Jimmy Davy’s Generation

In my own ten years of toil at The Tennessean newspaper - working nights and weekends through my college years and after - the one job I never got to do was sportswriter.

There were probably lots of good reasons for this gap in my journalism resume, but one of them must have been this: In our Hall of Fame sports department down on the second floor, there was simply no room for ordinary.

In that day the Tennessean sports department was a riot of large personalities: John Bibb, F.M. Williams, Jimmy Davy, Jimmy Holt, Larry Woody, Wendell Rawls (before he moved to the newsroom). Bibb was the sports editor, forever. Jimmy Davy was technically his No. 2 – but he was second to nobody in the ways that counted most.

At the college level Jimmy covered Vanderbilt and Lipscomb sports with a magnifying glass, but I remember him most for his long and faithful attention to high school athletics across the city.

He knew the Nashville Interscholastic League like the back of his hand – its coaches and players, its important match-ups on Friday nights, its standings on Saturday mornings. When we read Jimmy Davy, we knew it too. Other fine writers would follow him – Mike Organ, Mo Patton – but I’m confident they would tip a hat today to Jimmy Davy. He set the standard.

In 2014, I wrote a column about the awful fire that destroyed Hillsboro High School on Halloween night, 1952. I wrote it because, oddly enough, it turned out to be a tale of Nashville sportsmanship at the highest level. Hillsboro had lost everything, down to the uniforms in the football locker room, and the next night they were facing rival MBA. You can find the piece here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/09/21/remembering-night-sportsmanship/15964545/

To do my research, the first authority I phoned was Davy. He had covered prep sports in the 1950s. Other old-timers helped me with the story – Joe Pat Breen, Billy Lynch, Bill Cochran, David Herbert, Hale Harris – but calling Jimmy was like turning on a time machine. He quickly recalled the city’s football powers of 1952 and the meaning of their legendary rivalries.

Newspaper people can be famous for their singular characters and their rough-and-tumble lives, but Jimmy Davy was also a gentleman. He was always polite and helpful to me, and each person who knew him will tell you that to this day.

There is much to lament about our current day, with sadness and a sore sense of loss on so many levels. But the deepest of these to me is how we are losing Jimmy Davy’s generation, and we are all the poorer for it.