To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS). Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Unless otherwise noted, you can republish most of Mississippi Today’s stories for free under a Creative Commons license. He then played on the 1971 Marshall football team, highlighted in the movie, that heroically won three games. He attended funerals and memorial services in eight states. He would have been on that disastrous flight if not for an injury that caused him to miss the trip.Īfter the tragedy, Ruffin manned the phones in the Marshall athletic department, delivering the news to families of his friends. During the course of conversation, Ruffin, since deceased, told me that he was a captain of that 1970 Marshall team. Twenty-one years after the Marshall tragedy, I was speaking with Nate Ruffin, who was then of the human resources director of The Clarion Ledger, where I worked at the time. I still think about it every time I see a Marshall score.” All those young people with a whole life in front of them. I remember that I just sat there and thought about how an entire football team, one just like ours, had been killed in an instant. But I do remember that all the sudden none of that mattered very much. We had beaten Oklahoma State and Georgia and we would beat Ole Miss. Says Grubbs, who really was a running back, “LSU had popped us pretty good. “And I remember a couple players who had been really scared riding back in a car with the highway patrol men who had been with us for the game.” ![]() “That’s been a long, long time, but I remember how somber the mood was waiting for the flight and then how quiet it was on the plane,” Templeton said. Larry Templeton, who was a sports information assistant who would go on to become the school’s athletic director, was on the flight as well. No way he ever knew he got on that plane or got off.” He told us he wasn’t going to get on any plane sober that night, and he made darn sure he didn’t. ![]() “We had some fans with us and one of them – he was a judge I think – found the liquor cabinet. “They opened up the canteen at the airport and let us get whatever we wanted to eat and drink,” he said. Grubbs remembers one funny part of the entire episode. I had serious reservations about getting on the plane.” “Still I was like everybody else that night. ![]() “So I knew something about flying, including all the statistics about how much safer it was getting on an airplane that getting into your car,” Grubbs said.
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