If there was one word to describe Billy Ray Adams, it was tough.
Given his circumstances, he had to be.
Adams, a Columbus native and All-American football player at Ole Miss during the Rebels’ glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, died Thursday at his home in Madison at age 84.
He was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Ole Miss Athletic Hall of Fame in 1990. In 2003, he was selected a Southeastern Conference Legend, representing Ole Miss at the SEC Football Championship game in Atlanta.
“He was a fun guy, never had a big head even though he was an incredible athlete. He understood who he was and where he came from,” said Dr. James “Jimmy” Keeton, who met Adams in grammar school and maintained a friendship that endured for 75 years.
Keeton, who went on to become a pediatric neurologist and dean of the University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson, said Adams made an impression on him from the moment they met.
“He was a year behind me at Franklin Academy, and the first thing I noticed about him was he was such a good athlete,” Keeton said.
“Even in grammar school, he was the strongest person we had ever seen. He was such a good athlete, they held him back a year for athletics. He played every sport and played it pretty well. But football was where he dominated because he was so strong and tough.”
Church-mouse poor
Adams’ strength may have come naturally, but the toughness was a survival skill.
In a 2020 interview with Chuck Rounsaville of the fan site “Ole Miss Spirit,” Adams spoke candidly of his grim beginnings.
He was the 11th of 12 children born in a shack near Steens that had no electricity or running water. When Billy Ray was 6, his father abandoned the family.
“When I say we were poor, I mean we were poor as the proverbial church mouse,” Adams told Rounsaville. “My mother had a third-grade education and worked hard, but we all had to figure out some way to contribute.”
One by one, his older siblings dropped out of school to find jobs to help support the family. None of them advanced beyond the ninth grade, but with their help, Adams managed to stay in school, becoming the only member of his family to graduate high school.
When the family moved within the Columbus city limits and Adams began attending Franklin Academy at age 9, he was held back a year because the school he had attended was not accredited. He was held back another year to take advantage of his athletic prowess.
That worked to Adams’ advantage in more ways than one. By the time he was a sophomore, Adams was already a licensed driver, and he helped supplement the family’s meager income by driving a school bus for $2 a day.
A star at Lee High
By the time Adams reached Lee High School, he had filled out.
“I started to grow and before I knew it, I was 6-2 and weighed 200 pounds, the biggest fullback in the Big Eight Conference,” Adams said in 2020. “I lettered in four sports all three high school years.”
Keeton, a starter on the Lee High basketball team, said Adams played a well-defined role on the team.
“He was our sixth man,” Keeton told The Dispatch. “Mainly, any time we played a team that had a big scorer, Adams would come in and take care of that. He wasn’t in the game long because he fouled out. But he did the job he was supposed to do.”
Keeton vividly recalled a game against Tuscaloosa High that pretty well defined Adams’ style of play.
“There was a loose ball and everybody was trying to come up with it,” Keeton said. “Billy Ray piles in there, digging for the ball, and I hear this crack. I said, ‘Billy Ray, you broke his arm!’ He just said, ‘Well, he had the ball.’
“I told him, ‘You can’t do that. This isn’t football.’ But that was how Jimmy played, full out.”
By the time he graduated from Lee High in 1958, Adams was one of the most coveted recruits in the South, picking up scholarship offers from every team in the SEC, along with Texas, Memphis State and Minnesota.
There was no real suspense about his choice, however. Columbus attorney Ben Owen, father of attorney David Owen, was Adams’ youth coach. He would sometimes take Adams with him to Ole Miss football games.
“It was an adventure going to Ole Miss to those games — it was way over my head,” Adams said. “After an Ole Miss-Arkansas game we went to, I thought Ole Miss was the Ole Miss Pigs. I got confused.”
One of 14
Adams signed with Ole Miss, quickly discovering that he was one of 14 fullbacks in the recruiting class at a time when there were scholarship limits.
“Usually, the best players in high school were fullbacks, so (Ole Miss coach) Johnny Vaught would sign a bunch of fullbacks and then moved them to other positions after he saw what they could do,” Adams said in the Rounsaville interview.
Adams was one of four who remained in the position, moving into the starting lineup as a sophomore in 1959. By today’s standards, Adams’ career stats are modest — 1,009 yards on 174 carries and 10 TDs. But in an era defined as “three yards and a cloud of dust,” Adams was a star. As a senior, he led Ole Miss and was second in Southeastern Conference in rushing (575 yards) and led the conference in touchdowns with 10, averaging 6.3 yards per carry. Most impressively, during his entire playing career he was stopped for a loss just once, and that while trying to advance a fumble from a teammate that resulted in a 1-yard loss.
Accident ends career
Following his senior season, Adams was chosen in the third round of the NFL Draft by the San Francisco 49ers, but his pro career was cut short before it started.
Two days after the Rebels’ final regular-season game, he was injured in an automobile accident after attending a Jackson Touchdown Club meeting where he had received the Most Valuable Player award. He was unable to play for the Rebels in the Cotton Bowl or in the Senior Bowl and the Coaches All-American Game. Although he recuperated over time, he couldn’t pass the 49ers physical, voiding his contract and ending his playing career.
Keeton said Adams always considered his life blessed and didn’t complain much at all about the car wreck that ended his playing career.
“He was on to the next thing, typical Billy Ray,” Keeton said. “At first, he thought he would be a coach and he started coaching. He started coaching in Forest, but he was also selling insurance as kind of a side job. DJ (Adams’ wife) said he came in one day and threw a check on the table from a policy he sold. He told her, ‘I made more from that one policy than I make in a month’s coaching. We’re not coaching anymore.’”
Adams turned to insurance full-time, finding a niche in selling policies on aircrafts.
“He did really well with it,” Keeton said. “It didn’t surprise me. He was such a fun guy and easy to get along with. As poor as he was growing up, even among those really rich kids at Ole Miss, he never felt like he was less than. He was confident in who he was and easy in anybody’s company, no matter their situation.
“I tell you, he was a good man. We certainly need more people like Billy Ray.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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