The history of some of our sports has always fascinated me, and I have written several times about the evolution of the rules of some of football, basketball and baseball.

In the rural South, those histories are not quite so long. Many small country schools in our state and around the South offered no sports for most of their early years until finally fielding boys’ basketball teams, often not until the 1930s.

An old friend, who played baseball at Mississippi State (when it was Mississippi A&M) was able to participate at the college level despite coming from a high school that only sponsored boys’ basketball, which he did not play.

His school did not have a gym and practiced and played their basketball games outside either on concrete courts, if they played at a larger school, or on dirt if they played at home. He told of one game, against a rival school, at which the lone referee did not show up. In order to avoid conflict, the home team asked my friend’s school principal to referee the game.

Somehow things got out of hand, and some of the home school’s fans charged the floor, grabbed the poor not-really official by his neck tie and tried to hang him. My friend’s team ran for the bus and headed home.

He can’t remember anything more about the event except that the principal survived and was at school the next day. That happened in the middle 1920s, and we read almost every season about similar happenings in our time. I guess people don’t ever change, do they?

I have gotten the new roster of football officials for the SEC. It includes 105 names, but that number includes the supervisor of officials, an observer of officials, seven replay officials and 10 communicators.

The replay officials were drawn mostly from the list of last year’s observers and a couple of recently retired officials. The communicators appear to be partially from the same group plus a couple who may have come from other conferences.

Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia head the list with 19, 18 and 17 officials listed. Mississippi has seven people on the roster as active officials. Listed are Jimmy Buchanan of Ridgeland, a back judge in his third year. Brad Freeman from Starkville is a new official this season. Brad will be remembered as a star on Mississippi State’s last College World Series baseball team and is the son of former SEC football official Steve Freeman. Steve now officiates in the NFL.

William Correro of Senatobia and Thomas Miller of Ocean Springs are officials with whom I worked scrimmages. Back judges George Ranager of Meridian and Stan Murray from Columbus, along with side judge Don Shanks of Deerfield, are among the few remaining active officials with whom I officiated on the field.

No longer on the SEC roster is Clifton Ely from Flowood. I do not know if Clifton just hung up his cleats or moved on to another level of officiating. This season’s SEC football officials roster listed six new names and had deleted seven names from last year.

And that’s official.

Al Graning is a former SEC official and former Natchez resident. You can reach him at

AlanWard39157@aol.com

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