Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260005
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-5 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Rudy Rohrdanz was such a man. He's not well known among today's high school football fans in Timesland, but his accomplishments are legendary.
Before he ever coached, Rohrdanz moved with the greats. Though he was injured and sat out until the next year, Rohrdanz was a member of the Alabama Rose Bowl team coached by the legendary Frank Thomas that included Bear Bryant, Don Hutson and Dixie Howell. Those are three of the greatest players in Tide football history.
At Roanoke's Jefferson High School, which closed in the 1970s, Rohrdanz coached for 18 years, compiling a 117-38-16 record. His 1957 team won the Group AAA championship to end a 29-year drought for Roanoke-area schools in the state's large-school classification.
In 1959, Rohrdanz moved to City High School in Chattanooga, Tenn., as the football coach. Like Jefferson, City is closed, but at that school, Rohrdanz's career never was the same.
At the Chattanooga Times, the only newspaper clipping in his file was a faded yellow article written in 1959 asking why Rohrdanz would give up a career at Jefferson to move to City, which was not known as a football school.
His obituary in Thursday's edition of the Chattanooga newspaper said little about Rohrdanz, except to mention that he was a coach and teacher.
This doesn't begin to tell his story. A call from Carroll Moffit, a former sandlot coach, alerted this writer about Rohrdanz's death.
The next morning, Ray Bussard, a former Olympic swimming coach at the University of Tennessee who was an assistant to Rohrdanz and later an opponent as the head coach at Red Bank High School in Chattanooga, called to talk about him.
The memory of his exploits will far outlast a piece of paper in a newspaper morgue 600 miles away - at least until his generation of players is gone.
For the past nine years, Jefferson football players from the 1940s and 1950s have held reunions in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Rohrdanz attended seven of them, showing how much his former players meant to him even though he was out of their lives. He missed this year's reunion because he had suffered a series of strokes.
Rohrdanz may have sent more players to major colleges on scholarship than anybody who has coached football in this state. Every first-team player on the 1957 Jefferson team except the quarterback, Jay Blackwood, received a college scholarship.
Blackwood waited until the next year. He was only a junior.
Many of Rohrdanz's players were college greats. The most famous, at least to this writer, are: George Preas, who was a star at Virginia Tech and for the NFL's Baltimore Colts; Carlton Waskey and Paul Rotenberry, who were outstanding on some of Georgia Tech's greatest teams under Bobby Dodd; Buddy Shoaf, who played defense and offense in the two-platoon era at Virginia; and Lewis McLelland, an All-American at Memphis State.
Other well-known players tutored by Rohrdanz were: Harry Walton, the quarterback for Virginia Tech's first team in a postseason game when the Hokies went to the 1946 Sun Bowl; Billy Edmunds and Carol Jamison, who played at Duke; Walter Howard, who went to Georgia Tech; Dave Edmunds, who attended William and Mary; Jimmy Lugar, another quarterback at Virginia Tech ; and Tracy Callis, who was captain of the 1957 team with Waskey and went to Virginia Tech.
Rohrdanz's coaching career started in Kingsport, Tenn., two years before he came to Jefferson. Among his players there, Bobby Cifers was an All-American at Tennessee and Denver Crawford was a captain for the Volunteers. John Edward Bell was outstanding at Georgia Tech and Shelton Biles was an All-America tackle at Army. Bell later was head coach at East Tennessee State.
I wonder who has been left off this list.
The biggest names arguably are Rotenberry, called by Dodd the best halfback who ever played at Georgia Tech, and Preas.
Rotenberry remembered his old coach.
``We didn't tackle or scrimmage all the time in practice like some teams do,'' he said. ``Coach Rohrdanz was a perfectionist. He kept running the plays over and over until everyone knew what they were doing. We just didn't make any mistakes.''
Waskey recalls the coach not as much for the 1957 state title as for being a great offensive mind.
``He was way ahead of his time,'' Waskey said. ``My sophomore year, we put in a wide belly series against Maury [of Norfolk]. They didn't see the ball all night long.''
Rohrdanz got Waskey's father, Ray, into high school coaching. Ray was a sandlot coach whose teams ran Jefferson's plays before World War II. He joined Rohrdanz's staff when it was hard to get an assistant because of the war and served at Jefferson and then Cave Spring until his death a little more than a year ago.
So why did Rohrdanz give up all this to move to Chattanooga? At City High School, his teams lost for several years and he was forced to resign. It was a sad end to a career that had been so bright.
According to that article in the Chattanooga Times, with information furnished by Bob McLelland, the late sports editor of the Roanoke World-News, Rohrdanz left when the Roanoke schools phased out his job as supervisor of health and physical education. The city made Rohrdanz a driver's education teacher and gave him five classes a day.
With a decision pending, Dr. E.W. Rushton, superintendent of Roanoke's schools, said Rohrdanz had made a great contribution and ``we can ill afford to lose a person of his ability.''
Harold Secord, principal at Jefferson, said, ``He symbolizes true Christian sportsmanship. It would be a serious loss to our school and to the Roanoke community if he leaves.''
They let him leave anyway.
I ran across Rohrdanz when I took a job as prep editor of the Chattanooga Times in 1964. It was his last year, and my first assignment at the paper was one I'll never forget.
In Rohrdanz's season-opening game against Notre Dame, a private Catholic school, City won. The Notre Dame coach accused Rohrdanz of knowingly running an illegal formation with too many players lined up in the backfield.
At a meeting of the Hamilton Interscholastic League coaches, which governed Chattanooga high school athletics, they dragged this proud man through the films of what appeared to be a lineman lining up inches in the backfield.
It was like a witch hunt. Then, Red Etter, a legendary coach in Tennessee with a career as great as that of Rohrdanz in Roanoke, got up and said, ``It seems to me there is nothing on these films indicating Coach Rohrdanz cheated.''
Etter coached at Central High School, City's biggest rival. With that, the coaches agreed and Rohrdanz was exonerated.
No one in the room that night knew any more about what Rohrdanz meant to high school athletics than they did more than 30 years later when the legendary coach died. How sad.
Memo: NOTE: Also ran in October 26, 1995 Neighbors.