KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The roar of the Neyland Stadium crowd was still ringing in Tennessee coach Josh Heupel’s ears when he finally got home late Saturday night.
“And that’s a good thing,” Heupel told ESPN. “There’s always the next game, but a scene like that is something you don’t want to forget. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He hopes to see a lot more like it, as does a suddenly recharged Tennessee fan base that is basking in Saturday’s 38-33 win over Florida, a game that, in typical fashion for this series, went down to the very end.
It was also a game, at least in the eyes of long-suffering Tennessee fans, that looked all too familiar in those final frantic minutes. Florida clawed back from a 38-21 deficit midway through the fourth quarter, and after recovering an onside kick, the Gators had one final heave by quarterback Anthony Richardson from the Tennessee 39-yard line to win it.
Tennessee defensive end Byron Young hit Richardson as he released the pass, and cornerback Kamal Hadden had an easy interception at the 6-yard line to seal the game.
Only then could Heupel or anybody wearing Tennessee’s shade of orange (Pantone 151) exhale.
“It’s like a punch-drunk fighter. You’re just waiting for that next blow to come,” said Tennessee fan Rusty Rathburn, who made the trip from Portage, Michigan, along with sons Luke and Max to see his alma mater accomplish something it has done only twice in the past 18 years — beat Florida.
“We’ve had so much misery against these guys. You’re waiting for us to screw it up. But this team is different.”
Similarly, Heupel spent all week hammering home to his players that this was a different team, different game, different year. And, yet, he was also keenly aware of how deeply the scars run among the Big Orange faithful when it comes to the Gators, who had dominated this rivalry back to the height of Phillip Fulmer’s successful tenure at Tennessee, when even some of his most talented teams didn’t have an answer for old nemesis Steve Spurrier.
So, yes, Heupel soaked up the moment with his players and the fans, most of whom remained in the stands covered in orange-and-white checkerboard for nearly 20 minutes after the game.
“I love the pride and the passion of our fan base, and I can promise you that our players feel every bit of it,” Heupel said.
Indeed, Neyland Stadium was electric, bursting at the seams, as the Pride of the Southland marching band played “Rocky Top” loud enough and long enough for it seemingly to be heard in every corner of the state, from Mohawk to Union City and all points in between.
It’s true this was hardly the best Florida team that Tennessee has faced over the years. After all, the Vols were 10½-point favorites, the most they’ve been favored in the series since the 1970s. Billy Napier is in his first season as Florida’s coach, and the Gators have some big holes to fill on their roster.
Still, it was Florida, and as Spurrier himself put it last week, “It just seems like a whole lot of good things always happen to the Gators in this game and a whole lot of bad things happen to the Vols.”
So who could blame the Big Orange Nation for partying like it was 1998, the year of the Vols’ last national championship? The party might continue for a while with Tennessee having a bye week this Saturday.
“It’s surreal, to be able to come here and really just experience this and see how it’s all changed from when I first got here until what it is now,” junior defensive tackle Omari Thomas said. “It’s something we want to keep building on, and honestly, get it better and better each week.”
Saturday’s postgame scene will be hard to match.
Former players from five different decades flocked to Heupel to hug him. They hugged current players, and they hugged each other. Heath Shuler was there. So were Al Wilson, Josh Dobbs, two generations of Colquitts (Craig and Britton) as well as Jabari Davis and Fred White, who weren’t bashful about lighting up victory cigars.
Arian Foster, a four-time Pro Bowler, was back at Neyland for the first time since he played his final game at Tennessee during the 2008 season.
“I can promise you that I will be back,” said Foster, who led the NFL in 2010 with 1,616 yards rushing.
Tony Vitello, Tennessee’s fiery baseball coach, had done his part to fire up the crowd before the game, and he was a buzz saw afterward. Earlier in the week, he said his biggest goal was to not get arrested.
It appears he achieved that goal and didn’t chest-bump any officials (or umpires), either. Vitello even joked on the set of ESPN’s College GameDay before the game that “if we win, everybody could go streaking.”
It was that kind of day on Rocky Top, a breakthrough of sorts for a football program that has wallowed around in a gator-infested wasteland for most of the past two decades. Entering Saturday’s game, the Vols had more coaches (six) than they had wins over the Gators (five) in the previous three decades.
Wilson, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame last year, speaks for the entire Tennessee fan base when he says he still feels the pain of those Florida losses going all the way back to the 1990s.
“I lost five games my whole college career, and three of them were to Florida. I mean, come on. We were sick of losing to them and sick of hearing about everything that Spurrier said,” said Wilson, the heart and soul of Tennessee’s 1998 national championship team.
Earl Brown and his wife, Judy, are some of the most dedicated Tennessee fans on the planet. Earl has been to 320 Tennessee football games in a row without missing one, a streak that goes back to 1996.
“There’s joy and relief,” Brown said. “There were a lot of years in there that we were the better team and didn’t win. I think this is the one that gets us back through that door of getting to where we all want to be again.”
The Vols (4-0) haven’t won more than eight games in the regular season since 2007, Fulmer’s next-to-last season.
Stephen Crutchfield hasn’t missed a Tennessee SEC game since 2007. He lives three blocks from Neyland Stadium in the Fort Sanders area just off campus. He said one of the reasons he moved there was to be closer to the Vols’ football cathedral.
“At the end of the day, people just want to win, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a defensive battle or the way we play now with a lot of offense,” Crutchfield said. “People don’t want to hear that you’re building anything or that you’re getting better or that you’re a class away. They just want to win, which makes a [win] like this so important.”
That’s why Rathburn, who graduated from Tennessee in 1987, didn’t mind making the eight-hour drive and a significant financial investment to be in Knoxville on Saturday. He paid $1,375 for three tickets in the upper deck and forked over $700 per night for a hotel room.
“This ranks up there with the ’98 Florida game with how crazy the place was,” Rathburn said. “I don’t remember it much louder. The Tennessee fans were hungry for this. There’s hope now, the kind of hope we haven’t had in a while. It’s amazing what Heupel has done in less than two years.”
Heupel’s demeanor is about as steady as it gets, and that steadiness has endeared him to his players. Tennessee fired previous coach Jeremy Pruitt after an internal investigation uncovered 18 Level 1 violations for impermissible recruiting benefits. Even with that NCAA cloud hovering, Heupel has steered the Vols to the No. 8 spot in the latest AP poll, their highest ranking since 2006.
“The guys play hard for Josh because he coaches unafraid,” said Scott Altizer, who returned as director of football relations last year after working for 20 years on Tennessee’s football staff beginning in 1994. “He preaches letting it all hang out and going out and having fun.”
Casey Clausen, the only Vols quarterback to have beaten Florida twice in his career (2001 and 2003), sees a version of Tennessee that he hasn’t seen in a while, a version that falls in line with Heupel’s go-for-broke, warp-speed offense.
“There’s a juice that’s back in the program, and for the younger generation of players, they don’t necessarily know about the past with Florida or anybody else, nor do they care or should they care,” said Clausen, who lives in California and still follows the Vols closely.
“Coach Heupel seems to have it back to, ‘It’s our team versus their team,’ and all the other noise doesn’t matter. You see that in the way this team plays, even when it doesn’t play its best football.
“The other thing is that he’s not playing with some of the same 4- and 5-star players a lot of the other SEC teams have, but he’s going to get there. You look at that offense and how fun it is to play in it, and why wouldn’t a big-time skill player want to come and play in that offense?”
This was a massive recruiting weekend for the Vols, as some of the top prospects on their board were in town.
Heupel made sure to practice what he preaches late Saturday night. Several of the former players, including Foster, were in the locker room after the game. And although nobody would say for sure, in the middle of that circle of 125 players dancing, Heupel might have been showing off a few moves of his own.
“If you can’t have fun in that environment, you can’t have fun anywhere,” said Heupel, who showcased his best vertical leap since his Oklahoma playing days and got in a few Tiger Woods-sized fist pumps after Jaylen Wright‘s 5-yard touchdown run gave his team a 38-21 lead midway through the fourth quarter.
Heupel typically has a large contingent of family in town for home games, and by the time he got home Saturday night after meeting with recruits and doing his TV show, he switched roles from coach to uncle with several nieces and nephews running around the house.
Finally, at the end of the night, he got to spend some quiet time with his wife, Dawn.
“Everybody had gone to bed, and we just looked at each other and said, ‘What a great day,'” Heupel said. “It was a huge moment for us as we continue to build this program and how much the players have invested. It’s really a lot of fun when you’re a part of the climb.”
But, as Heupel is quick to point out, the Vols are still in the early stages of that climb. After an open date, they play LSU on Oct. 8 and Alabama on Oct. 15, facing two of the past three national champions. That’s not to mention a game with No. 7 Kentucky on Oct. 29 and a trip to defending national champion Georgia on Nov. 5. The win over Florida was only the fifth Tennessee victory over Alabama, Florida or Georgia since the start of Fulmer’s final season in 2008, making the Vols 5-38 against those teams in that span.
That’s why Heupel was right back at the football complex at 7:30 Sunday morning meeting with recruits.
“There’s always another big game, another test right around the corner,” he said.
And while the Vols have more points through four games (194) than any Tennessee team since 1915 (202), Heupel isn’t about to get ahead of himself. The Vols made the kinds of mistakes in their first two games against nationally ranked opponents (Pittsburgh and Florida) that usually result in defeat — blocked punts, fumbled punts, fumbles in the red zone and not recovering onside kicks.
What’s more, Tennessee has struggled mightily against the pass on defense, both in getting to the quarterback and especially at covering receivers. The Vols are also precariously thin at some key positions, including the offensive line and defensive secondary.
“There are so many things we can do a lot better and will have to do better as we go forward, but I go back to the resiliency of our players,” Heupel said. “Obviously, we didn’t finish that game the way we needed to, and you could sense that from the crowd a little bit when [Florida] got the onside kick. But what I love about our group is that they just keep playing.”
One of the Heupels’ traditions after games is gathering all the family members in town for a picture on the field.
Heupel and his wife were looking through those pictures together late Saturday night.
“We’re all standing there together and the stadium is still checkerboarded behind us, and this is still probably 20 minutes after the game had ended,” he said. “That’s going to be a cool background to that picture for us.”
Come December, Heupel wouldn’t mind having a few more pictures like that to admire.
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
BOSTON — The Red Sox activated All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman from the 10-day injured list before Friday’s game against Tampa Bay.
Bregman, who has been sidelined since May 24 with a right quad strain, returned to his customary spot in the field and was slotted in the No. 2 spot of Boston’s lineup for the second of a four-game series against the Rays. He sustained the injury when he rounded first base and felt his quad tighten up.
A two-time World Series winner who spent the first nine seasons of his big league career with the Houston Astros, Bregman signed a $120 million, three-year contract in February. At the time of the injury, he was hitting .299 with 11 homers and 35 RBI. Those numbers led to him being named to the American League’s All-Star team for the third time since breaking into the majors with the Astros in 2016.
Bregman missed 43 games with the quad strain. Earlier this week, he told reporters that he was trending in a direction where he didn’t believe he would require a minor league rehab assignment. With three games left before the All-Star break, the Red Sox agreed the time was right to reinstate a player to a team that entered Friday in possession of one of the AL’s three wild-card berths.
“He’s going to do his part,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said before Friday’s game. “Obviously, the timing, we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s been working hard on the swing … visualizing and watching video.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.