Ole Miss football devotees had no idea what they were getting for $12,000 a year when John Vaught decided he’d rather coach their team than be an assistant at Alabama in 1947. What would follow was like striking a football Spindletop in Oxford, six championships in the Southeastern Conference, three of the whole wide nation (by at least one rating system), and total dominance of the state of Mississippi, then verdant with talent.
Time has a way of eroding memories such as these. Long before Bryant at Alabama, before Spurrier at Florida, but running concurrently with Dodd at Georgia Tech, there was Vaught at Ole Miss. Dodd wouldn’t schedule the Rebels. “Who wants to spend a weekend in Oxford, Miss.?” (Well, right now who wouldn’t?)
If there has ever been a coach more athletic in physique than Vaught, I never saw him. He was raised on a farm near Olney, Texas, one of 11 children. Tonto Coleman, when at Georgia Tech, told a yarn of how he and Vaught met, “running the highway in the morning looking for roadkill,” he said.
Well, when I checked the map of Texas and found that Olney was about 150 miles from Roscoe, Tonto’s hometown, I realized I’d been spoofed. Truth is, though, I think Vaught could have made it.
Vaught was an All-America guard at Texas Christian, in a time when it was 11 players to a team. When he came to North Carolina as an assistant to Bear Wolf, I was a manager, and came to know, respect and sometimes fear him. A kind but hardy man who would match dropkicks with me after practice, but never kind enough to allow me to win.
It was on a recruiting trip to Allentown, Pa., that he came across a likely prospect, “walking out of this coal mine with a sack of coal on his back,” a story he liked to tell. The prospect’s name was Walter Palanuik, a tackle who thought he was a fullback. When his coaches didn’t agree, he quit the team and turned to acting. You know him as Jack Palance.
What Vaught did at Ole Miss was establish a football kingdom. He had been a lieutenant commander in the Navy, returned to Chapel Hill as the pre-flight school instructor, and caught on as an assistant to Red Drew at Ole Miss. When Drew left, he tried to take Vaught with him, until at the last minute Vaught changed his mind. Ole Miss won the conference championship right out of the box and the rush to glory was on. Kids with names like Bobby Ray, Billy Ray, Rex Reed, Eagle, Bookie, Showboat got in line from Moss Point to Corinth to play for the Rebels. Ole Miss had its pick. A string of all-star quarterbacks followed in lock-step, from Charlie Conerly to Archie Manning.
Ole Miss had linemen that appeared to have come off the pages of a fitness magazine. Tall, about 240 — large for those times — and swift, as if ordered by conscription. They were merely biding time on the way to the NFL, Jim Dunaway, Gene Hickerson, Johnny Brewer, Larry Grantham, and on they came. Still, when talk starts up about great games Ole Miss has played in, it nearly always includes a rainy night at LSU in 1959, when Billy Cannon returned a punt 89 yards and upset the Rebels.