See the highlighted parts
Booster Proud of His Largess and Game-Day Partieshttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/sports/ncaafootball/booster-proud-of-his-largess-and-game-day-parties.html?hpRoy Adams’s two-story brick home is tucked neatly into a middle-class residential street. In the driveway, University of Tennessee and Southeastern Conference flags fly at full staff. On the front door, a poster urges his guests to adhere to a five-drink limit.
Adams may be 75 years old, but his home looks like something dreamed up by teenage fraternity brothers: he has 36 big-screen televisions, five TV viewing rooms, three game rooms, a wet bar and, on a recent afternoon, two tapped kegs.
Adams, a retired restaurant and real estate developer, has been called the Great Gatsby of college sports for his legendary game-day parties, which often include athletes, coaches and politicians mixing with a crowd that can top 100. But he is more than a septuagenarian party animal.
A 1963 graduate of Tennessee, Adams represents the twilight of a college sports booster. For more than 40 years, he cherished his role as a benefactor for players, even if it meant breaking a few rules. If college athletes generally receive gifts in the shadows, Roy Adams is the rare booster who crows about his largess.
He is not remorseful, and now, largely out of the booster game, he says he is proud of his life’s work and the friendships he has made.
“I knew the N.C.A.A. rules,” he said. “I just didn’t care for them.”
As a national debate swirls over whether college athletes should be paid, Adams revels in memories of the old days when he distributed cash with a wink to favored players. By his own estimate, he has spent $400,000 on food, clothes, cash and a handful of cars for college athletes.
“I’ve always found him to be one of the more fascinating people I’ve met in college sports,” said Paul Finebaum, an ESPN radio host and former columnist. “He’s a throwback to a more romantic time.”
Today’s boosters, Adams said, have lost the intimate relationships with players he always sought. From his perspective, the N.C.A.A. rules have tightened drastically. And the players have changed too. “Today you give a kid a Chevrolet, and he wants a Cadillac,” Adams said. “You give them $1,000, they want two or three. It’s not the same as it used to be.”Adams has been a Tennessee football fan for decades, but now, instead of making trips to Knoxville, he brings the party to his TV rooms — all five of them. On a typical Saturday, guests spill from room to room, passing a shuffleboard table, a stuffed deer head, a signed photograph from the former Tennessee star Peyton Manning.
On one wall a photograph of Adams shaking hands with Nick Saban hangs above a signed picture of Richard Nixon. In the pantry, Adams had a urinal installed. Then there are all the televisions, squeezed together like puzzle pieces around every corner. His friends say there is no better sports bar in Memphis.
On a recent afternoon, the Shelby County mayor was a guest. Romaro Miller, who played quarterback at Mississippi before Eli Manning, was there. So were Bobby Ray Franklin, the quarterback who led Ole Miss to a share of the 1959 national championship, and Ron Gust, who played for Tennessee in the 1950s.
On fall Saturdays, two cooks arrive at Adams’s home at 7 a.m. to prepare a menu of more than 30 dishes in an industrial-size kitchen Adams had installed several years ago. He offers a buffet that ranges from sushi to fried chicken cooked in a vat on the back patio. Adams said he spends around $1,500 each weekend on the spread.
On this afternoon, Adams’s beloved Tennessee visited Florida. As a flood of guests arrived before kickoff, Adams bellowed gleefully, “No Democrats or Florida fans allowed!”
Many of the guests are former college players and beneficiaries of Adams’s generosity, creating an eclectic mix of boosters, former jocks and current high school coaches from around the area. Most SEC teams are represented among the crowd. An Arkansas fan chided Volunteer supporters about the hillbillies in east Tennessee. Female Ole Miss students were the butt of another joke.
Adams hurried from room to room, making sure the food was just so and each guest properly attended to. Stories tumbled out of his mouth in between sips from an old-fashioned. “Nobody’s wife would ever let them do this,” he said. “I’m a bachelor, so I can.”
Adams recalls his bending of the N.C.A.A. rules with a wistful smile. He described players lining up outside his Knoxville hotel room knowing he would happily slip them a few bucks. Players at Arkansas State, Memphis and Ole Miss have also been the recipients of his generosity and hospitality.Adams has had several run-ins with the N.C.A.A. and his alma mater. He said the former Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey once confronted him outside the locker room and told him to stay away from the team. The N.C.A.A. investigated Adams in the late 1980s for sponsoring a recruiting trip for two players to visit the University of Houston. Adams’s defense was that he never did the bidding of any one school. He said he regularly sent money to Cortez Kennedy, the Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle, when he played at Miami. It was proper, he said, because he had no association to the school.“I’m a friend to all athletes, everywhere,” he said, beaming.
In 2000, Adams became well known in Tennessee circles as a commentator who helped spark the federal investigation and conviction of Logan Young, an Alabama booster in Memphis who paid a coach $150,000 to steer defensive lineman Albert Means to Tuscaloosa.
In a wrongful termination civil suit later brought by two Alabama coaches that stemmed from the Young case, Adams was deposed. He wore a white coonskin cap and an orange blazer and brought along a bottle of Tennessee sipping whiskey to the proceedings.
Adams relishes the memory. “I couldn’t think of anything that would upset an Alabama lawyer more,” he said.
Adams was born in Batesville, Miss., to tenant farmers and moved to Memphis in childhood. As a teenager, he worked as a Senate page in Washington. Autographed pictures of Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Estes Kefauver are prominent on the walls. (His politics shifted right after the Jimmy Carter administration.)
At Tennessee, he fell in love with the pageantry of football. When he returned to Memphis, he served on the national board of governors for the Tennessee Alumni Association. “I didn’t have a family,” he said. “This became my family.”
Adams managed a Goodyear store in Memphis and then opened a chain of Adams Family Restaurants. He worked in real estate before retiring. As he reflected on the string of scandals gripping college sports, in part because of boosters like him, he chuckled.
“It’s funny,” he said. “You’d be right to say I wasted my life on football, but it can be a very emotional game.”
He added: “I like to take care of people. Now I want people to come over here and enjoy themselves.”
Late in the afternoon, a graphic flashed on one of the televisions showing the seven straight national championships won by SEC teams. Adams’s eyes gleamed as he chanted, “S-E-C! S-E-C!”
“All this — the parties, the friends, the football,” said Pete Story, a local high school coach. “I think it’s what keeps Roy alive.”
