It has been said of Tad Smith that he never lost his “country modesty.” The coliseum would remain as our basketball facility until 2016. The Field House was doubled in size, Hemingway Stadium was expanded, a department of intercollegiate athletics building was constructed, and athletic dormitory (Miller Hall) was constructed, and an 8,500-seat coliseum was constructed at the cost of $1,800,000 in 1965. Tad is credited with bringing Ole Miss out of the dark ages with reference to athletic facilities. In 1946 he was named athletic director and would serve until 1971 when he retired. It would be the only time he did not call Oxford home from when he first came on campus in 1926. Tad would remain at Ole Miss as a coach from 1929 until the outbreak of World War II. He was All South Eastern in 1928 and was on the Southern Conference Championship baseball team as a first baseman. By the way, we won that first Egg Bowl game. It was the game in which a student fight between the two teams ushered in the “Egg Bowl” between the two teams, which has been played every year since 1927. He was a member of the team when Ole Miss played Mississippi A&M in the infamous “Cain Chair Game” in 1926. He would play both football and baseball for Ole Miss during the years 1926, 19.
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Showed me how to do it, too, and I played several games without a helmet.” “Tad just taped his ears against his head and let her rip. “The helmets in those days were made about like helmets worn by boxers in training,” stated Pie Vann a player from Magnolia. One, he played most games without a helmet and he is quoted as stating he would tape down his ears to his head so he could run faster with no wind resistance. Two of the things that he did would not be done today. “He was an exceptional broken field runner,” said Webb Burke, center and captain of the 1926 team, “and he could scat.”
He disdained fair-catch signals and tried to field every ball on the dead run. A&M, coached by Earl Abel, won the game, 13-6.”Īt Ole Miss, Tad’s flying feet won him a reputation as the greatest punt returner in the South. Tad was quoted as saying, “I climbed a mulberry tree and watched it. They had jumped a freight train and hoboed the short trip to Jackson. The two young men went to Jackson from Brookhaven for the game. Tad had witnessed one Ole Miss football game, which he and a friend saw for free. “I drove Holmes’ Franklin, which had an air-cooled engine, on gravel and dirt roads all the way from Lincoln County to Oxford, Tad recalled, and we crossed 92 one-way bridges.” He had seen Tad play football and invited him to go to Oxford with him. Tad spent about three weeks at Loyola until his father came to see him and told him he should go elsewhere to play football and baseball.Īn attorney from Hattiesburg, D.H. Blaise D’Antoni had interests in athletics at Loyola, and he offered Tad a scholarship as he had done for other south Mississippi boys. In a ride south on the railroad, he met a banana boat owner from New Orleans.
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