Fair is retiring high school football magazine
His publication started as hobby, lasted for 34 years
Murphy Fair paused for a moment. His voice cracked with emotion as he began to talk about the relationships he's formed over the past 34 years and knowing an important chapter of his life has ended.
That's when he started to choke up with tears on the phone.
“I get emotional about it,” Fair said. “You can tell, I really do. I have so much respect for so many head football coaches.”
Fair, 71, has retired his preseason book — “Murphy Fair's Tennessee High School Football” — after four decades. A former newspaper man in Carthage, Fair picked up the project when he left being a full-time sports writer to work for a local savings and loan.
“It started as a hobby,” Fair said. “I missed the atmosphere and the writing part of it. I had been an editor of a weekly newspaper in Carthage, and that meant you were going to be on the sideline every Friday night covering (Smith County) or Gordonsville.”
It's led to countless nights on the sidelines in the fall and buried in his computer in the offseason compiling surveys from coaches, then using their own words to preview those teams in his book. He'd travel the state, dropping off boxes of books that he had loaded up.
“I encouraged Murphy to do this because I knew how well it would be received,” former TSSAA executive director Ronnie Carter said. “At that time, you had some of those things for the college world, but there wasn't a book for high school sports that emphasized one thing, and this was for football.
“Ideally, you'd like one for every high school sport, but you understand why that doesn't happen. It was just something very special.”
Fair spent more than 50 years covering high school football. He did it at a weekly in Cookeville, covering teams in Putnam County. He was a sports editor in Union City. And he worked in Carthage.
And of course there is more. He’s on radio and has worked as a sideline reporter during the TSSAA Bluecross Bowl high school football state championship games. He plans to continue work on radio, where he’ll pick the winner every game each week in the state. He also wants to continue to be part of the TV coverage at the state championship games.
How he became ‘the guru’
Fair has countless high school football stories from decades of phone calls and in-person interviews.
He remembers when he was on the radio with former Hillsboro and Pearlcohn football coach Maurice Fitzgerald and current WNSR sports talk show host Greg Pogue. A listener called in and asked a question when Fitzgerald turned to Fair and told him he could answer the question.
“He said, ‘I’m not real sure, but the guru is here, let’s ask him,’” Fair said. “And it just stuck.”
How much so? Fair has “FB GURU” as his license plate. He added a football between FB and GURU due to some thinking he was a Facebook guru.
What’s next?
Fair has plans to stay involved with Tennessee high school football beyond radio and TV. He’s working on a book where he’s asking more than 500 head coaches their best story.
“What story do you want people to remember you for?” Fair said.
“Some are hilariously funny. Some are heart squeezers, as I call them. Some stories, you find out where some coaches got into coaching through the back door.”
He’s still got plenty of work to do on it. Fair would like to have it done by late next year, giving him time to tell stories and get it edited. Now, as far as what will fill the void for a preview magazine, Rutherford County writer Donovan Stewart has written his own preview magazine and can be purchased at https://www.myteamworks.org/donovanstewart stennesseefootballpreview for $32, which includes shipping expenses.