John Gordy

Gordy was born on July 17, 1935 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was the son of John Thomas Gordy and Margaret Ruth Poe. Gordy played his final season of high school football as a lineman for the former Isaac Litton High School (now closed) in the Inglewood neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, winning the 1952 Clinic Bowl and the Nashville Interscholastic League AA Division. He was named second-team All-Nashville Interscholastic League and honorable mention All-State. The Tennessean included Gordy on a list of the 50 best high school football players in Nashville's history. He is a member of the Metro Nashville Public Schools Sports Hall of Fame. He did not play in his senior year, but still received a scholarship to the University of Tennessee. == College ==

Gordy subsequently played college football for the Tennessee Volunteers, under coach Bowden Wyatt. He started at right tackle for two years and was team captain in his senior season,1956, when he was named All-Southeastern Conference. The Volunteers won the Southeastern Conference that year with a 10–0 record, but lost in the Sugar Bowl to Baylor. The Volunteers ended the season ranked number 2 in the nation. Their star player was Johnny Majors, who served as Gordy's alternate captain (and went on to become a legendary coach at the University of Pittsburgh and at Tennessee). Majors and Gordy remained close even after college. In 2018, he was voted one of the 10 greatest players from the Nashville area ever to have played UT football by a panel of sportswriters. ==Career==

National Football League Gordy was drafted in the second round of the 1957 NFL draft by the Lions (24th overall). The 1957 Lions, quarterbacked primarily by Tobin Rote and with Gordy playing a key role in the blocking schemes at right tackle, won the NFL championship, He started in 128 or 134 games he played for the Lions. Shortly after ratifying the collective bargaining agreement, he was forced to retire from the NFL due to a lingering knee injury. He had suffered a serious knee injury in the Lions 1968 training camp and retired before the season started. Around 1970, Gordy became President of Visual Sounds, Inc., the audio-visual subsidiary of A & R Recording in Manhattan. Gordy became the California state director of Fellowship of Christian Athletes in 1999. By the time Gordy died, nearly every single high school in Southern California had an FCA group on their campus. Gordy considered this his greatest accomplishment. He was inducted into the FCA Hall of Champions in 2006. ==Personal life==

Gordy was married three times. He first married – on June 2, 1957, in Nashville – Yvonne Hodge. He again married – on July 1, 1972, in Blue Hill, Maine – Jean Becton DeMeritt (née Jean Sprague Becton) (also her second marriage), a 1965 graduate of Vassar College and granddaughter of Maxwell Becton, co-founder of Becton Dickinson, a multinational medical device manufacturer. Jean and John Gordy divorced December 29, 1982, in Santa Barbara County, California. John Gordy married again to Betty Euelene Epperson (maiden). Gordy's father, Poppa John Gordy (né John Thomas Gordy; 1904–1961), a dixieland jazz, swing, ragtime, and honky-tonk pianist, was for more than 25 years, musical director of The Noon Show on station WSM, the NBC Radio Network affiliate in Nashville. == Death ==

Gordy died on January 30, 2009, in Orange, California, after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer. == Bibliography ==