Life’s Super Bowl
Tribute to a champion
LONG BEFORE SAM BALL became a consensus All-American tackle at the University of Kentucky and helped lead the then-Baltimore Colts of the NFL to a Super Bowl championship, he had gone head-to-head with hard knocks in the game of life.
His father left the family when Sam was 9, and Sam wound up doing a man’s work on the Henderson County farm while still a boy. His school clothes came from the Salvation Army. Life was hard, as well, for his loving mother, younger brother and older sister. But Sam never gave up.
“Thank God for football and Mojo Hollowell,” he said of the late Henderson County football coach, James “Mojo” Hollowell. “He was the closest thing to a dad figure I ever had. He was tough on me. He expected the best I could come up with, but I loved him dearly. My nickname was ‘Foot’ (Ball).”
Standing a little over 6 feet, 4 inches and weighing 250 pounds, Sam also ran track and played basketball at Henderson County—later joking that he led the Colonels’ basketball team in “fouls, muggings and free throws.”
He’d need to be even tougher after earning a football scholarship to the University of Kentucky. In 1962, the year Sam enrolled at UK, Charlie Bradshaw became head coach and initiated vicious practice sessions with abusive treatment of players that would be remembered for decades.
“Brutal” was the word Sam used, remembering that, during his freshman year, an 88-member squad dwindled to what Sports Illustrated called “the thin 30.” Sam said “28.”
Following an All-Star college career with such Wildcat notables as Rick Norton, Larry Seiple and Roger Bird, Sam was a first round draft pick of the Baltimore Colts. From 1966 through 1970, he and the Colts made two trips to the Super Bowl, beating the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V.
After injuries forced early retirement from the NFL, he returned to Henderson County, began a successful agribusiness career, took his mother to church every Sunday and owned a farm with his son, Shane. His identical twin daughters, Shannon and Shelly, were doubles tennis champions in high school, and Shane played linebacker at the University of Kentucky in the early-to-mid-1990s.
A longtime consumer-member of Kenergy, Sam was a devoted supporter of local charities, and he and UK teammate Roger Bird hosted a yearly football camp with visits from such Hall-of-Famers as Johnny Unitas, Gale Sayers and others.
Sam was under hospice care when I talked with him by phone at his Henderson home a few weeks before he passed away at age 79 this past October. But he insisted he was “in good shape.”
Looking back over life from the end zone, he recalled that Shane wore the number 37 as a linebacker at UK, while Sam had worn the number 73 through his career. When Sam remarked on the reverse arrangement of numbers, Shane told him, “Dad, I’m a reflection of you.”
A fitting legacy for Sam Ball.
BYRON CRAWFORD is Kentucky’s storyteller—a veteran television and newspaper journalist known for his colorful essays about life in Kentucky.
