Mark WiedmerBRENTWOOD, Tenn. – Back in the early 1980s, when John Green Jr. was making a pretty fair name for himself on the Red Bank High School golf team, a local sports writer of that era walked up to Green’s father at the close of a Lions match and said, “Didn’t you used to be somebody famous?”
In the 113 seasons the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has fielded a football team, it would be hard to find anyone more famous in his time than John Edward Green Sr. And that doesn’t include what the Little All-America quarterback later did in the pros, when he started zinging touchdowns for the Buffalo Bills, the New York Titans (now the N.Y. Jets) and the Toronto Argonauts.
A single bit of trivia to understand how good he was: When Tennessee Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota became the youngest player in NFL history to throw four touchdown passes in the first half of his first regular-season game, he also became only the second first-year player to accomplish such a feat. The first was Green during his rookie year with the old American Football League’s Buffalo Bills in 1960.
Not that Green – who died last Wednesday, April 24, at the too-young age of 81 after a long and courageous battle with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease – was much for talking about such exploits. As retired Episcopal priest Randy Dunnavant noted during a touching eulogy on Sunday at the Church of the Good Shepherd, “Someone else had to tell me he’d been a pro football player because he never talked about it.”
But around the Scenic City, they’ll always talk about the performance Green turned in against the University of Tennessee on Nov. 8, 1958.