The results for the 29th Annual FWAA Best Writing Contest presented by collegepressbox include one writer who claimed two first places and a total of five double placers.

Alex Scarborough of ESPN.com won first place in both Column and Enterprise; Glenn Guilbeau of USA Today took the Game Story category, and Dave Wilson of ESPN.com was tops in Feature.

Other double placers were Travis Hines of the Des Moines Register (second place and an honorable mention); Ryan McGee of ESPN.com (second place and an honorable mention); Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports (third place and an honorable mention); Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com (two honorable mentions), and Eric Hansen of the South Bend Tribune (two honorable mentions). 

First-place winners will receive game balls from Big Game and collegepressbox.  Finishers 1-3 receive cash prizes and certificates. Honorable mentions receive certificates. The first-place entries will be displayed in The Fifth Down.

Click on each first-place winner’s name below to read their stories. To go to a page with all the first-place stories, CLICK HERE.

GAME

First Place — Glenn Guilbeau, USA TODAY

Second Place — Travis Hines, Des Moines Register

Third Place — Matt Baker, Tampa Bay Times

Honorable Mention — Ryan McGee, ESPN.com; Eric Hansen, South Bend Tribune; Dick Friedman, Harvard Magazine; Michael Lev, Arizona Daily Star/Tucson.com

FEATURE

First Place — Dave Wilson, ESPN.com

Second Place — Andrea Adelson, ESPN.com

Third Place — David Jones, PennLive.com

Honorable Mention — Nate Mink, Syracuse Post-Standard; Ross Dellenger, Sports Illustrated; David Ubben,The Athletic

COLUMN

First Place — Alex Scarborough, ESPN.com

Second Place — Ryan McGee, ESPN.com

Third Place — Reese Becker, Fifth Quarter

Honorable Mention — Eric Hansen, South Bend Tribune; Dennis Dodd, CBSSports.com; Pete Thamel, Yahoo Sports

ENTERPRISE

First Place — Alex Scarborough, ESPN.com

Second Place — Audrey Snyder, The Athletic

Third Place — Pete Thamel, Yahoo Sports

Honorable Mention — Travis Hines, Des Moines Register; Dennis Dodd, CBSSports.com; Matt Fortuna, The Athletic

By Alex Scarborough

ESPN.com

For going on 14 years, Alabama has beaten Tennessee every October, and every year coaches and players have enjoyed a traditional postgame cigar. You’ve probably seen the photos that pop up on social media around this time each year. The one of Derrick Henry puffing a stogie with his arm around Nick Saban is particularly memorable, the running back towering over his head coach.

Fans have gotten in on the action, too. Television cameras have often panned into the crowds in the fourth quarter to show plumes of smoke rising from the bleachers. And somewhere, whether in Bryant-Denny Stadium or at his home in town, Jimmy Tom Goostree has been watching it all with a smile on his face.

Jimmy Tom’s father, Jim Goostree, is the reason cigar shops in Tuscaloosa and Knoxville have a run of business the week of the rivalry that’s better known as the Third Saturday in October.

Jim was a longtime trainer at Alabama, but before that he was an assistant trainer at Tennessee. And like his boss, Paul “Bear” Bryant, he hated the Volunteers. So, the story goes, in the fall of 1961, Jim made a bet with the players on the team. Beat Tennessee for the first time in six years, he said, and he’ll dance around the locker room naked.

Whether by talent or precision or the promise of seeing Jim cut a rug, the Crimson Tide beat the Vols 34-3. And true to his word, Jim danced, albeit with a victory cigar pressed between his lips.

Thankfully, the stogie is the only part of the celebration that carried over.

“It’s a sense of pride for all of our family members,” Jimmy Tom said. “It means a lot that Dad is recognized this particular week.”

Bill Oliver was a senior on that 1961 team that started it all, and he remembers the elder Goostree as “a little short fella” and an excellent trainer. He had “a keen mind,” Oliver said, and he understood the rivalry with Tennessee better than almost anyone given his time with the program prior to coming to Alabama. Oliver said Goostree’s history paid off in that “the more knowledge you had, the more you could find out, the more we could smoke cigars.”

“Beating them was the ultimate,” Oliver recalled. “It really was.”

Jim Goostree died in 1999, and Jimmy Tom isn’t sure where all the time went. When he walks into his den, though, he’s reminded of his father. In a glass case, on the top shelf, is a football that’s nearly 50 years old. There are no markings on it to signify its importance, but Jimmy Tom knows.

More…

By Dave Wilson

ESPN.com

In the late 1990s, at a benefit 30 miles away from his East Texas hometown of Tyler, Earl Campbell sat at a table while the party’s host, a colorful businessman and one of Campbell’s best friends, summoned sheepish onlookers to come say hello to the legend.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Get on over here,” he said. “Earl don’t get up.”

Campbell wasn’t aloof, wasn’t too cool to get up, despite the darkened Wayfarers that made him look cool. “Earl don’t get up” because he couldn’t.

Campbell was once seen as the baddest man on the planet. He left tacklers and pieces of his tearaway jersey on the field behind him. Off the field, he wore Wranglers and giant belt buckles and did Skoal commercials. He was declared an official State Hero in 1981 by the Texas legislature, an honor previously bestowed upon only Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett.

As time went on and he was out of public view, Campbell broke down. At the Heisman Trophy ceremony, he remained in his seat while his fraternity brothers lined up on stage behind the winner. At Texas football games, he was always in a golf cart or riding on a scooter. Fans would pity him, muttering “Poor Earl,” as they tried to reconcile their love of football with Campbell being seen as a cautionary tale of its ravages.

But years later, he would discover through a decades-long medical odyssey, that was only part of the story.

“What happened over time is everybody just thinks I had football injuries,” says Campbell, who turned 65 in March. “They look at me and they think, ‘Oh, poor Earl.’ People really don’t know the truth about it.”

The truth came late to Campbell himself, which is why he hasn’t told this story in much detail before. Yet this year, he is deliberative as he relishes the biggest honor of a football life filled with so many of them. In July, the University of Texas announced it would immediately change the name of the football field at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium to Campbell-Williams Field to honor Campbell, who won the 1977 Heisman Trophy, and the Longhorns’ other Heisman winner, Ricky Williams (1998).

It is remarkable for several reasons. First, for how it happened: The field was previously named for Joe Jamail, a billionaire attorney and Texas mega-booster who was a close friend of Campbell’s. But amid a conversation about social justice led by Texas players on campus following George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, Jamail’s three sons asked the university to remove their late father’s name and replace it with the names of the two Longhorns legends, replacing a wealthy booster’s name with two of the most prominent Black athletes in school history.

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