Condredge Holloway's story got him

Condredge Holloway's story got him - When you click off your television tonight after watching "The Color Orange: The Condredge Holloway Story" - and you really should watch it - this is what Kenny Chesney wants you to carry away from the experience:"Condredge had obstacles in his life. He made choices. With the help of family and friends, he made the right ones," Chesney said. "He bottled up the negative things and made them positive. Yeah, it's a sports-related thing. But this message is universal. If there's a kid out there who thinks he has obstacles, he can get past them. Condredge did."

Chesney, a country music star, produced and narrated the documentary for ESPN that debuts tonight at 7, telling the story of Holloway, the Huntsville native who in 1972 became the first black starting quarterback in the Southeastern Conference.
"It got me," Holloway said Wednesday after a special premiere. It got him emotionally and it got his story. Chesney unabashedly calls Holloway "my hero." He was a 6-year-old boy growing up outside Knoxville when Holloway was a UT senior. Chesney wore a No. 7 orange football jersey to have his class picture made.

The tables have turned. Holloway now laughs at how his son, Condredge III, idolizes Chesney. Not a bad thing, Holloway figures, saying, "He wants to be Kenny. That should be OK. (Black country music star) Charley Pride is injury-free and probably rich."

The film focuses heavily on Holloway's Tennessee career, with the challenges and difficulties he faced from racist fans and opponents. But with his teammates as his "comfort zone," Holloway "never let it get to the point where I had to do something about it. When you get letters, they don't sign it. You know what you're dealing with. To confront that would cause a bigger problem. Not to accept it, but deal with it and go back to your everyday life."

There are some electrifying highlight moments in his career that are captured in the video. To current fans unfamiliar with Holloway's style, he'd be reminiscent of Michael Vick. "I don't get why people think I'm like Michael Vick," Holloway laughed during the "orange carpet" ceremonies Wednesday. "He's like me. I was there before he was. They got that backwards."

"Condredge was ahead of his time with his abilities," said ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit.

"He was way out in front of ... the athletic quarterbacks we see today," said former UT coach Phillip Fulmer.

"The Color Orange" paid significant attention to his Huntsville days and his brilliance at Lee High School. A film crew visited Huntsville last fall and interviewed former coaches Keith Wilson and Jerry Dugan and former teammates Randy Davidson and Paul Parvin, as well as Condredge's mom Dorothy and sister Valerie.

Holloway was a three-sport sensation. Wilson always tells people "his best sport was the one that was in season at the time."

He was the No. 4 pick in the major league baseball draft and good enough in basketball that UT coach Ray Mears once told Dugan "he could start for me at point guard."

Baseball was Holloway's first love - "We recruited harder against baseball than we did against Alabama or Auburn or anybody else," former Tennessee coach Bill Battle said - but Dorothy was insistent he go to college. Since Condredge was only 17 when the Expos drafted him, he couldn't have signed the contract.

Tennessee offered him the chance to play quarterback. In those days, no other schools would do so.

"It didn't take but about a week on campus when we figured he could help us," Battle said.

But it would take time. Freshmen weren't eligible then. Had they been, Fulmer said, "There's no question we would have won the national championship (in 1971). He was that good."

Such was the hype around Holloway that 31,000 showed up at Neyland Stadium for a freshman game against Notre Dame when the Vols varsity was idle. Said Battle, "I think the record before that was 500 (fans)."

There were so many stories to tell "and we only had 50 minutes," Chesney bemoaned. "I wish I had twice that much."

Holloway has never run away from the limelight, though he has never coveted it, either. When ESPN approached Chesney about the project, with Chesney having produced "The Boys of Fall" video previously, Holloway was at first disbelieving and then a little cautious.

"There's a lot of feelings I've suppressed I didn't want surfacing again," he said. "I've suppressed them but I haven't forgotten. It was difficult. But we got through it."

The big picture of Chesney's film tells Holloway's story beautifully.

But Holloway has a small picture that sums up his life and career just as neatly.

"It's a little card that a creative friend of mine put together. It's a picture of me that says on the front, 'No Excuses.' You open it up, it says, 'Just Play.'

"It's a picture of me trying to throw a screen pass over a guy 6-foot-2. And I'm jumping over him," Holloway said. "Instead of me saying I couldn't throw it over him, there's a way. You've got to find a way. You've got to keep playing."