A shower or two possible this morning with partly cloudy skies for the afternoon. High 73F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..
Partly cloudy. Low 52F. Winds light and variable.
Virginia High trickster Bobby Knox won the VHSL Group I-A individual title in the 440-yard dash in 1968. His Southwest Virginia all-time best of 48.24 seconds for the 400 is still standing.
ETSU runner Bobby Knox, right, and a Baptist College runner compete at a dual meet in the late 1960s.
East Tennessee State runner Bobby Knox, right, and a Murray State runner race to the finish line at a meet in the early 1970s.
Virginia High trickster Bobby Knox won the VHSL Group I-A individual title in the 440-yard dash in 1968. His Southwest Virginia all-time best of 48.24 seconds for the 400 is still standing.
ETSU runner Bobby Knox, right, and a Baptist College runner compete at a dual meet in the late 1960s.
East Tennessee State runner Bobby Knox, right, and a Murray State runner race to the finish line at a meet in the early 1970s.
It was once stated that the 400-meter dash is the purest race in track — one lap around the oval to see who is the fastest.
Former Virginia High state champion and East Tennessee State record holder Bobby Knox knows a thing or two about the one-lap race.
“I always played football and basketball growing up and didn’t think about track,” he said. “Most of my relatives were good athletes. I had an uncle and a cousin that played professional baseball. One thing they all had in common was that they were fast.
“I was doing an intramural track race one day for fun as part of a relay and one of the Virginia High coaches came up to me and said that I was pretty fast and should give track a try.”
Running on mostly cinder tracks in his prep days, Knox still holds the all-time Southwest Virginia best in the 440-yard dash by turning the hand-timed in 48.3 seconds in 1968, which converts to 48.24 for the 400.
After signing on with ETSU, Knox was always a force to be reckoned with in the Ohio Valley Conference. He still holds the school record in the 400 with a hand-timed clocking of 46.6 in 1971.
Nearly a decade before legendary Bearcats coach Ron Helmer arrived in Bristol and established a track and cross country dynasty, Knox was changing the game.
Knox was a talented utility man that could do anything for then Bearcats coach Phil Marshall, who was also the football coach.
He was a district long jump champion along with being by far and away the best in the area for the 100- and 220-yard dashes. He also dabbled in high jump, triple jump and was often a leg on the Bearcats’ mile relay team.
“I actually started out in the 440, but I also ran the 880,” he said. “I long jumped somewhere around 21 feet and I had the school record for a while.”
It was his senior year when Marshall left for another job and Eddie Icenhour took over the reins. That’s when Knox figured out that his event was the 440.
“When I was running at Virginia High, our track was only 380 yards long and it was made of cinders,” he said.
Fortunately for Knox, track was nearing a peak period in history across the state line and he was able to take full advantage of it.
The lone blemish on Knox’s senior year record in the spring of 1968 was to a kid from Dobyns-Bennett named Darwin Bond.
At the old Kingsport Relays inside of J. Fred Johnson Stadium, Knox and Bond went head-to-head in their key event for the only time and Bond came away with the win.
“I was on (Bond’s) shoulder the whole way,” Knox said. “It was the only time I ran against him. I almost had him.”
The highlight event leading up to the state meet was the VHSL Group I-A Western Regional Championships held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Not only was this the qualifying meet for athletes to the state meet in Williamsburg, it had the added luxury of being the only all-weather track in the state.
And again, Knox took full advantage of the opportunity.
“That was the only synthetic track I ran on in my whole career in high school,” he said.
Knox easily won the 440 with a new state-best time of 48.3 seconds. His run not only beat the previous facility record in Blacksburg, but it was also faster than the Virginia Tech school record at the time.
Even though his scintillating time was the fastest ever recorded in the state’s track history, it did not count as a state record because it was not performed at the state meet.
Top stories, delivered straight to your inbox.
A six-hour drive across the state didn’t seem to bother Knox all that much on a glorious Saturday in May at the College of William and Mary’s Cary Field.
Knox was going up against some of the best runners in the state at the Group I-A state meet. And yes, the track was cinders.
“I didn’t start running that fast until later in the season,” Knox said. “The cinders were loose and you couldn’t get any kind of grip at all. If they had the state meet at Virginia Tech, I probably would’ve beaten the state record because it was like 48.8 at the time.
“A guy from (E.C.) Glass named Dick Morris had the best time from the heats the day before going into the finals. I went out the first 220 really hard and just held on. I was in the lead most of the way.”
Knox blistered the field from the inside lane, breaking the tape with a clocking of 49.3, becoming the first and only athlete from Southwest Virginia to win an individual event in Virginia’s largest classification.
“I didn’t know how I was doing until I hit the final turn and I saw I was even with the others,” he said. “Back then, we were considered a big school and we had 1,100 students.”
Added Knox: “Recruiting was kind of weird because Coach Marshall went to take the job at Grundy right before the track season. I missed out on going to the junior nationals my senior year because nobody knew who to contact for track at the high school. (Dave) Walker actually called me at home after I ran 48.3. Virginia Tech and Western Kentucky were also interested, but I liked being around home.”
Knox could not have picked a better time to be on the track team at ETSU.
The Buccaneer thinclads were in the early years of the “Irish Brigade” with names like Neil Cusack, P.J. and Eddie Leddy, Patsy Durnin and Kevin Breen among others.
“Walker had just started getting that distance program going,” he said. “He had one guy named from Ireland and then he started getting guys like Patsy, Neil and the Leddy boys.
“Running for Walker was great. He was a disciplinarian and we didn’t have a lot of money like a lot of the other schools for track. We actually sold Krispy Kreme donuts one time to help raise funds to go to a meet.”
Knox made an instant impact for the Bucs, breaking the school record in one of his first outdoor meets in 1969 at the Southern Conference Relays by clocking 50.3 seconds.
The previous best was 51.2 by David Johnson the previous year.
“We did a lot of dual meets back then and we ran against Georgia Tech every year,” he said. “Their coach was Buddy Fowlkes, who ran and beat Ollan Cassell at the AAU Championships one year. All of those guys knew each other.”
In all, Knox broke his own school record in the outdoor 440 seven times over the course of his career, culminating in 1971 at the OVC Championships in Cookeville.
Knox was one of the top seeds going into the meet, but Murray State’s Tommie Turner did him one better.
In a heated race under cloudy skies, Turner edged Knox at the line by two-tenths of a second with a new conference meet record of 46.4.
Knox broke his own school record one final time (46.6). It has remained untouched for almost 51 years.
“I was ranked in the top 40 in the world at the time, but there were probably 12 guys in the States that were running better times,” Knox said. “We went out to a USATF meet in Utah one time when I was at ETSU and I finished fourth.”
Before Knox, there was Appalachia’s Cassell, who went on to run for the US Olympic team in the 1960 Tokyo Olympics.
After Cassell, there wasn’t a lot to write home about in the sprints until Knox came around.
Knox’s record has been threatened over the years, most notably by another Bearcat, Darrayl Wilson, in the late 1970s. Wilson would go on to become an NCAA All-American for Tennessee.
“I think Wilson ran like 48.6 back then, but I think he was hurt most of his senior year,” Knox said. “The quarter-mile is a tough race, so I had to be a tough runner.”
His athletic ability has certainly been passed on as his son Conner was a tennis state champion for Tennessee High. Conner won the Class AAA doubles title with Owen Rockett in 2010 and the Vikings would win the team title in 2011.
Please disable your ad blocker, whitelist our site, or purchase a subscription