Appalachian Heritage

What Is an Arena Like Neyland Stadium Doing in a Place Like Appalachia? Robert J. Higgs In their first home game for the 1996 season, the University of Tennessee Volunteers may well be playing in the largest college stadium in the country if plans materialize to expand the current seating capacity of Neyland Stadium of 96,000. Why such a huge "Roman" structure is located in Knoxville, Tennessee , "the Gateway to the Smokies," is one of the more glaring paradoxes in Appalachia since, judging from the general character of the settlers of the region, the erection of a coliseum was certainly not very high on their list of priorities if present at all in their thinking. They may or may not have known anything about the trouble early Christians, criminals, and animals had in stadia in the ancient world, but they were skeptical of power of the organized state symbolized by the institution of knighthood , a major feature of the Rome-London Axis. To be sure, the "mixed people," including a large element of Scotch-Irish (or ScotsIrish ) from Ulster, loved play in many forms and were often excellent athletes and fighters, but these attributes did not either singly or collectively point toward a super stadium in the mountains where many would look on and turn thumbs up or down on the performance of the few. The raw material for a high degree of athletic development was very much present in the mountains, but the idea of organized athletics and the need for a super stadium came from outside the region in the form of British and continental influences, specifically industrialism with its emphasis on science and technology, militarism, the Morrill Land Grant Act, the YMCA, and simple revenge in football against private universities in the state. Like Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," the story of the house that Neyland built—Neyland himself being a distinguished knight—is complex, full of twists and turns. The tale begins elsewhere and the roots are several, Robert J. Higgs, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and retired professor ofEnglish at East Tennessee State University, is a noted authority on Appalachian literature. The author of scholarly studies on a variety of topics, including sports, his most recent book, God in the Stadium, was published last fall by the University Press ofKentucky. 30 going all the way back to the frontier and running back and forth between Nashville, Knoxville, and West Point, each exhibiting some form of "organization," ecclesiastical, educational, and military, that made the stadium a reality. To Samuel Doak, Father of Education in Tennessee, and other Presbyterians coming south from Princeton before and after the Revolution, frontier sports such as cockfighting, horseracing, and wrestling no doubt reflected a "type of moral rebellion." What, however, appears as a fault one minute may emerge as an asset the next. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, wants us to remember that John Sevier and other Overmountain men were lovers of sport which helped to make them excellent soldiers in a time of need: "Sevier had given a great barbecue, where oxen and deer were roasted whole, while horse races were run, and backwoodsmen tried their skill as marksmen and wrestlers. In the midst of their feasting Shelby, hot with hard riding, arrived to tell of the approach of Ferguson and the British." At Sycamore Shoals near the modern town of Elizabethton, Tennessee, the "sturdy Scotch-Irish Presbyterians , leaning upon their long rifles, listened in an attitude of respectful attention" as Doak invoked "the God of Battle" to "avenge the slaughter of thy people" and to defend "liberty and justice and truth." It was at the Battle of King's Mountain, rather than in the Mexican War, that, in the view of some, Tennesseans got the name of "Volunteers" with all men eligible volunteering except two. While evangelical activity shaped the development of sports in Appalachia and the frontier in the years before and after the Revolution, a stronger influence came by way of new educational models from the East in the first half of the nineteenth century. Again Princeton Presbyterians led the way in the south. Offered the presidency of Princeton in 1823, Philip Lindsley chose...