By Mickey Dunaway

Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine April 2024 | Cornelius, NC

I worked on my bachelor’s degree at Auburn University from 1965-69 in the prototypical college town of Auburn.  The University had an enrollment of 12,000 students and was located in east Alabama, about 60 miles northeast of Montgomery and just over 100 miles from Atlanta.  My hometown was Fairview, Alabama, in Mobile County, with a population of about 500.  The trip from Auburn to Fairview was 172 miles, with most of it on two-lane roads.  So, one did not just run home on a whim.  

The timeframe of this story was the middle of one of those weeks when I knew I would not be going home.

I must have been a sophomore because I didn’t have a car.  I lived and worked at Thornton’s Boarding House across Magnolia Avenue from the campus.  On an afternoon when I should have been studying, I took my old beat-up football, a spray paint can top that I used as a kicking tee, and I would walk the few hundred yards behind the student infirmary to the practice field behind the north end zone of Cliff Hare Stadium as it was known at the time.

I never played the game after junior high school, but I loved to punt and kick.  On this fall day, I was “practicing” my field goal kicking.  I would put my spray can tee about 40 yards from the goal—imagine the game’s setting, and I would back up a yard or so and kick the imaginary field goal.  Then I would run and retrieve the ball—run back and do it again.  Kick and retrieve—kick and retrieve.  Good fun with Walter Middy aspirations of being pulled from the student section of some game to kick a field goal because John Riley (the Auburn kicker at the time) had been taken ill.

For no reason at all, after I had finished “practicing” that day, I walked into Cliff Hare Stadium—you could do that in those days—and sat down on the home side bench.  As I let my mind wander, in the middle of my orange and blue daydream, an older gentleman walked up and sat beside me.  I recognized him immediately by the old beat-up canvas porkpie hat that was his trademark.  We briefly discussed Auburn, my college major, and how I was doing.  He said he had watched me kicking field goals on the practice field and was impressed.  At this point, I could only whisper, “Thank you, sir.” 

That gentleman with the slow southern accent was Auburn’s head football coach, Ralph “Shug” Jordan.  He was making his way to practice and stopped to talk to this student with a football.

In a few years, the stadium’s name would be changed to Jordan-Hare Stadium in Coach Jordan’s honor as the winningest coach in Auburn football history.  But, I mainly remember him as the exemplary Southern gentleman that he was. 

Epigram

I end this mostly true tale of the South with a Southernism that one is likely to find only in the deep South. 

The family surname Jordan is pronounced Jordan, right?  Not necessarily.  In some parts of the South, such as Selma, where Coach Shug Jordan was born, Jordan is more correctly pronounced Jur-dan.

Should you visit Auburn, Alabama, perhaps with a grandchild to check out this outstanding public university, remember that the football stadium’s name is not Jordan-Hare but Jurdan-Hare—and the spelling is the same!

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

-William Shakespeare