How a Football Legend and a Preeminent Magazine Inadvertently Redefined Libel Law

George Burnett didn’t want to be infamous. He just wanted to make a phone call. On the morning of September 13, 1962, Burnett, a Georgia insurance sales manager, was trying to call Milton Flack, the PR director for Communications International, a public relations firm in Atlanta. Something went wrong. Instead of getting Flack, he was patched into another call, one between Wally Butts and Paul “Bear” Bryant, two football legends. What Burnett overheard sparked one of the biggest scandals in Southeastern Conference (SEC) football and led to a redefining of libel law in America.

With Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant–Wally Butts Football Scandal That Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law, Ball State University professor emeritus David E. Sumner tries to present the definitive account of that scandal. It’s a difficult task. The fifty-five-year-old case presents numerous twists that confuse football and legal experts alike.

To Burnett—and many others—the conversation between Butts and Bryant sounded like cheating. The two longtime friends were discussing football. That made sense. Butts had been the most successful coach the University of Georgia had seen, at least until his personal life started impacting Bulldog recruiting efforts; and at the end of the 1960 season, he resigned to become the school’s athletic director. And at the time of the call, Bryant was four years into his twenty-five-year tenure as head coach of the University of Alabama.

But the two schools were scheduled to play each other on September 22, 1962, so the fact that Butts was sharing with Bryant details about the Bulldog football team, including plays, personnel details, and formations, sounded off to Burnett—so much so that he started taking notes on the conversation.

Several months later, long after the Crimson Tide had buried the Bulldogs 35–0, Burnett shared those notes with the University of Georgia and, eventually, the Saturday Evening Post. It was just the kind of story the magazine’s new editorial director, Clay Blair Jr., was looking for. He wanted to redefine magazines. In an internal memo that was leaked to Newsweek Blair said that he intended to “restore the crusading spirt, the sophisticated muckraking, the exposé in mass magazines. We’re going to provoke people, make ’em mad” (55).

The piece about Burnett and the conversation he overheard, “The Story of the College Football Fix,” did just that. It alleged that Butts and Bryant had colluded to ensure an Alabama blowout, comparing the phone call to the notorious 1919 Chicago White Sox, who threw the World Series. Butts sued the Post and its owners, Curtis Publishing Company, for libel. The case went to trial in August 1963. It was a two-week spectacle that pummeled the all-male jury with football jargon, emotional testimony, and jarring lapses in memory.

Sumner spent four years digging through over 1,600 pages of trial transcripts, thirty different depositions, and numerous letters and investigation notes. His ultimate goal was “to help settle the debate by going deeper into the primary sources than any author has previously ventured” (2), thus allowing readers to come to a conclusion of their own regarding the three essential issues of the case:

First, what did Butts and Bryant say to each other in this telephone conversation?

Second, did the contents of their conversation affect the 35–0 outcome of the game?

And third, did the Saturday Evening Post publish “The Story of the Football Fix” in good faith, believing that it was true, and without a malicious intent?

(2)

Sumner builds the book like the best episodes of Law and Order, first laying out the alleged crime and investigation, before spending nearly half the text detailing the courtroom drama of the libel case. He excerpts testimony liberally from the trial, letting witnesses—like Bryant, Butts, Burnett, the presidents of the University of Alabama...