Coach Shug Jordan Wore the Houndstooth Hat First

Each fall, die-hard Auburn fan Kathy Moates ’73 dusts off the houndstooth hat and places it on her coffee table, where it stays all football season long. It anchors her living room’s Auburn decor. Folks come over for games. They look down. They look back up. “I thought y’all were Auburn people.” Kathy laughs and tells them the story.

She got the hat at the 1969 Iron Bowl, Auburn’s first win over Bama in five years. It was a crazy game. Auburn faked a punt from its own goal line—on a whim—to score a touchdown with a minute left and seal Bear Bryant’s worst defeat ever, 49-26. Fans went wild. An Auburn student ran to midfield, shouting “hallelujah.”

Even Shug let his hair down.

“He was walking down the sideline after the game was over and everybody started yelling ‘throw us your hat, throw us your hat!’” said Moates, an Auburn freshman at the time sitting with her date and future husband, Robert Moates ’71, above one of Legion Field’s tunnel exits. “He just hauled off and threw it, and I caught it.”

And in that moment, Shug Jordan’s houndstooth hat briefly became the most famous fedora in the country.

“He was walking down the sideline after the game was over and everybody started yelling ‘throw us your hat, throw us your hat! He just hauled off and threw it, and I caught it.”

In 1969, the “houndstooth” hat across the state (which, most of the time, wasn’t houndstooth at all, but plaid) had only recently become associated with Bryant, and was still years away from its eventually iconic status. Shug had worn actual houndstooth headpieces for at least as long—on the sidelines and in photo shoots. Most were acquired from the Brooks Brothers in New York City. The hat Moates caught, though, was special.

“I got the hat two years ago in Ireland and it was pretty well battered up,” Shug told sportswriters asking about his spontaneous fedora flinging after the game. “I guess I’ll never know what happened to my old hat.”

He was still mourning the loss during the next day’s Auburn Football Review. But he needn’t have.

“I called the athletics department the next day,” she said. “I said I wanted to give it back to him to wear to the bowl game.”

The photo that Moates’ dad, longtime Opelika-Auburn News reporter Robert “Scoop” Owsley, snapped of the houndstooth homecoming ran in papers across the country. The caption read, “Jordan says she’ll get the hat back after the Houston game.”

And she did.

“It always made me mad, all that [Bama] houndstooth crap,” Moates said. “Bear’s hat wasn’t famous then. I think Shug wore one first. And I have it.”

By Jeremy Henderson ’04