October 12, 1963: The Sleeping Giant Began To Waken

What happened on the night of October 12, 1963, when the charter plane carrying the University of Florida football team arrived back in Gainesville, obscures what happened earlier that afternoon for Jack Thompson.

“We were approaching Gainesville when the pilot told us he was going to circle Gainesville and dip the wings so we could look out the window and see what was going on,” Thompson recalls. “There was a mob of people at the airport … must have been several thousand of them. They were waiting for us. We had never seen anything like it.”

The fans were there because earlier that day the Gators had done the unthinkable by taking out 3rd-ranked Alabama, 10-6, in Tuscaloosa. Contrasting the way the two teams started the season, an Alabama blowout had been predicted. Alabama was 3-0, having outscored Georgia, Tulane and Vanderbilt 81-13. Florida, on the other hand, started the season with a 9-0 loss to Georgia Tech in Atlanta in which the Gators wound up with negative yardage. That was followed by a 9-9 tie with Mississippi State and a 35-28 squeaker of a win over Richmond, a game the Gators probably should have lost.

The Gators were 1-1-1, but everyone realized just how close they were to 0-3, therefore no one in their right mind gave them a chance to beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Alabama was coached by Bear Bryant and quarterbacked by Joe Namath. The Crimson Tide won the 1961 national championship, lost only one game in 1962, and was one of the favorites to win another national title in 1963.

Ray Graves was the Florida coach, who had taken the Gators to Gator Bowl wins over Baylor (1960) and Penn State (1962) in his first three years on the job. Tommy Shannon was the quarterback but the star of the team was running back Larry Dupree. This was the next-to-last year of single platoon football so Thompson, a senior from Savannah and all of 5-8 and 180 pounds, played guard when the Gators had the ball, linebacker when they were trying to stop the other team.

This was supposed to be a mismatch, particularly since Alabama had not lost a home game since Bear Bryant answered mama’s call and came home to stop the Crimson Tide from plunging into obscurity in 1958. Obviously, someone forgot to drop off the script to the Florida Gators.

Thompson remembers the Florida locker room.

“Hot … stifling hot,” he remembers. “I don’t know what their locker room was like, but all we had was this room with some benches. No windows. No air. We had the door open just to let some air in. I don’t know what the temperature was in our locker room.”

In that locker room where sweating Gators sat on benches while hoping to get back on the field where it was actually cooler that the seeds of victory were planted. After head coach Ray Graves gave a short talk, defensive coordinator Gene Ellenson gave one of his already famous pregame speeches. No one before and no one since has been able to fire up a Florida football team like the legendary Ellenson, a true hero of the Battle of the Bulge during World War II where he won two silver stars. Ellenson was a master psychologist who knew how to push the Gators’ buttons, particularly in games where they were considered underdogs. Prior to Florida’s 1968 game against Florida State in Tallahassee, Ellenson had a box delivered to the team meeting at the team hotel on Friday night. Inside was a Florida helmet with a hatchet buried in the crown. There was an attached note that read, “We’re going to kill your quarterback.” The Gators didn’t know that this was all Gene Ellenson’s idea. All they did was dominate Florida State, 9-3, the only game all season in which the Seminoles failed to score three touchdowns.

There at Alabama, Ellenson was fire and brimstone bringing up references to his time on the battlefield. When his pre-game speech ended, team captain Jack Katz (you know him now as Panama Jack … you might use his suntan products!) leapt to his feet and shouted, “If you aren’t ready to play now, you never will be ready!”

He put on his helmet, turned to the blackboard that Coach Graves had used, and shattered it with a head butt to the roar of the Gators. That created an almost cartoon-like scene as the Gators rushed almost in unison to the locker room door.

There was just one teensy little problem. It was a single wide door, wide enough for one person at a time to pass through. There were probably 50 players in uniform rushing the door and trying to get out.

The chaos of getting out of the locker room gave way to the reality of Homecoming weekend in Tuscaloosa and the imposing Alabama Crimson Tide, whose coaching staff included future University of Florida head coach Charley Pell and future Division I head coaches Howard Schnellenberger, Gene Stallings and Jimmy Sharpe. Alabama’s roster included numerous players who would make All-America during their careers: Namath, Paul Crane, Wayne Freeman, Dan Kearly, David Ray and Steve Sloan.

The adrenaline rush of the locker room carried over to the opening kickoff, where Bama’s All-SEC halfback Benny Nelson caught the ball around the three. Nelson took two steps, lost the ball momentarily, and once he scooped it back up, tried to run laterally across the field. The fired up Gators blew through Alabama’s blockers. Hagood Clark was the first one down the field. He sliced through the Bama blockers like they weren’t even there and knocked Nelson to the ground at the six.

After a first down run netted one yard, Namath dropped back to throw a 12-yard out pattern, but a high throw and tight coverage forced an incompletion and a most conservative decision. Bryant sent in the punt team on third down and it was a near disaster because Buddy French fumbled the snap in the face of an all-out Florida rush. He scooped up the ball and barely made it out of the end zone to avoid a safety. On fourth down, punting from the back of the end zone, French hit a line drive out to the 40 that Bruce Bennett returned to the Alabama 28. Florida picked up six yards on its first two plays from scrimmage but a missed assignment on third down resulted in Tommy Shannon getting swarmed under for a three-yard loss. Graves sent in Bobby Lyle who launched what was, at the time, a lengthy field goal from 43 yards out for a 3-0 Florida lead.

Later in the quarter, Alabama got possession after a Florida fumble at the Gator 30. On second-and-one at the UF 21, Namath rolled right and tried to hit Ray Ogden in the end zone, but the combination of Florida pursuit and a three-deep zone forced an overthrow. Third-and-one turned into fourth-and-two when linebacker Jimmy Morgan got a clean shot at Mike Fracchia, nailing the big Alabama fullback for a 1-yard loss. On fourth down Alabama went for it, but the Gators swarmed Nelson, who fumbled, the first of three Crimson Tide turnovers.

Florida blew a couple of scoring opportunities in the second and third quarters so the score remained 3-0 until the fourth quarter. That’s when the Gators stunned Alabama with a 75-yard scoring drive that was saved by a procedure penalty. On third-and-five at the UF 45, Shannon fumbled and Alabama apparently recovered, but the zebras had thrown a flag just prior to the ball being snapped. The fumble nullified, the Gators got a do-over from their own 40. On third-and-10, Shannon rolled to his right and sidearmed a throw to tight end Barry Brown, who made a leaping catch at the Alabama 42, holding onto the ball as he took a hard shot from the Alabama safety.

On the next play, running out of a three-back, power-I formation, Dick Kirk took a handoff and made a nifty move that caused an Alabama tackler to miss what could have been a 3-yard loss. At the line of scrimmage, Kirk broke a tackle. Two steps later, he wormed his way through a small crease that got him into open space at the second level. Cutting back to his left, Kirk needed a block to pick off the Alabama safety. Almost out of nowhere, split end Charlie Casey arrived to deliver a crushing block that pancaked the Alabama safety at the 24. From there it was a footrace to the end zone that Kirk won as two Bama defenders gave chase. With the extra point, the Gators led 10-0. Denny Stadium was eerily silent.

Alabama wasn’t done. On the ensuing drive, the Crimson Tide converted a fourth-and-three on a pitch play to Nelson and a third-and-15 on laser strike from Namath. A 66-yard scoring drive culminated with a 1-yard sneak by Namath to cut the lead to 10-6. Bryant wasn’t going to settle for a tie so he went for two but the Florida defense came up big once again, pressuring a bad throw. When the Gators got the ball back, they were able to run out the clock for what was the win over the highest-ranked opponent in history at that time.

The Gators celebrated by carrying Graves off the field on their shoulders. On the buses as they waited to depart for the airport, Namath climbed aboard and congratulated the Gators on a hard fought win.

“What a classy gesture,” Dick Kirk would say years later while recalling the aftermath. “He was an All-American who had just gotten beat and it was at home where they never lose. And he took the time to congratulate us that way.”

This game was not televised so everyone in Gainesville had listened to Otis Boggs calling the game on WRUF. From the moment Otis signed off, Gainesville was abuzz with excitement. Several bonfires were set, the most prominent of which was the one on the corner of 13th Street and University Avenue, fueled by furniture from the SAE and Pike fraternity houses. All up and down University Avenue you would have thought the Gators had won the national championship judging by the celebration that seemed to grow larger by the minute.

There were traffic jams on Waldo Road where fans drove to meet the UF charter at the airport. This was before there was a terminal with assigned gates. There were no fences or no restraints to prevent thousands of fans from swelling onto the tarmac and lining the runway. In the hour before the UF charter landed, the crowd continued to swell. Some of the conservative estimates say somewhere between 8,000-10,000 fans were there to greet the Gators. Folks who were actually there swear it might have been double that.

The party that was taking place both at the airport and throughout the city was visible in the sky where the Florida charter approached. The pilot circled Gainesville so the players and coaches could see what a city-wide celebration looked like. He had to buzz the runway to clear people so he could even land the plane.

“There were no gates at the airport and since there was no fence to keep the crowd away, soon as the planed landed and stopped, they just rolled the stairway up to the plane,” Thompson said. “The crowd just surrounded us and just pushed forward. When we were going down the stairs we were holding our bags real tight, close to us, because the people were reaching out to touch us and to grab us. None of us had ever seen anything or been a part of anything like it.”

The next week the Gators shut out Vanderbilt, 21-0, but in the two weeks after, UF lost to LSU, 14-0, at Homecoming and 19-0 at 5th-ranked Auburn. The listing ship was righted a week later when the Gators knocked off Georgia, 21-14, a game made famous because Larry Dupree played the game a day after his child was stillborn. The Gators would finish their season 6-3-1 with a win over Miami, 27-21, at the Orange Bowl and a 7-0 win over Florida State, which featured future NFL quarterback Steve Tensi and Hall of Fame receiver Fred Biletnikoff.

In these days and times, a 6-3-1 record would have earned a bowl bid for the Gators but there were only nine bowl games at the time. Despite no postseason game, it was still a memorable year for Thompson, who exhausted his eligibility.

“In my three years (freshmen weren’t eligible), we never lost a game to Georgia,” the Savannah-native Thompson said. “Savannah’s a big Georgia town so that was one of the real highlights of my time at Florida, but that win over Alabama … that was really, really big.”

For years, Bear Bryant had called Florida “the sleeping giant” of the Southeastern Conference. It would be 28 years after that 10-6 win over Alabama before the Gators ever won a Southeastern Conference championship that counted – the Gators won it on the field in 1984 only to have the SEC strip UF of the title because of NCAA sanctions – but beating Alabama in Tuscaloosa was indeed impactful.

Thompson spent the 1964-65 seasons as a graduate assistant before joining the Florida staff full time as one of the freshman team coaches in 1966. Steve Spurrier led the Gators to a 23-9 record from 1964-66 but more important, three straight top three finishes in the Southeastern Conference. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1966 when he led the Gators to a 9-2 record and a win over Georgia Tech in Bobby Dodd’s final game as a head coach in the Orange Bowl.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the win over Alabama was when the sleeping giant woke up, but it was a big moment,” Thompson said. “Bob Woodruff got things started in a way because the Gators were competitive and they went to their first two bowl games (Gator Bowl in 1952 and 1958). Coach Graves pushed things along and I think made us realize what could happen here. Coach (Doug) Dickey had us two or three years within a play or two of winning the SEC before things fell apart. You know about Coach Pell and Coach Hall and what happened in the 1980s. Then Coach Spurrier arrived and you could really say the sleeping giant woke up.”

Maybe it took until 1991 before the giant was fully awake, but on October 12, 1963 the giant had both eyes open and was starting to stretch.