached by TSU's Ed Temple, became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympics.[23] Temple spent the 1950s building his program even though the predominantly black college had run-down facilities and lacked scholarships. After Rudolph's olympic stardom, Temple said, "The biggest disappointment in all my 44 years was when we came back from Rome and [the university] didn't get a cent [for scholarships and facilities]"[7]:99 He confided his frustration with Russell who personally called the Governor of Tennessee, Buford Ellington and arranged for Temple to go downtown and meet with the governor. Temple enjoyed sitting there listening to the phone call from Ellington to the commissioner of colleges which produced prompt results. Temple said, "We had the pusher in Fred Russell and the governor".[7]:101 Coach Temple did have to weather some temporary displeasure from the university for not following the chain of command.[7]:101 When Olympic star Wilma Rudolph died in 1980, Russell delivered her eulogy.[24]

Other sports[]

Russell covered major championship boxing and was a long-time friend of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. He interviewed Muhammed Ali. He covered more than 50 consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby.[7]:33 Russell covered the first Masters golf tournament in 1934 in Augusta, Georgia and over 40 subsequent Masters'. He was a close friend friend of Bobby Jones (who preferred to be called "Bob").[7]:43[2] Russell got to know Jones before his golfing success, when Jones was a part owner of the Atlanta Crackers, a minor league baseball team.[7]:44 Like Russell, Jones was a great storyteller and this trait was part of the foundation for their friendship.[7]:44

Art Demmas was a star football player for Vanderbilt in the 1950s. Later he became a high school referee and got to know Russell, who helped him get a position as a college football referee. After working several years at the college level, Demmas was recruited into the NFL and became an official for 28 seasons.[25] Demmas served as the Southern Region Chairman of the National Football Foundation; Demmas and Russell worked together for 42 years as the primary founders of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of the NFF.

Awards and honors[]

Russell received numerous honors from sports organizations.[26] He was elected to the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame in 1988.[27] He became a Charter Member of the Tennessee Sportswriters Hall of Fame in 2005.[28] He received the Distinguished American Award in 1980[26] given by the National Football Foundation (NFF).[29] Two of the previous winners of the award were Vince Lombardi and Bob Hope.[30]

He was the "Honors Court" Chairman of the College Football Foundation and Hall of Fame for 29 years.[29] Russell is past President of the Football Writers Association(1965).[26] He was a member of the Heisman Trophy Committee for 46 years and was the committee's Southern chairman for 30 years.[26] Russell received the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award in 1981 from the American Football Coaches Association.[31] Other winners of this award were Paul 'Bear' Bryant (1983) and Woody Hayes (1986).[31] In the same year he was awarded the Bert McGrane Award from the Football Writers Association of America.[32]

In 1983, The National Turf Writers Association (horse-racing) awarded Russell the Walter Haight Award for Excellence in Turf Writing.[33] He received the Associated Press Editor's Red Smith Award in 1984 for “extended meritorious labor in the art of sportswriting.”[34] He received the first annual "Grantland Rice Memorial Award" in 1957 by an organization of journalists, the Sports Brotherhood, Inc. for "writing in the Grantland Rice Tradition".[35]

Russell was a member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.[34]. In 1968, The Middle Tennessee Chapter of the National Football Association and Hall of Fame created the annual "Fred Russell Distinguished American Award" which as of 2021 has had over 50 recipients.[36] He was named to the Vanderbilt Athletics Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class.[37] Russell was awarded the Distinguished Journalism Award by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1976.[38] He was named the Kappa Sigma "Man of the Year" in 1981.[39] At the Nashville Banner, he became editor in 1962, publisher in 1973 and chairman in 1982.[7]:9 Several of Russells' protégés have worked for the New York Times, including, Buster Olney, Tyler Kepner, and Lee Jenkins.[7]:246 He was one of the founders of the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville and served on its original board in 1951.[3]

Named for Russell[]

  • Fred Russell Distinguished American Award, Middle Tennessee Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame
  • Fred Russell Lifetime Achievement Award, Nashville Sports Council[40][7]:241
  • The press box at Vanderbilt Stadium (formerly called Dudley Field) is named for him.[3]
  • The press box at the Vanderbilt Baseball stadium.[3]

Personal life[]

Russell and his wife, Katherine Wyche Early Russell, were married for 63 years until her death in 1996. They had four daughters, Katherine Early, Ellen Fall, Elizabeth Lee, Carolyn Evans. Russell worked past the age of 90 and lived until the age of 96. Two personal tragedies that Russell suffered in his life were the death of his wife Kay in 1996 and the demise of the Nashville Banner in 1998. Kay died at age 87 when Russell was 90. He lived for six more years. The demise of the Banner came swiftly and painfully on February 16, 1998, when 100 staffers were called together by publisher and co-owner Irby Simpkins who told them that the Banner had been sold to the Gannett Company, who already owned the Tennessean; Gannett then decided to shut down the 122 year-old Banner. Its last issue would be that Friday, four days hence. The news took an unexpected mental toll on the 92 year-old Russell. His daughter Carolyn said, "When mother died, he still had the column; when the Banner left, he had nothing."[7]:228 Russell went into a deep depression, but over time recovered enough to take a writing job with his longtime rival, the Tennessean, after being respectfully approached by the publisher John Siegenthaler and sports editor John Bibb. Russell wrote a few articles for them, then retired. Said long-time Tennessean writer Jimmy Davy, "You know, he just didn't have his heart in it— he was a Banner man."[7]:230 Russell died in 2003 at age 96.

Works by Fred Russell[]

  • Big Bowl Football: The Great Season Classics, (1963) with George Leonard
  • Bury Me in an Old Press Box, (1955)
  • Vol Feats, (1950) with George Leonard
  • Funny Thing About Sports, (1948)
  • I'll Try Anything Twice, (1945)
  • I'll Go Quietly, (1944)
  • 50 Years of Vanderbilt Football (1938), by Maxwell E. Benson, Edited by Fred Russell

Notes[]

  1. ^ In the 1890s, she published "Violets So Blue", "I love You", and "The Vanderbilt University Waltz". The latter was featured on Vanderbilt Day in a ceremony at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897 when the statue of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was presented to the university.[3]
  2. ^ TRA is the Thoroughbred Racing Association, an organization that funded the scholarship initially because of Grantland Rice's love of horse racing and writing about the industry.[7]:207

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b "Removed to Their Country Home". 31 (143). Nashville Banner. September 22, 1906. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c Russell, Fred (2018). Bury Me In An Old Press Box : Good Times and Life of a Sportswriter. Chicago: Papamoa Press. p. ebook. ISBN 9781789125719. Retrieved September 1, 2021.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g Normand, Tom (January 28, 2003). "Mr. Russell: End of an Era". 99 (28). The Tennessean. pp. 1–A, 1–C, 3–C. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  4. ^ McFerrin, Mabel Lee (1898). "Vanderbilt University Waltz". levysheetmusicmse.jhu.edu. H.A. French. Retrieved August 31, 2021. Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries & University Museums
  5. ^ "Duncan College Preparatory School for Boys". hmdb.org. The Historical Marker Database. Retrieved August 28, 2021.
  6. ^ Fox, David (January 27, 2003). "Legendary Sports Reporter Fred Russell Dies". nashvillepost.com. Nashville Post.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as Derr, Andrew (2012). Life of Dreams : The Good Times of Sportswriter Fred Russell (1st ed.). Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. ISBN 9780881462784.
  8. ^ Traughber, Bill (August 23, 2006). "Fred Russell Was A Vanderbilt Man". vucommodores.com. Vanderbilt University. Retrieved August 25, 2021.
  9. ^ Simpson, John A. (2007). The Greatest Game Ever Played in Dixie" : the Nashville Vols, their 1908 season, and the championship game. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 9780786430505. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  10. ^ Summer, Jim (January 1, 2004). "Sports in the 1920s:The Golden age of Sports". ncpedia.org. NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina). Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  11. ^ Oriard, Michael (2001). King Football : Sport and spectacle in the golden age of radio and newsreels, movies and magazines, the weekly & the daily press. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. ix. ISBN 0807826502. Retrieved August 30, 2021.
  12. ^ "Grantland Rice/ Vanderbilt University Athletics". vucommodores.com. 13 May 2019. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  13. ^ Egerton, John (1979). Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries, 1780–1980 (First ed.). PlusMedia.
  14. ^ Jump up to: a b Schudel, Matt (May 23, 2018). "Billy Cannon, 1959 Heisman Trophy winner later convicted of counterfeiting, dies at 80". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  15. ^ Harwell, Jim (2012). Confessions of a Practical Joker. Nashville, Tennessee: Bridge Books. ISBN 9780985594305.
  16. ^ Jump up to: a b Horick, Randy (March 26, 1998). "The Time of his Life: How Fred Russell Got the Story". nashvillescene.com. The Nashville Scene. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  17. ^ Jump up to: a b Egerton, John; Wood, E. Thomas (2001). Nashville : an American self-portrait (1st ed.). Nashville, Tennessee: Beaten Biscuit Press. ISBN 0970670214.
  18. ^ Romano, John (June 6, 2020). "Once upon a time, St. Pete was the center of baseball's fight for civil rights". tampabay.com. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
  19. ^ Biddle, Joe (January 28, 2003). "Missing an Old Friend on the Sidelines". 99 (28). The Tennessean. p. 1–C. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  20. ^ Bell, Rick C. (October 8, 2017). "Fred McFerrin Russell". tennesseeencyclopedia.net. The Tennessee Historical Society. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  21. ^ "Byline for the Ages: Fred Russell's Banner Career". Sports Illustrated. 88:9 (March 2, 1998): 22. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  22. ^ "Heroines of the Track: TSU's Tigerbelles Bring Home the Gold". library.nashville.org. Nashville Public Library. July 25, 2021. Retrieved August 30, 2021.
  23. ^ "On this Day:1950–2005/11 September/1960: Rudolph takes third Olympic gold". news.bbc.co.uk. BBC. 11 September 1960. Retrieved September 1, 2021.
  24. ^ "Russell, Frederic McFerrin 1906–2003". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  25. ^ "Art Demmas". tshf.net. Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  26. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Russell, Sports Columnist, Is Cited by Football Hall". The New York Times. April 27, 1980. p. S–9. Retrieved September 3, 2021.
  27. ^ "National Sports Media Association (NSMA)/Hall of Fame/". nationalsportsmedia.org. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  28. ^ "Tennessee Sports Writers Hall of Fame features quotes, jokes". williamsonherald.com. Williamson Herald (Franklin, Tennessee). July 27, 2006. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  29. ^ Jump up to: a b "National Football Foundation/ NFF Distinguished American Award Recipients/Fred Russell/Bio". footballfoundation.org. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  30. ^ "NFF Distinguished American Award Recipients". footballfoundation.org. National Football Foundation (NFF). Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  31. ^ Jump up to: a b "Longtime College Head Coach Dick Tomey to Receive 2020 Amos Alonzo Stagg Award". afca.com. American Football Coaches Association. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  32. ^ "Bert McGrane Award". sportswriters.net. Football Writers Association of America. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  33. ^ "Walter Haight Award". ntwab.org. National Turf Writers and Broadcasters. Retrieved September 5, 2021.
  34. ^ Jump up to: a b "Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame/Inductees/Fred Russell". tshf.net. Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
  35. ^ Russell, Fred (May 4, 1959). "An Expert Defends the Sports Page". vault.si.com. Sports Illustrated. Retrieved September 3, 2021. Here, by invitation, one of the ablest sports editors in America, Fred Russell of the 'Nashville Banner' proudly speaks for his profession
  36. ^ "Fred Russell Distinguished American Award". nffnashville.org. The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame, Inc. (NFF). Retrieved September 5, 2021.
  37. ^ "Vanderbilt Athletics Announces Inaugural Hall of Fame Class". Vanderbilt University. 2008-06-26. Archived from the original on 2008-06-28. Retrieved 2008-06-26.
  38. ^ "Longtime Sports Editor Fred Russell Dies". apnews.com. Associated Press. January 27, 2003. Retrieved September 10, 2021.
  39. ^ "Tennessee House of Representatives, Joint Resolution 33: 00240156" (PDF). capitol.tn.gov. Tennessee Legislature. Feb 6, 2003. Retrieved September 10, 2021. 00240156
  40. ^ Kreager, Tom (June 28, 2021). "Fitzgerald earns Lifetime Achievement honor". 17 (79). The Tennessean. p. 1–B. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
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