It is Saturday, Oct. 9, and the usual few dozen football fans are gathered at Adams's home in East Memphis to watch Tennessee play Georgia. In the den, Adams has five TVs tuned to five games - more than 200 inches of TV space, altogether.
The set in the middle, the 52-inch big-screen, shows Tennessee and Georgia. And now the referee is signaling a penalty on Georgia and no touchdown.
"Those officials are going to get killed," says Tim Jones.
Jones's photo is among the nearly 600 framed pictures and articles that cover Adams's walls like wallpaper, a collage that testifies to his large circle of "dear friends" from the college football world and his rise from the "slums of South Memphis" to his current status as a wealthy owner of a property management company.
A former quarterback for the local college football program Adams still refers to as Memphis State, Jones has known Adams since he played for the Tigers and is a regular at the football parties.
"See," says Adams, "that's why you've got to have policemen in society. Georgia was crooked."
Adams has come to consider himself something of an authority on crookedness, and he doesn't deny that college football, this game he loves, has a corrupting influence.
"Those football factories, the players are there to generate revenue," Adams says. "If we get to where these football players can read or write, that would be an admirable goal.
"It's all a joke."
And yet, those who know Adams say the 66-year-old UT graduate is the biggest college football fan in Memphis, if not the entire Southeast (and, hence, the country). When it comes to Tennessee football, the shortened "fan" does not do Adams's fervor justice.
His fanaticism is such that the mere mention of his name can create controversy among SEC fans.
This is just one of many contradictions in the Dickensian character that is Roy Adams.
"Being a college football fan is a sickness," Adams says. "College football is a cult, and we are all in different cults. It's like Jim Jones and all those people committing suicide. Alabama and Tennessee fans are the same way."
Eccentric With A Capital 'E' When Alabama played Tennessee on Saturday, Roy Adams sat in Neyland Stadium urging his beloved Vols to defeat hated Alabama.
To many Tennessee fans, Adams is an eccentric - with a capital "E" - and colorful character who does no harm.
To many Alabama fans, Adams looms as a sinister character in a rivalry now that has grown more bitter and more intense because of Tennessee's involvement with the NCAA and FBI investigation that led to severe sanctions against Alabama.
It was Adams and his former UT-educated attorney, Southland Capital president Karl Schledwitz, who first urged former Trezevant assistant coach Milton Kirk to tell NCAA officials about the recruitment of Albert Means, who signed with Alabama in 2000.
In 2001, Kirk claimed that Memphian Logan Young, a wealthy Alabama booster, gave $200,000 to former Trezevant coach Lynn Lang to steer his prize recruit, Means, to the Crimson Tide.
The story turned into a national scandal. An FBI investigation produced guilty pleas from Kirk and Lang for shopping Means and an indictment of Young, who has always denied any involvement with Means's recruitment.
Adams first emerged as a herald of sorts, trumpeting allegations that Young was spending money to steer players to Alabama.
On the Tennessee message board, Adams uses the handle, "TennStud," after the old Jimmy Driftwood song.
Adams has gloried in Alabama's troubles, and the word "gloat" and the term "rub it in" are often used to describe his posts.
"With Alabama fans, he can create a stir in a heartbeat," says Rodney Orr, who runs the popular Alabama message board TiderInsider. "He's enemy No. 1."
Phillip Shanks, an attorney in Cordova, has filed lawsuits along with Montgomery, Ala., attorney Tommy Gallion against the NCAA and Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer on behalf of their clients, former Alabama assistant coaches Ronnie Cottrell and Ivy Williams.
Earlier this week, Shanks hinted that Adams could be the subject of another soon-to-be-filed lawsuit. In a now-famous episode among hardcore UT and Alabama fans, Adams showed up to a deposition with Shanks wearing his white coonskin cap and carrying a bottle of whiskey.
Adams often directs his verbal barrages at Shanks and Gallion.
This was a post from earlier this week: "When you are right, as we Tennesseans are, when you are principled, as we Tennesseans are, when you are abiding by the rules and winning, as we Tennesseans are, then all the evil in the world as represented by Gallion and his ilk can do the University of Tennessee no harm!!"
Shanks clearly despises Adams.
"At my age, a man is fortunate if his chief enemy in the world is a discredited (man) like Roy Adams," Shanks says. "I'm fortunate that Roy Adams is my chief tormentor, and thank God it's not somebody with any credibility."
Most afternoons, Adams can be found in the large dining room area of his house, half of which he's converted to an office.
He tunes his satellite radio to listen to Paul Finebaum, a sports writer in Birmingham with a popular sports talk show. His computer, which is crammed into a busy and cluttered desk, is always turned on and always logged into the UT message board known as Gridscape.
Adams began visiting message boards eight years ago and for years used WebTV to access the Internet.
He recently made his 4,000th post on Gridscape.
"I go to the Tennessee board, the Notre Dame board and to TiderInsider for the laughs of the day," Adams says. "I go to see the links they have and if any new information has been brought out.
And the Alabama board?
"TiderInsider is the National Enquirer," Adams says with a sly smile. "Just goofballs that still live in the past who say, 'We will do this ...' It's just funny. I mainly followed it through the years with the Logan Young thing, and I knew what was true and they were all in denial and whatnot. And still are."
Orr, as soft-spoken as Adams is loud, doesn't seem to share the deep grudge his customers hold against Adams, but he acknowledges that Adams inflames Tide fans.
"What's so funny is how he paints this picture of Tennessee being so clean, and naturally Alabama fans aren't going to see it quite that way," says Orr. "And then he paints Alabama to be the dirtiest program in the history of the NCAA. Roy has admitted he's had relationships with college players, and there's talk Roy was banned from the University of Tennessee, so fans see it as a guy who is hypocritical."
Adams practically crows that, "We won! They lost! We have been vindicated!"
Even his friends, like Schledwitz, think Adams would do himself a favor by toning it down.
"I've said that to him so many times until I'm blue in the face," Schledwitz says.
Alabama fans, for their part, believe Adams might yet receive his comeuppance.
"Let's just leave it at this," Shanks says. "Roy has some exposure. He has said some things about my clients that are untrue and some things about the University of Alabama that are untrue.
"We'll have to see what happens."
His good friends The shrill noise of a phone ringing interrupts the action of the UT-Georgia game.
Milton Kirk, reclined in a Roy Adams big leather easy chair, the one directly across from the big screen showing UT-Georgia, picks up the receiver.
"Roy Adams residence," Kirk says, to no avail. He repeats: "Roy Adams residence."
Gerald Riggs fumbles. Phone rings again. This time Adams answers.
It's Derrick Ballard, a linebacker at the University of Memphis from 2000-03. Tiger players are regulars at Adams's house, and some will come by on this day, too, since Memphis has an off week.
"He's a good friend," Adams says of Ballard.
The "good friends" and "dear friends" that populate Adams's life are too numerous to count. Many are former Memphis players. Some met Adams through his longtime connection with Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia. Others visited with friends of friends and partook of the food and drink always available at the East Memphis abode for Friends of Roy.
Adams says he has bought "five or six" cars for Memphis players dating back decades.
As Tennessee drives into field-goal range, Adams tells the story of a car he gave an LSU player more than a decade ago.
"I said, 'What are you going to do with the plates?' " Adams explains. "They said, 'Why?' I told them that at UT they check the titles, but they said, 'It doesn't matter here.' "
The poor kid The defining moment in Roy Adams's life came in 1952, when he walked into the downtown campaign headquarters for Sen. Estes Kefauver and contributed his $5 to electing the political enemy of E.H. 'Boss' Crump to the presidency.
Adams was 14.
"It was the defining moment of my life," Adams says now. "If I had not done that, I wouldn't have met the prominent anti-Crump people who took me under their wing."
Adams became a regular at the headquarters and soon enough met some of the giants of local politics - Lucius Burch, Edmund Orgill, Al Rickey and, of course, Sen. Kefauver himself.
"Because I was this poor kid, they looked after me," Adams says.
Adams calls his late mother, Irene, the "nucleus" of the family and recalls that she made $1 an hour as an egg handler. His father, Harris, worked for the Frisco railroad and was, Roy says, an alcoholic with violent tendencies.
The children of tenant farmers in Batesville, Miss., Irene and Harris permanently moved the family to South Memphis, to a tri-plex on Edith Avenue, when Roy was in elementary school.
"We started out on top, 200 square feet, paid our rent on time and were able to work our way to the bottom," Adams says.
Politics became Roy's ticket out of South Memphis. Even though the Democrats lost control of the Senate in 1952, Adams says Sens. Kefauver and Al Gore Sr. convinced a Nebraska Republican to give the young Memphian a cherished appointment as a Senatorial page.
Adams would spend three years as a page and proudly displays two high school diplomas. One is from Central, where he would attend until late January, and the other, signed by one Dwight David Eisenhower, from the Capitol Hill Page School.
He also has framed large, signed photographs of John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and, of course, Kefauver.
"I guarantee I was the poorest guy ever in Washington as a Senate page," Adams says.
That began a career in politics that lasted until after he graduated from UT in 1963. Adams would serve as Youth Chairman for statewide campaigns and says he has spoken from the courthouse steps in every county in Tennessee.
At Tennessee, where he attended from 1956-63 (interrupted by a stint in the Army reserves), Adams developed a reputation as a power-broker in campus politics.
One of his former political opponents, Nashville entertainment lawyer Ralph Gordon, said he has neither seen nor talked to Adams since their college days and was unaware of Adams's notoriety among SEC football fans.
But his memories of Adams then fit the personality of the man they now call TennStud.
"He was always a guy to push the envelope," Gordon says. "He was a fierce competitor, I will tell you that. He would do everything he could to see that his people got the most (publicity). Nothing illegal that I saw or underhanded as such, just fierce."
Says Al Harvey, a Memphis attorney and another former opponent who says he has rarely dealt with Adams over the past 20 years: "He was innovative, he was pugnacious, he knew a lot of people. People would think of Roy as the power behind the throne."
After finishing at UT, Adams began running Goodyear stores in Memphis, with great success. He got into the restaurant business in the '70s, left Goodyear in 1980 and finally got out of the restaurant business to devote his time to his burgeoning property management company.
As a prominent UT booster, he was the subject of an NCAA investigation in the '80s. Schledwitz served as his attorney and came up with a unique defense. Because Adams was so generous to so many players from so many different college programs, it could not be proven that he was exerting influence for the benefit of any one school.
UT coaches and officials have long been wary of Adams, and Adams says he stays uninvolved with the program to avoid any appearance of impropriety.
"The only thing I have ever done is helped kids, and I don't care where they go," Adams says.
Alabama fans, of course, have their own theories.
Hand On The Bible When Tennessee misses a field goal, Milton Kirk leans forward in the big easy chair and exclaims: "(Darn), we needed that."
Kirk roots openly for the Vols. He knows how much Alabama fans despise him, but he says he doesn't care.
Adams admits that Kirk's presence at his many parties creates a potentially troubling image. Alabama fans have implied that Adams used more than just words to encourage Kirk to tell his story to NCAA investigators.
Adams is adamant that no such bribes ever took place, and defiant about his ongoing friendship with Kirk.
"He will have a lasting influence for the good," Adams says. "Before he went public, there was all this corruption. He should be remembered and rewarded. No, I am not embarrassed to be with Milton Kirk."
Asked if he has ever given money to a recruit in an effort to steer him to Tennessee, Adams says: "I never bought a player to go to the University of Tennessee. I will put my hand on the Bible."
The real Roy Adams Adams knows that the insinuations made about him on the Internet and elsewhere go beyond allegations of cheating.
Alabama fans regularly pepper their references to Adams with vulgar epithets. Shanks, the Memphis attorney, has his own personal nickname for Adams that cannot be printed in the newspaper.
The upshot of the insinuations is that Adams is gay and that there must be some ulterior motive for spending so much time with all those young athletes over all those many years.
Even some of the pictures that Adams proudly displays, like the one where he's sitting at a Key West restaurant with two current U of M players, could raise eyebrows.
"I guess it's natural that people would say that," Adams says. "I don't care. I am comfortable with who I am."
Adams points out that he is "dear friends" with lots of people who he says would never condone a gay lifestyle.
Former and current U of M players like Idrees Bashir and Danny Wimprine are "dear friends." So, too, are former Ole Miss players like DeWayne Dotson and Cassius Ware, as is former Alabama standout Dewayne Rudd.
One of his closest friends is former Miami defensive tackle Cortez Kennedy, a former NFL All-Pro player from Osceola, Ark. who often stays in an upstairs room in Adams's house.
George Harper, a former Memphis player, is a vice president for Adams's property management company and also lives with Adams.
"College football players and college football coaches are some of the most masculine members of society," Adams says. "Do you think they would be around a situation with any gay (stuff) going on?"
Adams, who has never been married, loves to brag about trips he makes to Platinum Plus, a strip club not far from his house.
"Many times the ladies from Platinum come over here during our parties," Adams says.
This brings up yet another contradiction.
Adams is a loyal and dedicated fan of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He contributes money to him monthly - much more than the $500 per year he gives to Tennessee, Adams says - and calls the framed picture of himself and Falwell his "prized possession."
But Adams does not attend church, and his lifestyle is not exactly one Falwell might approve.
"I believe he represents everything that is good and moral and right in society," Adams says. "The teaching of the Lord is we all fall short. I do not live up to and accomplish all that I would like to in my personal life."
"But I say my prayers every night."
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