The Coach

He was the epitome of a certain breed of winning football coach, a giant tending to paunch since his playing days, a man with a muscular glad-hand and sharp tongue, a celebrity of sorts who had had so much acclaim that he floated on an air of supreme self-confidence, certain that things would be fine--so long as he won. Once, when the student paper at his alma mater, North Carolina, took him to task for "playing to win and win alone," Big Jim Tatum replied: "Winning isn't the most important thing--it's the only thing."

That was the way things usually did work out for James Moore Tatum. He won. One of nine children--and the last of five left tackles--born to a merchant-banker-farmer of varying fortune in McColl, S.C., Tatum was sent to the University of North Carolina by an uncle, was rugged enough (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) to get an All-America mention or two in his senior year on Coach Carl Snavely's powerhouse. After graduating in 1935, Tatum signed on as Snavely's assistant, followed him to Cornell, and laid the foundations of a remarkable coaching career.

Navy T-Time. By 1942 he was head coach at North Carolina (5 wins, 2 defeats, 2 ties), soon went on to help the Navy with its Iowa Pre-Flight team. There, along with Bud Wilkinson, Tatum learned the secrets of the split-T offense from Head Coach Don Faurot, who had dreamed up the system at the University of Missouri. After the war, the big man with the bull-bellow voice lost no time building a football winner and a 'Gator Bowl victory at the University of Oklahoma. He was big time and growing bigger. When the University of Maryland offered him a free hand to set up a football machine in 1947, Tatum accepted for the chance to show people how a football factory should really run.

The Glory Days. At Maryland, Jim Tatum became the most successful major college coach in the game. Witty and winning, he was a tireless recruiter, prowling the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia night after night for the agile, brawny kids he needed to make the split-T work. In nine years his teams won 73, lost only 15, tied 4, and went to five bowl games. In the glory days of 1953, while the stands chanted "We're number one!", Maryland was undefeated, was judged the national champion by wire-service polls, and Jim Tatum was coach of the year.

Still, it was not all roses for Tatum, even at Maryland. The university was criticized for overemphasizing football; in one year the school handed out 93 scholarships, averaging $944 each, to Tatum's players. When Dr. Wilson Elkins, a Rhodes scholar and onetime University of Texas quarterback, was named president in 1954 and set out to raise Maryland's academic standing, Tatum got itchy feet. In 1956, taking a salary cut from $18,500 to $15,000, Jim Tatum went home to North Carolina. Said he with a rum-Wing chuckle: "I'm going back to North Carolina to die."

The Maryland student paper was not sad to see him go: Tatum's tenure "was an era in which an inadequate stadium became ultra-adequate, and an inadequate library became more inadequate." Nor was the North Carolina student paper glad to see him come--"this parasitic monster of open professionalism. . . ."

Place at Home. The man who at Maryland once rolled up a 74-13 score on a hapless Missouri team coached by his old master, Don Faurot, sat through a season of agonizing (2-7-1) defeat. He learned to tone down his blasts, worked so hard at his job that he landed in a hospital, gradually won a place at his old school. This season, with 24 returning lettermen, was to be the year for North Carolina. But fortnight ago, his huge 240-lb. body covered with a red rash, Jim Tatum was rushed to the university hospital. Doctors diagnosed an overwhelming attack of a "common type of virus" that had affected his vital organs. Last week, at 45, Coach Jim Tatum died.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.