Big Red's Story

Numerous obstacles were placed in front of Randal Davidson, and he overcame them all with a figurative fist pump in order to honor his favorite high school football team.

Even a house fire could not stop him from completing his quest to document the history of Dalton High School Catamounts football.

The Dalton High teacher and voice of Catamounts football on local radio is on the verge of publishing his first book, “Catamounts! The Glorious History of Dalton Football, Volume One.” It includes a year-by-year recap of each season, beginning with the first in 1924 and ending in 1969. A planned second volume will include the years 1970 through 2012, which Davidson expects to publish sometime next year. Davidson said this year’s first volume will be around 220 pages long.

Agonizing ending

Davidson was still finalizing edits and last-minute proofing as late as this past Friday, and he wants to make sure everything is as perfect as it can be. And that search for perfect has been the most agonizing part of the decade-long process. It is the “last 5 percent,” he said, that “will keep me awake at night.”

“That random typo will haunt you for the rest of your life,” he said. “It’s something that will drive you crazy because you put ‘an’ instead of ‘and.’ So I keep doing it and doing it and re-doing it. So what happens is your brain starts doing autocorrect, but you don’t do it on the page.”

The 2004 University of Tennessee Chattanooga graduate moved to Dalton in the summer of 1995 and started as the voice of Dalton football on WYYU-104.5 FM. He currently teaches history at the school, which is part of the reason he wanted to venture down this road. However, he admits he “didn’t know a thing about Dalton football” when he first moved to the area.

“One of the first things I did was I went to (Dalton State College) and pulled up some old microfilm from the newspaper articles,” he said. “I started reading them and printed off some copies of stuff just to know anything. I would do that over the next few years. It didn’t occur to me until about 10 years ago. I went there to look up something and then I decided to find out when it began. I had no idea. It could’ve began in the 1940s for all I know.

“I went through and found the whole year’s game articles. Over the next few months I kept doing more and more and you start finding stories, and just asides, that were more interesting to me as a history teacher than the main stuff because it’s fascinating. About 10 years ago I started talking about doing a book.”

And thus began the journey. The book is heavy on research, but he did speak to a handful of people, including former head coach Bill Chappell, who won 317 games in 33 seasons and the 1967 state championship, George Mitchell, who was a star Catamount in the 1950s, current head coach Matt Land and others.

“I think it’s great,” Land said. “There’s so much history with Dalton high football, so much tradition, and so much hasn’t been chronicled. It rests on the older generations of our community and even other towns. It has truly become an obsession with him and has taken a large portion of his life.”

Much of his time was not spent talking to the past figures as much as finding newspaper articles, photos, records or anything that might give game-by-game information. He said it is “90 percent” research and he’s spent “hundreds” of hours at Dalton State and “thousands” of hours altogether trying to put 46 years of puzzle pieces together, something no one has done before.

“It’s very rare that you come across something that is not chronicled nowadays,” Davidson said. “I mean, everything has been written and re-written. This is something. It has not been done. The best records that exist are missing 20 or 30 games.”

And he’s been relatively successful, but two things are poking him while he sleeps.

“I am missing two games, and one I’m not sure it got played,” he said. “This week I am working with a library in Petersburg, Tenn., trying to figure out the score of a game. I know (Dalton) lost. I know what happened in these two games. They lost both games. One happened in 1928; one happened in 1932.”

Won’t lose it

Davidson did not remember the exact date, but when a fire broke out at his Rising Fawn home, there was a short list of things he was thinking about. He got the call and headed home. When he arrived on scene, the first thing he and his wife did was make sure everyone, including their five kids, was OK.

After that, Davidson was focusing on his work.

“The fire department gets there and there is smoke going everywhere and they are suiting up,” he said. “I put my T-shirt over my head and went in there and got my bucket of research and got it out.”

There was no way he was letting years of work go to the wayside, considering he finally started sitting down to chronicle the history around 2000.

“If I had lost that, there’s almost no way I’d do it again,” he said. “If I had lost that after putting all that time and effort into it, to have the energy to start that over, that’s hard to say. I’m not saying I wouldn’t, but that’s hard to say. So I made sure I got that out.”

The fire didn’t burn the house down but did do some damage in the kitchen, he said. However, it still has him out of his home and in a cabin with no Internet access. For the final few weeks of summer, it was a chore to finish his research.

“That has thrown a curve ball into everything,” he said. “Not being in school made it tough. Right now, being in school, I have the Internet whenever I want, but for that time period, I had to make a lot of trips to libraries.”

One person who is happy he did not lose the information is Chappell, who has a foreword at the beginning of the book.

“There’s so much history here in Dalton, particularly football wise,” Chappell said. “It needs to be recognized.”

Even people like Land, who have been involved with the program for all of their lives, want to know more about the history.

“I remember what happened from 1979 and forward,” Land said. “I want to read the stories from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. ... There’s a lot of mythological characters that have existed over the years that I’m really excited to read about.”

Fascinating fascination

The book focuses heavily on game-by-game recaps more that statistics, because Davidson said no one ever documented statistics from the earliest decades of Catamounts football. And the games that are really flushed out are playoff games.

For a history buff, Davidson had trouble picking specific years that were his favorite, because he likes it all. He has the research done all the way through 2011 season — 88 years of gridiron tradition.

Of the 46 from the first volume, it came down to six seasons that fascinated him more than the rest. The first two? The first season ever, when the team played at Prudent Park across from Harmon Field, and the first undefeated season.

“1956 was an undefeated year, and that was a neat year,” he said. “I love the 1924 team, because it was the first year. They got waxed by LaFayette in their first game, and then they came back four games later and tied them.”

Then it is a more well-known team, one that is highlighted on the back cover of his book with a photo of Chappell being carried off the field.

“And the 1967 state championship, here is a team that lost their first game of the year and then turned around and beat that team in the region championship 33-0,” Davidson said. “You could just see this progression get better and better and steam roll. When they got to West Rome again, they had played them four times in around 19 months. The total point separation from those games was about nine points. They get to them and win 33-0, same exact team.”

And finally, a group of three years he considers underrated: 1961, 1962 and 1963, the final three of head coach Alf Anderson’s 17-year Catamounts coaching career.

“I’m fascinated by coach Anderson’s last three years,” he said. “Coach Chappell gets the ink — 317 wins, 33 years, a state championship and all of that — and rightfully so. Coach Anderson’s last three years were 26-5, and that’s a good record. The upward climb had certainly started then.”

And the moments of glee from the process? One was finding the very beginning.

“Who said, ‘We want football’? That is the interesting stuff that takes more detective work,” Davidson said. “I found that, and it doesn’t specifically say it, but you can draw a line from A to B to C to D and figure it out.”

Another is finding those nuggets of information. Davidson hopes it happens twice more.

“Finding stuff that you didn’t think you’d find,” he said when asked what his favorite part of writing the book was. “Someone tells me that it doesn’t exist and I call another library and they tell me they’ll get back to me and then they tell me they found it.

“It’s driving me crazy I don’t have two final scores.”

Unaltered summary

Davidson hasn’t even started really promoting the book, and he already received positive feedback.

“I’ve got so many people who said, ‘I want to get this for my dad because my dad graduated in 1971,’” he said. “I had someone who said his grandfather was in the first band, and I have the first band in there.”

One thing he said he’s tried hard to avoid is telling a story not about the program. He wanted to tell the Catamounts’ history, and not an individual player or group of players. He wanted to give readers as best a year-by-year timeline as there could be.

“The story I’m trying to tell is just Dalton football,” he said. “It’s hard to do because people like George Mitchell are just fascinating.”

The chapters go by decades with years by subheads. At the end of each chapter is an alphabetical roster filled with each player’s name.

“That was a very long process getting that done,” Davidson said.

That is one thing he wanted to show, and something he thought would be appreciated. It ended up being part of the reason he had to divide the project into two parts.

“The 1950s might be 50 pages, and the 1960s might be 60 pages. You have more information, and they are playing more games,” he said. “I think the second half of the book would probably add 350 pages to it. That epiphany didn’t come to me until a month ago.”

Once the first volume goes to print, Davidson plans to sit back and relax and not think about the next volume for a little while.

“The hardest part is getting to the point where you think, ‘OK, I’ve done it,’” he said.

There is one part he is finished with, and has been since his first draft.

“The back cover, to me that is the summary,” he said. “I wrote that back cover a long time ago, and I haven’t changed a syllable. The day I wrote it, I loved it. ... I have not touched it.”

And a summary of the summary?

“The book is the story of one of the central facets of this community, one of the hubs, one of the backbones,” Davidson said. “While everything is changing, it is the story of the kids who played a game that captured a community.”

Dalton High School Catamounts

Search Results

GRIDIRON GLORY ON YOUR COFFEE TABLE

Related Photos

Discussion

Big Red's Story

Davidson brings Dalton football program’s history to pages

Site Map

Contact Us