The Rich Fabric of Tennessee Volunteer Football

On Rocky Top: A Front-Row Seat To The End of an Era. By Clay Travis. ItBooks; 337 pages; $25.99.

It is Monday, September 1, 2008. In the visiting locker room of the Rose Bowl Stadium, Phillip Fulmer, the second most successful coach in Tennessee football history in terms of wins, on his birthday, has just led his warriors in reciting Robert Neyland’s Seven Game Maxims. He then instills in his troops a feeling of timeless tradition before they take the field to open the 2008 season opener against UCLA: “Believe in your brothers all the way back to the twenties that have said these Maxims. Understand what you stand for by putting on that orange shirt and that T on your helmet.”

In less than three months, Coach Fulmer will be fired, and that timeless tradition will be tested by the hiring of a complete outsider, Lane Kiffin, who as we know now, will also be gone a season later.

Clay Travis, a sports columnist, an attorney living in Nashville, the grandson of a Vol who played for General Neyland in the 1930s, and an unabashed Tennessee football junkie who did not attend UT but traces his Vol fandom to watching the 1986 Sugar Bowl victory over Miami as a six-year old, was given access to the locker room and the sideline to write a book about a season that became one of the most memorable in the annals of Volunteer football.