Born in 1906, Gene Thompson’s entry into athletics came first as a participant. At Virginia High School in Bristol, Thompson played football and baseball, where he had some help from his outstanding teammates, Gene McEver and Beatie Feathers. He went on to Emory & Henry College for one year before transferring to King College on a basketball scholarship. Thompson left school to accept a job as general reporter with the “Bristol Herald Courier”, where he would stay for nearly fifty years, moving up to police and court reporter, sportswriter, sports editor, and eventually executive sports editor before retiring in 1979. He was a member of such prestigious organizations as the American Football Writers, the National Association of Basketball Writers, the National Association of Baseball Writers, the National Football Foundation, and the Society for Research of American Baseball. Thompson wrote SEC and Southern Independents previews for “Football Roundup” for more than fifteen years, and he won several state awards for feature stories and sportswriting. A charter member of Emory & Henry Sports Hall of Fame, and an inductee into the UT Press Box Hall of Fame, Thompson originated the “Football Edition”, now an annual fall feature of Bristol newspapers. Gene Thompson passed away in 1988. He will be fondly remembered by Tennessee sports fans for his distinguished writing career which lasted nearly half a century.
