End of an era: 50 years ago, Auburn’s Ralph ‘Shug’ Jordan announced he was stepping down

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series examining the career and legacy of Auburn football coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan, 50 years after he announced he was planning to retire after the coming season. In Part 1, we examine Jordan’s life including his 25 seasons as Tigers head coach, how the news broke he was stepping down and how his successor was chosen.

It wasn’t the way Ralph “Shug” Jordan wanted to inform the world of his plans, but even 50 years ago, the news cycle waited for no man.

An Auburn trustee leaked the news to a Mobile television station on April 7, 1975, that Jordan had told the board that the upcoming season would be his last as Tigers head football coach. The 64-year-old Jordan was left with no choice but to let everyone else know that the reports were true — he was stepping down after would be his 25th season.

“You have to make up your mind, put your hat on and walk out,” Jordan said, “and that’s what I’m doing.”

The previous January, Jordan had notified a handful of people — including school president Harry Philpott, athletics director Lee Hayley and David Housel, then an Auburn journalism instructor and later the school’s sports information director and AD — of his plans. All were sworn to secrecy, and all kept their word until John “Sonnie” Pace III, a businessman and trustee based in Mobile, broke the news on a local television program.

A press conference was scheduled for the following day, April 8, at Memorial Coliseum on the Auburn campus, but Jordan confirmed the news to a handful of reporters. The Birmingham News, which then published in the afternoon, splashed the headline “Jordan bowing out after this season” across the top of its sports front page.

“I was upset over the way the story broke,” Jordan was quoted as saying by The Birmingham News’ Jimmy Bryan. “It has done a lot of harm to Auburn. I have not had an opportunity to talk to the most important people of all … the players. This is not my way of doing it, the Auburn way of doing it and I apologize for the haphazard way it was done. We will have to find a way to forgive those people who caused it to happen this way.”

Ralph Jordan Jr., the coach’s son, said his father called him soon after it became apparent the story was about to break. The elder Jordan had had a scare with prostate cancer in 1969 and had missed the 1971 Gator Bowl following an emergency appendectomy, but assured everyone he wasn’t retiring for health reasons.

“He wanted me to know firsthand, not hear it on the evening sports,” the younger Jordan told AL.com. “I think he said ‘everybody’s got a certain amount of time here, and I’m going to enjoy what’s left of mine.’ He was not tired of football per se, but I think he was just conscious of the fact that he and Mother needed to enjoy their (final) years.

“I think if he’d had it in a perfect world, he would have announced it at the end of the (1975) season. But it leaked out, and so it is what it is.”

Auburn immediately announced Jordan’s successor that day as well, anointing offensive coordinator Doug Barfield as the Tigers’ next head coach. It was something of a surprising choice, given that Barfield was just 39-years-old and had been on the Auburn staff only four years.

Up until that moment, the conventional wisdom had been that defensive coordinator Paul Davis — then 53 and an Auburn assistant since 1967 — would be head coach after Jordan. But the school’s board of trustees ultimately landed on Barfield as their hire.

Jordan told reporters at the time that he had recommended several of his coaches as potential replacements. He added that he was “delighted” that Barfield would be his successor.

Author Jeff Miller — who wrote the 2022 book “Teammates for Life,” the story of Jordan’s 1972 team — was then an Auburn student who worked as sports director of the campus radio station. He said the announcement of Barfield’s ascension to head coach was certainly unexpected.

“Most people who were following Auburn football assumed that Paul Davis would be the next head coach,” Miller recalled. “And so there was both surprise and disappointment among most of the people who were familiar with Auburn football.”

Auburn went 3-6-2 in Jordan’s swan song, including a 28-0 loss to Alabama in the Iron Bowl. It was the Tigers’ first losing record in nine years and its first season not to end with a bowl game since 1967.

Fortunes didn’t improve under Barfield, whose five-year tenure included three losing seasons and a two-year postseason ban due to NCAA sanctions. Auburn went 29-25-1 from 1976-80, and Barfield was fired at the end of a season in which the Tigers finished 5-6 and did not win an SEC game.

“I’ll say this — Doug Barfield is a fine man,” Housel told AL.com. “Auburn people refer to those days, his tenure here, (derisively) as ‘the Barfield days.’ Coach Barfield had some good wins. He just didn’t have enough of them.

“… He never had a chance because Auburn people, trustees and all the fans, wanted him to be Shug Jordan II. They expected him to be Shug Jordan II. He had no chance unless he could be Doug Barfield. And the fans and the leaders of the program, they said they (wanted that), but they really didn’t.”

Since Jordan’s retirement, no Auburn head football coach has approached his quarter-century of stability. Every man to hold that position in the last 50 years has either been fired or resigned under pressure.

Jordan won 175 games and the 1957 national championship during his 25 years at Auburn. No coach since has stayed even half that.

“No matter what level of greatness it may attain,” Phillip Marshall wrote in the Birmingham Post-Herald at the time, “Auburn football will never be the same.”

A star athlete, then a war hero

So what made Jordan different? The answer goes far beyond football.

Born Sept. 25, 1910, in Selma, Jordan was the descendent of Welsh immigrants who had first settled in West Virginia before heading south (as his son told AL.com, the pronunciation of Jordan — with the “o” spoken more like a short “u” — goes back to the middle ages). He got his nickname from friends because of his affinity for sugar cane, which he would often peel and eat raw as a young man.

An outstanding all-around athlete, Jordan played football, baseball and basketball at Auburn, graduating in 1932. He soon after was hired as head basketball and assistant football coach at his alma mater, a position he held until joining the U.S. Army following the outbreak of World War II (he’d been in ROTC during his days as an Auburn student, and graduated with a commission as a Second Lieutenant).

Jordan — who eventually rose to the rank of Captain — served in north Africa and Sicily before participating in the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was wounded by shrapnel in the left arm and shoulder, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his service.

After recuperating from his injuries, Capt. Jordan returned to his unit and was shipped back to the U.S. in December 1944. Following a short time visiting with family, he was sent to Washington and then Hawaii and on to Okinawa, where he was to prepare for the planned invasion of Japan. (As most students of history know, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the war before the fighting reached the Japanese mainland.)

Military service was not uncommon for those with backgrounds in athletics during the World War II era, but Jordan had seen more action than most. A future coaching colleague was among the many who admired him for his war record.

“Shug has more courage in his little finger than I’ve got in my entire body,” Alabama’s Paul “Bear” Bryant, a Navy veteran himself, once said.

Though Ralph Jordan Jr. said his father in later years enjoyed telling war stories with fellow veterans, he didn’t care to discuss it with those who hadn’t been there. Terry Henley, a star Auburn halfback in the early 1970s, spent many long car trips with his old coach on the post-retirement banquet circuit.

“I could go on all day telling you things that I said at those banquets and things that he and I talked about when we were riding around together,” Henley said. “But one thing he did not talk about was storming the beach at Normandy. He never did. Never said a word about it. I mentioned it one time, and he said, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ And I never said another word about it.”

Jordan spent one year back at Auburn before being hired as a football assistant and basketball head coach at Georgia. He stayed in Athens for four years, then returned to his alma mater to become head football coach at a time when the program was at perhaps its lowest ebb.

Auburn went 3-22-4 in three seasons under head coach Earl Brown, including an 0-10 finish in 1950 that included seven shutout losses. The Tigers ended the season by losing to Clemson and Alabama by a combined score of 75-0.

“Auburn was in the dumps and the doldrums,” Housel said. “Had he not come and had (athletics director) Jeff Beard not hired him in 1951, Auburn would have probably been where Mississippi State or Vanderbilt is now. Auburn was terrible.”

A ‘gentleman coach,’ but fiercely loyal

Jordan’s first two Auburn teams went a combined 7-13, before a 7-3-1 breakthrough that included a trip to the Gator Bowl in 1953. The Tigers went 8-3 and beat Alabama 28-0 the following year, beginning a stretch of five consecutive victories in the game that would come to be known as the Iron Bowl (incidentally, it is Jordan who is credited with coining the now-ubiquitous nickname for the Alabama-Auburn game at some point in the mid-1960s).

The late 1950s were Jordan’s glory years, including a 10-0 record and the Associated Press national championship in 1957 and a 9-0-1 mark spoiled only by a tie with Georgia Tech in 1958. Alabama hired Bryant that year and would go on to dominate their in-state rival and college football in general for the next two-decades plus, but Jordan’s Tigers would have their share of highlights, including the magical Pat Sullivan-Terry Beasley era of 1969-71 and memorable seasons that featured Iron Bowl wins in 1963 and 1972.

Jordan was often described as a “gentleman coach,” but he wasn’t above showing his combativeness. Auburn lost the 1967 Iron Bowl 7-3, with the only touchdown scored on the famed 47-yard, “Run Through the Mud” by quarterback Ken Stabler — a play during which Auburn faithful have long maintained that Crimson Tide tight end Dennis Dixon rather egregiously held defensive lineman Gusty Yearout.

While narrating game film on his weekly coach’s television show the following day, Jordan quipped, “I wonder if No. 84 (Dixon) thought he was on defense because he made one of the finest tackles on Yearout that I have ever seen.” Bryant claimed he didn’t see any such illegal block while watching his own game film, but Jordan refused to back down.

“I’m tired of being ‘Good Ole Shug,‘” Jordan said during an appearance that Tuesday at the Selma Quarterback Club. “I’m going to stand up for my team and Auburn no matter the consequences.”

Auburn went to seven consecutive bowl games from 1967-74, beating Alabama in four of those years. The Tigers became among the first SEC programs to rely heavily on passing the ball, with Sullivan winning the school’s first Heisman Trophy in 1971 and Beasley establishing receiving records that have still not been topped more than a half-century later.

Henley was one of the stars of the 1972 Auburn team, known as the “Amazin’s” for a string of improbable victories that included defeats of No. 4 Tennessee (10-6), No. 18 Ole Miss (24-14) No. 17 Florida State (27-14), No. 2 Alabama (17-16) and No. 13 Colorado (24-3) on the way to a 10-1 finish and No. 7 final national ranking. That year’s Tigers drew their inspiration from their coach, the war hero who had dedicated his life to embodying the Auburn Creed.

“He challenged you to do your best,” Henley said, “not to give up on yourself and not to give up on the team. That was something that just resonated with me the whole time. He’d never give up, never give up. You give up when the clock is all zeros.”

No good time to retire

Auburn re-named Cliff Hare Stadium in Jordan’s honor while he was still coaching, officially christening the Tigers’ on-campus facility as Jordan-Hare Stadium prior to the 1973 season. This came a full two years before Alabama changed the name of its football field from Denny Stadium to Bryant-Denny Stadium, almost certainly in response to Auburn’s move.

The new stadium name — the first-ever such recognition for an active coach — came after Auburn had gone 10-1 in 1972, a year in which they stunned SEC champion Alabama in the “Punt Bama Punt” game. The Tigers slipped back to 6-6 in 1973, but rebounded with a strong 1974 season that included a shutout victory over Tennessee and a narrow loss to Alabama before a 27-3 rout of Texas in the Gator Bowl.

Though Jordan said in his April 8, 1975, news conference that there was “no good time to retire,” after the 1974 season might have been the ideal time for Jordan to go out in retrospect. But he hung on one more year, a forgettable final season that ended with double-digit losses to Florida, Georgia and Alabama — plus a tie with Mississippi State — in November.

Jordan also spoke often during that period of 25 years at one job having a “magic ring” to it, so it was perhaps inevitable he would stay on for 1975. But once the news got out he was stepping down, the coach could no longer control the story.

“He went and told President Philpott,” Henley said. “And President Philpott called one of the trustees. And the next thing you know, they had just about hired Doug Barfield before Coach Jordan was even out the door. And that didn’t suit Coach Jordan too well.”

Housel said that to the best of his knowledge, there was no outside search for Jordan’s successor. In later years, Auburn would conduct more widespread pursuits of established coaches, most notably an unsuccessful courtship of Georgia’s Vince Dooley (one of Jordan’s former quarterbacks and later a Tigers assistant coach) in 1980.

“They certainly took the easy way out,” Housel said. “And they would have taken the easy way out had it been Paul Davis or Coach Barfield. Maybe they should have had a search; I don’t know.”

Barfield is still living, having turned 89 last month. He spent several years as a high school coach and administrator before retiring to the Auburn area, but stays mostly out of the spotlight (he did not respond to interview requests for this story).

In May of 2022, Marshall wrote a column after having had lunch with Barfield near campus. Barfield is not quoted directly in the piece, but Marshall — who now writes for AuburnUndercover.com, part of the 247 Sports network — indicated the old coach has no regrets regarding his time at Auburn.

Jordan had lost to Alabama in his final three tries, a slide that continued through Barfield’s five seasons at Auburn. The losing streak reached nine in Pat Dye’s debut season, before finally ending in glorious fashion with the 23-22 “Bo Over the Top” Iron Bowl victory at Legion Field in 1982. “From first grade through ninth grade, we lost to Alabama every year,” said Van Allen Plexico, a political science professor and Auburn graduate who has co-authored several books on Tigers athletics history and now co-hosts the AU Wishbone podcast. “That was my entire childhood; it was all that I knew. … It was tough, and Barfield was not doing anything to help me there.

“That’s why Shug’s legacy was important, because as a kid all I knew was losing. Knowing we had been that good with Shug meant that it didn’t have to be this way and that this was not the way it always had been.”

‘With typical courage, he didn’t want any sympathy’

Following his retirement from Auburn, Jordan took some time to travel with his wife, Evelyn, a trained clinical psychologist who worked for many years as adviser to the school’s sororities and as counselor to married and international students. The couple avoided going overseas, however; “He’d seen Europe; didn’t enjoy it very much,” his son noted.

The Jordans spent some time near the water, with the Grand Hotel in Fairhope and Lake Martin in central Alabama two of their favorite spots. But unlike many other former athletes, Jordan could never “figure out” golf, his son said.

“He was a terrible golfer,” Ralph Jr. said. “He was born a left-hander, and … he used to say ‘golf is for right-handers.’

“I’ve got a book there on the shelf at the house that (golf legend and Augusta National founder) Bobby Jones wrote about the golf game, and he sent my dad a copy and said, ‘My dear friend, Shug, I hope in some way this book will improve your game … but I doubt it. Ha, ha, ha. Your friend, Bobby.‘”

Jordan was appointed to the Auburn Board of Trustees shortly after his retirement as coach, perhaps a consolation after Philpott had resisted for so many years to name him the school’s athletics director. It was common in those days for high-profile football coaches to simultaneously serve as AD, as Bryant, Dooley and Texas’ Darrell Royal did — and as Dye would do for the majority of his Auburn tenure.

In early 1980, Jordan was diagnosed with acute leukemia. He died at his home on July 16 at age 69, his family by his side.

“In the fall of ‘79, it was pretty obvious to me something was wrong, and so I found out shortly after Christmas that he was sick,” Ralph Jr. said. “I drove to Auburn every weekend from Knoxville to spend time with him, and it was traumatic to see somebody who’d always been kind of robust just wither away. But with typical courage, he didn’t want any sympathy and we’d talk about other things. I always admired him for that.”

In a story for the Birmingham News published the day after Jordan died, Housel summarized the feelings of many within the Auburn community.

“It was my great pleasure to know and love Coach Jordan,” wrote Housel, who had by that time been hired as Auburn’s assistant sports information director. “And to know that he knew and loved me. ‘Pleasure’ is not the right word, but I’m not sure what the right word is. Maybe ‘privilege.’ Certainly ‘honor.’

“Most people knew him as a football coach. I knew him as a man, a totally wonderful, beautiful man.”

Coming Thursday: In the second and final part of the series, we examine the high and low points — and overarching inconsistency — of the half-century of Auburn football since Ralph “Shug” Jordan’s retirement as head coach.

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has written about college football for a variety of publications since 1994. Email him at cstephenson@al.com.