Thanks to ballplayer Jim Tugerson, 1953 became a brilliant winning season for the Knoxville Smokies. The action, however, wasn’t in Knoxville, but at Chapman Highway Park in Seymour.
Big Jim “Schoolboy” Tugerson was by all accounts a phenomenal pitcher who could have held his own in Major League Baseball. But he never had the opportunity, foiled by racism just as integration was taking root. It was racism that eventually brought Tugerson, a lanky 6-foot-four right-hander, and his brother, Leander, to Seymour as Smokies team members. It was in Seymour that Big Jim became the star of the 1953 team that took the Mountain States League championship.
Jim and Leander Tugerson grew up in Florida, playing ball on county and semi-pro teams before joining the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League; during that time Jim roomed with a rookie Hank Aaron. Then the brothers signed up with the Hot Springs (Arkansas) Bathers of the Class C Cotton States League, which wanted to integrate its team. But owners of other teams in the league objected to having Black players. Although Jackie Robinson had already broken the color barrier by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, racial attitudes in the South still hadn’t changed. The Tugersons were optioned to the Knoxville Smokies, on April 20, a demotion for them to a Class D team.
It so happened that the Smokies were playing in Seymour that year. Smithson Stadium in Knoxville was being demolished. For a year, the team played instead at Chapman Highway Park in Seymour. It was located on the northeast side of the highway, a little south of the Old Knoxville Pike turnoff.
At that time, Robert S. Allen was a baseball-star-struck 9-year-old from Sevierville. He grew up to play baseball himself and wrote a book about Tugerson. “The ball park was perfect,” he wrote in his book, Schoolboy: Jim Tugerson, Ace of the ’53 Smokies. “There was a covered grandstand behind home plate. It was all wood, painted green. The fence was freshly painted with business ads familiar to me. The grass was very green, the infield immaculately manicured. It had all the sights, sounds, and smells of a minor league ballpark. It was the best I had ever seen.”
Allen was also deeply impressed by Tugerson. “He seemed out of place because he was so much better than any of the other pitchers in the league,” Allen recalled. “…Big Jim caused an excitement that summer for a lot of people.”
Alas, the debt incurred in sprucing up the ballpark was too much for its investors. There was not even money for baseballs. On May 28, Allen wrote, the Smokies had to forfeit a game because the team ran out of balls by the seventh inning. Another set of investors, not much better financed, stepped up. Tugerson was already a team star. He was working hard, pitching with little recovery time between games. The new investors promoted a “Jim Tugerson Night” on June 5, gave free admission to Black fans and bused in spectators from Knoxville.
By that time, Leander Tugerson had left the team and gone home to Florida with a career-ending arm injury. In mid-May, the Hot Springs Bathers recalled Big Jim, but as he was warming up to pitch, Cotton States League President Al Haraway forced the Bathers to forfeit the game before it began. Jim returned to the Smokies. “I hope I land in the (majors) some day,” he told The Sporting News. “I want to be in a league where they will let me play ball.”
He filed a $50,000 lawsuit against the Bathers, the Cotton States League and Haraway. He told his teammates he knew he had little hope of winning, but that it was “something he had to do even though he knew it might ruin his chances of … playing in the major leagues. He felt it might make it easier for those who followed,” Allen wrote.
Tugerson was right. He never made it to the majors. A judge threw out his lawsuit. But he had played a significant part in baseball’s integration efforts.
He had a stellar season that year in Seymour. He won 29 games to 11, had a 3.71 ERA, and led the Mountain States League with 286 strikeouts in 330 innings. He won four games in the playoffs and hit a home run in the title game against archrivals Maryville-Alcoa. The Smokies won the league championship.
The next year, the Smokies played in the newly built Municipal Stadium in Knoxville, soon to be renamed Bill Meyer Stadium. Seymour’s baseball glory days were over. Eventually the ballpark became part of a residential subdivision.
Tugerson left the Smokies at the end of the 1953 season and eventually went to Dallas, where he played until 1959. In 1956, he became the second Black police officer in Winter Haven, Fla., taking leaves of absence to pitch for Dallas for two seasons. He became a respected lieutenant in the police department, where he worked until his death in 1983. He was coaching a Little League team when a heart attack felled him. That year, Winter Haven dedicated Tugerson Baseball Field in his honor.
The Smokies had not forgotten him. In 2000, the Knoxville team moved to a new Smokies Stadium, once more in Sevier County, this time in Kodak. On July 11, 2008, the Smokies honored the team that won the 1953 Mountain States League championship, the first racially integrated team in the league. Big Jim Tugerson, the man with the most winning record of all 1953 teams, came in for a special tribute. His daughter and other family members traveled from Florida to witness it.
He had encountered racism throughout his baseball career. Black players could not eat in restaurants or stay in hotels with the rest of the team. He was given the shabbiest uniforms, faced racial slurs from fans of opposing teams, and could not understand why Cuban players, some of whom were darker-skinned than he, were not subject to the same rules. But he was an upright, courageous, clean-living man who said little but put his concern for racial equality before his own personal desire for advancement. He played a small but significant part in baseball’s eventual racial integration, though he never realized his dream.
“Schoolboy – Jim Tugerson, Ace of the ’53 Smokies” by Robert S. Allen was published by Infinity Publishing.com in September 2008. That company is no longer in business. I have a copy of the book, signed by Allen, that I am willing to loan to anyone interested. Other sources: sabr.org/bioproj/person/jim-tugerson and www.milb.com/news/remembering-jim-tugerson-s-1953-pitch-for-integration.
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