History Corner

Geny All Stars

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

In the 1920s, there was a Nashville amateur football league whose champion in 1927 was Oscar Geny and Sons All Stars. The team finished the year with a 12-0 record, climaxed by a 12-0 win over Louisville Bonnycastle, the defending national amateur champion.

Although most who read this may not remember the Geny All Stars, the team was loaded with MBA players. Two Geny All Stars,“Chile” Hardin and Eugene “Chin” Johnson, were named as MBA stars to the fourth annual All Southern preparatory and high school team in 1925.

The next year, Robbie Worrall, a Geny All Star, and a junior at MBA, was one of two Tennesseans named to the fifth annual All Southern team. Robbie repeated as an All Southern running back in 1927. That year, the Geny All Star’s coach was Kirk Kirkpatrick, also the MBA football coach in 1925, 1926 and 1927, where his teams were undefeated. In 1928, Kirkpatrick moved to Sewanee, where he was assistant football coach.

He took with him five MBA starters, including Worrall. Also on the 1927 Geny All Stars team was a young Cathedral athlete, Wille Geny, who would in 1935, be football captain and an All Southeastern Conference end at Vanderbilt. Oscar “Butts” Geny, Jr., who had started for MBA in 1924 and 1925, was on the 1928 Geny team that defeated MBA6-0, giving the Maroons their first defeat since 1924. If that was not enough fire-power, the 1927 Geny All Stars also had future Vanderbilt coach Red Sanders as a team member.

I believe the Geny All Stars played their home games at Sulphur Dell. The puzzle to me is that, in 1927, the Geny Coach Kirk Kirkpatrick and his star running back, Robbie Worrall, were also coaching and playing at MBA. In those days, rules for high school athletics were extremely lax. For example, MBA’s star tackle, Jay Patton, didn’t have any family in Nashville. Nevertheless, he started for MBA in 1927 and 1928, made possible because he lived in the attic of the new main building.

MBA was, in 1926, 1927 and 1928, a member of the Tennessee Interscholastic Athletic Association (TIAA), among whose other members were BGA, Branham and Hughes, Duncan and Hume Fogg.