How an unlikely hero helped Tennessee upset Georgia Tech in 1964

Doug Dickey called out to David Leake. 

Somewhere on Tennessee’s sideline at Grant Field, Leake emerged. The Vols were trailing No. 7 Georgia Tech by two scores at the start of the fourth quarter and needed a spark. 

One week earlier, Tennessee had taken its most significant step forward in Dickey’s first season as head coach with a 3-3 tie at LSU. Down to their last 15 minutes against Bobby Dodd’s unbeaten Yellow Jackets in Atlanta they were taking a step back. 

Enter a most unlikely hero: Leake. He played his high school football in Memphis and arrived at Tennessee without a role. He place-kicked for the freshmen team his first year and then split time between kicking and end as a sophomore. 

Eleven months earlier, not long after a Memphis train carrying then-31-year-old Arkansas assistant Doug Dickey rolled into Knoxville under the cover of darkness, Tennessee had its new coach and a new offense in the T-formation. 

The change inspired Leake to try out for quarterback. On a November afternoon on the edge of midtown Atlanta in 1964, Leake found his role—and a spot in Vols football lore after leading a fourth quarter comeback that included 19 unanswered points and a signature 22-14 signature triumph.

“When we went into the huddle, I told the boys, ‘Let’s go, this is our chance,’” Leake recalled to the scrum of reporters suddenly surrounding him in Tennessee’s postgame locker room. “I could just feel the surge and the throb in the boys.”

Even though Leake had impressed Dickey enough in the spring to join the quarterbacks room ahead of the 1964 season, the chances of him getting significant snaps against any team, let alone a top 10 Georgia Tech team that the Vols hadn’t beaten just once in six years, seemed unlikely. 

It was a script almost too good to be true: Leake, the kicker who spent the summer throwing footballs into an old mattress and spent the first six games behind Hal Wantland and Art Galiffa was now Tennessee’s field general entrusted with giving the Vols’ offense some semblance of life after barely clinging to it for three quarters. 

The Jackets scored in the second quarter on Johnny Greshman’s 12-yard run and then Gerry Bussell intercepted a Galiffa pass and returned it for a touchdown to go up 14-3 in the third. 

It was after a defensive stand from Tennessee that Dickey made the decision to put Leake in. 

“Art Galiffa was tired,” Dickey later recalled. “He had taken a beating. So, I switched to Leake in the last quarter.”

Leake almost immediately paid off Dickey’s gamble. He picked up four yards on an option run on his first play. He passed to Wantland for 30 yards to the Georgia Tech 23. 

Two plays later, Leake lobbed a pass to Al Tanara in the end zone, who out-jumped a couple of defenders and snagged the ball to trim the Jackets’ lead to 14-9. 

Wantland was stopped short on the two-point attempt, but Tennessee’s defense continued to give the offense a chance, getting the ball back following another stop. That drive began with a Leake pass to Wantland for 15 yards, then Jack Patterson did the rest. 

The Vols were on the doorstep when Leake gave the ball to Patterson at the 1. He was hit and nearly stuffed, but kept pushing forward, using all he had to push forward and get across for the go-ahead score. 

Tennessee led, 15-14. 

For the first time, Georgia Tech was playing from behind and the Vols were on the cusp of a signature victory. But for all of Leake’s fourth quarter heroics, it was going to be up to the defense to get them there.

The Jackets, meanwhile, were going to have to lean on their own quarterback in Jerry Priestley, who had spent much of the afternoon running from Steve DeLong and throwing to Tennessee defenders. 

The Vols’ accounted for five interceptions, one shy of a program single-game record. None were more important than the one that Doug Archibald stepped in front of with Georgia Tech driving.

Archibald rambled 69 yards to the end zone, applying the dagger with just over five minutes left. Bob Petrella picked Priestley off two more times before time ran out.  

“An amazed gathering of 50,673 saw Coach Doug Dickey’s gutty Vols fall behind 11 points on their own errors but come storming back like a hero in a TV Western,” Marvin West penned for the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

Leake was named the SEC Back of the Week by sports scribes for his efforts and newspapers praised Dickey’s decisiveness.

In some ways, Leake’s meteoric rise mirrored that of his head coach. 

Dickey was a young assistant coach under Frank Broyles at Arkansas when Tennessee tabbed him to take over a program built by Robert R. Neyland, but had slipped into the SEC cellar by the end of 1963. 

The Vols lost their next three games after beating Georgia Tech, but won eight games and reached a bowl game for the first time in eight years in 1965. They won their first SEC title in more than a decade two years later in 1967, and then again in 1969. 

The run that put Tennessee back among the college football elite might as well have started in the fourth quarter at Grant Field. 

“Doug Dickey will always have a soft spot in his heart for Grant Field, the dark and bloody battlefield of Georgia Tech where a visiting team wins as often as a Republican carries Georgia,” the News-Sentinel’s Tom Siler wrote. “Coach Dickey may swallow many a bitter pill of defeat on this field. 

“But he’ll never forget Nov. 7, 1964…This contest set the stage for Tennessee’s return to the football heights.”