Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Files found niche with Oklahoma
The Prep Rally: Best in the West series will highlight the all-time best players in western Arkansas as selected by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Jim Files might have been part of a new prep football dynasty if school integration went a different way in Fort Smith in the early 1960s.
When the Fort Smith schools opened a second high school on the south side of the city in 1963, Files was among the first group of students to enter new Southside High School. Had Fort Smith remained an integrated onehigh school city, Files would have joined the influx of Black athletes from Lincoln
High School to Fort Smith High School. What was already a juggernaut with the addition of players like Billy Joe Releford, the Grizzlies arguably would have been one of the strongest football programs in the southwest.
“I really didn’t think that much about it back then,” Files said. “I really didn’t think that much about going to Northside, but back then, I was probably a better basketball player. I really didn’t get serious about football until about the 10th or 11th grade.
“But the thing I do remember is that the guys at Northside said none of us guys at Southside could have played over there anyway. So we sort of had a chip on our shoulder. We were going to show them.”
Northside won the first 14 meetings between the two schools, and most of those games were not close.
It turned out OK for Files, who played a variety of positions for the Rebels, now the Mavericks, during his three-year career. He started out as the tight end, a big, burly sophomore, but an injury to the starting quarterback created an opening there, and Files moved behind center.
“I could kind of throw the football the farthest, so I got to be the quarterback,” Files joked. “It wasn’t my choice of position. I got drafted for that.”
The early years at Southside were a struggle with few seniors. Head coach Dub McGibboney used his best players on both offense and defense, so in addition to playing quarterback, Files also played safety. And that is where he caught the attention of college coaches.
Jim Mackenzie was an assistant coach at the University of Arkansas under Frank Broyles, but he was hired at Oklahoma as the head coach in 1966. Mackenzie had a connection with the high school coaches in Arkansas and called his friend McGibboney to see if there were any good players at Southside. At the time, Files wasn’t getting a lot of attention from college football coaches, but he was receiving interest as a basketball player.
“They were not really recruiting me at Arkansas,” Files said. “Coach McGibboney told him he thought I could play college football at some position, not necessarily quarterback. So OU said we’ll offer a scholarship, but we have to have an answer now because if he doesn’t want it, we’re going to give it to someone else.
“So I had to make my decision before basketball season was over, and when I got the offer and I knew it was a DI school and Oklahoma. I said I can’t pass this up.”
Mackenzie died just one year later after coaching just one season at Oklahoma. He was just 37-yearsold.
Dick Bumpas, who also starred at Southside and later was an All-Southwest Conference player at Arkansas, was a teammate of Files’ at Southside.
“He and my brother Mike were really good friends, so they let me hang around with them,” Bumpas said. “Jim was a big one. He was hard to get down, I’ll tell you that. He was just a tremendous athlete, big and fast. He was a force to be reckoned with, no doubt about it.”
Files recalled than when he arrived in Norman, there were 11 other former high school quarterbacks on the Sooners’ roster. “They recruited us as athletes, not as quarterbacks,” he said. “I think only one or two of them ever got to play quarterback.”
Files was among the group that did not take snaps, but he certainly made his mark at the position Oklahoma coaches moved him to.
Back in the 1960s, freshmen were not eligible to play on the college varsity team, so Files spent a season on the freshman team. In the spring of his freshman year, Files was in the group of defensive ends and caught the attention of Sooners’ coaches when he excelled at a drill where the ends had to shed a lead blocking halfback to stay on their feet. He earned a starting position and never let it go. Files’ sophomore season in 1967, the Sooners went 10-1 and won the Orange Bowl.
He started for all three seasons, later moving to a hybrid position called Monster. He moved around to wherever the offense’s strong side was, sometimes as a strong safety and other times as an outside linebacker.
After his senior season, Files was invited to both the East-West Shrine Game and the Senior Bowl, where the college all-stars played the Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs in 1970.
“At the Senior Bowl, that is where all of the scouts were and I had a good week there and a good game,” Files recalled. “I think that’s what they saw. They saw my size and speed and ability and that’s where my draft status rose.”
The New York Giants selected Files in the first round of the draft, the No. 13 overall selection. The big country boy from Fort Smith was headed to the Big Apple.
“I had no idea they were even interested,” Files laughed.
The first few weeks in Gotham were an experience, Files recalled. The Giants played their home games at Yankee Stadium, which is a subway ride right to the stadium. If you got on the right train. “That was quite an experience,” he said. “I was pretty well lost up there, but the older guys took us around. They made sure we knew how to get to Yankee Stadium on the subway. We’d come right out of the ground at Yankee Stadium. But one day we said we could do it by ourselves, so we went on the first train that stopped and we came up out of the ground … Yankee Stadium was nowhere. We said what have we done? We called a cab but there weren’t any yellow cabs there, but there were these white cabs. They picked us up and drove us back to Yankee Stadium. We got there and got out of the cab and paid and we walked up and those guys said, ‘what are y’all doing? Don’t ever get in one of those white cabs. You’re lucky to be alive. So that was the old country boy coming out in New York City.”
Files spent four seasons with the Giants and was a solid player. In 1970 he was the runner-up for the NFL Rookie of the Year. He intercepted 5 passes and returned one for a touchdown. He became disenchanted with football and left the game to become a minister, where he served for many years at Grand Avenue Baptist Church and Windsor Park Baptist Church in Fort Smith.
Today Files, now 72, lives in the Little Rock area where he and his wife Jane stay busy with their grandchildren.