By ROD WILLIAMSON
NASHVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 20, 2025 —Although I didn’t know it at the time, October 6, 1962 would become an important date in my life, as it began to shape my future in collegiate athletics. That was the Saturday my dad had come upon tickets to the Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Southern California Trojans football game in Iowa City.
We sat high atop Kinnick Stadium and I can still visualize those distinctive USC helmets far below, and calisthenics done with a precision I had never seen at Parkersburg High School games, which were the only other ones I had ever attended. Our family had no connections to college or collegiate sports; we just read about them in the Des Moines Register.
Well, that’s not totally true. We always watched WMT-TV’s 6 o’clock news out of Cedar Rapids, where sports director Tait Cummins and, later, Ron Gonder filled their segment with the exploits of Randy Duncan, Willie Fleming and the legendary Coach Forest Evashevski, who led the Hawkeyes to the 1957 and 1959 Rose Bowls.
The author, Rod Williamson, who retired in late 2016 as Director of Athletic Communications at Vanderbilt University, where he became friends with Vandy alumnus and fellow Iowan Chuck Offenburger.
I was drawn to college sports as a moth is drawn to a flame. Iwould turn up our tiny transistor radio as loud as it would go and re-enact Iowa football games on our lawn. In the winter I had a tattered sweatshirt that I thought resembled a basketball warm-up jacket and would do imaginary layups above my bedroom door as the TV announcer exclaimed “Big 10 Basketball is on the Air…live from East Lansing, Michigan, it’s the Michigan State Spartans hosting the Purdue Boilermakers,” with its Sousa march tune helping make a magic moment in our drafty farmhouse.
How much did I love it? For Iowa basketball games, I would carefully create a stat sheet with a ruler and typing paper and keep statistics at the kitchen table from the radio call by Paul Eels. I’d carefully enter the lineup — Chad Calabria, Glenn Vidnonic, George Peeples…. These guys were nearly mythical creatures as far as I was concerned. I don’t recall missing a game as the long-distance statistician.
And so the majority of my teenage years went by — as a Hawkeye, which meant I fit in with the vast majority of Parkersburg residents (pop. 1,500). I always enjoyed writing, and in 1967 I made another trip to the Iowa campus, this time to attend a week-long journalism workshop. I had a nice time there and even was cited for distinction for something I had written.
Much, much later, Iowa City would become important as my dad battled health challenges at the Veteran’s Hospital. I’ll forever be thankful for the Iowa football assistant coach Ron Aiken, who stopped by to visit dad after the Hawks had just returned from beating Michigan. He took the time to see dad – a man he didn’t even know – before he unpacked his bags. Pure class.
One would expect I’d become a lifetime Hawk — and that would be wrong. I had idolized Princeton University basketball star Bill Bradley, ever since I read a fanboy article in a Weekly Reader that described how Bradley would score 30-to-40 points in a game and then go study at the library. He was a Rhodes Scholar and I thought THAT was how it was done!
I somehow wound up as a student at Iowa State, which is another story for another time. But I not only graduated from ISU, I worked in its athletic department until 1983.
Young Rod Williamson, in his early working years at Iowa State U.
It was then I noticed Vanderbilt University was looking for an athletic marketing director. Vanderbilt was appealing to me because I knew of its academic reputation and thought I’d have the chance to work among “miniature” Bill Bradleys. I was hired by Roy Kramer, Vandy’s athletic director and future commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
At Vanderbilt, my hope to be among Bill Bradley-types proved true, although perhaps too often the replicas had the academic side but lacked the athletic talent as the model. My arrival came the season after Vandy participated in the 1982 Hall of Fame Bowl; I had told my wife to expect to go to bowl games often but it would be 26 long years before the Commodores were bowl-eligible again.
What I thought might be a brief stint in “Music City,” as Nashville is known, became a 33-year career. The Parkersburg farm boy was now a small part of arguably the nation’s premier college conference. And that argument, of course, would be with Iowa fans who’d defend the Big 10.
In coming days, I will return to these web pages with some opinions on how the “typical” Vanderbilt fan regards college athletics (it’s not always aligned with how a “typical” Iowa fan would see it), and how Vanderbilt football was almost totally transformed by an undersized, self-described “misfit” from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who would ignite a controversy after finishing second in the Heisman Trophy voting. If this becomes a movie, nobody will believe it and I wouldn’t blame them.
The author of this guest column Rod Williamson and his wife Phyllis, a native of Algona, Iowa, now live in retirement in the tiny Tennessee town of Arrington, 25 miles southeast of Nashville. You can comment on this story in the handy form below, or you can correspond directly with Williamson by email at rodwilliamson72@gmail.com.
