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The 1899 Sewanee Tigers have been regarded as one of the toughest and most accomplished teams in the history of college football, and their story recently served as the basis for a historical-fiction novel called “Iron Tigers,” written by David Neil Drews.

Drews, a Knoxville resident, said that he’s always been fascinated by the early days of sports with a 2014 novel called “The Opening Kickoff” by Dave Revsine on the early days of college football inspiring him to look into the roots of the sport on a local level.

“I wanted to know more about the first 30 years of Southern football,” he said. “That’s how I discovered Sewanee. I was looking for the dominant teams, and I learned about their miraculous season that took place in 1899.”

The 1899 Tigers accomplished feats that would be unheard of today as they went 12-0 to capture a championship in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a precursor to the NCAA, with their exploits including five shutout victories in a six-day span against the likes of Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss.

The 2,500-mile trip for those five games is the primary focus of Drews’ novel as he takes readers on a narrative journey through the lives of a slightly fictionalized version of the Tigers during that period.

Drews said he spent about five years researching and writing the book in an attempt to accurately depict what Southern football and Sewanee campus life looked like during the tail end of the 19^th century.

The research process involved combing through physical and digital archives from the University of the South with the student newspaper, The Sewanee Purple, serving as a primary source, thanks to the contributions of Sewanee’s student manager for the season, Luke Lea.

“(Lea) was really the prototype for an athletic director. When you think about all the things that an AD department is involved with from financial matters to public relations, he did it all,” Drews said. “On their famous road trip where they traveled 2,500 miles and shut out five teams in six days, he was on the trip, of course, and after each game, he would go to the Western Union office at the train depot they were pulling out of, and he would telegraph in a play-by-play account of the game that they had just played. 

Those play-by-play accounts proved invaluable for Drews in writing the action on the field, and Lea’s telegrams also provided direct insight into what the team was like away from the game.

“(Lea) was an incredible writer,” Drews said. “He would wax poetic about the games, the players and how they were representing Sewanee out in the world as true Southern gentlemen but, at the same time, fierce competitors.”

Other sources for Drews’ novel included letters sent between the players later in life and a 2003 non-fiction novel called “Ninety-Nine Iron” by journalist Wendell O. Givens.

When he started working on the project, Drews said he knew from the start that he wanted to put a slight fictional spin on the story to provide detail that otherwise wouldn’t be able to be confirmed.

“As much as we know about the team, we get hints here and there of what they might’ve been up to. They have a free night in New Orleans, and it says in one of Luke Lea’s commentary articles, ‘So-and-so did too much guzzling,’ and ‘So-and-so did too much girling.’ I want to put the flesh on those bones and animate what that might have looked like,” he said. “I very much wanted to put myself on that train, put myself on the fields they played. I wanted to be right there as a reporter on the scene.”

However, the historical-fiction approach doesn’t mean that the characters within “Iron Tigers” are entirely made up with notable personalities such as Luke Lea and William “Wild Bill” Claiborne on the 1899 Sewanee team having direct parallels in the book.

Lea is portrayed in the novel by the character of Alfie Melville with Melville’s personality being traced off of the large amounts of information available on Lea.

After graduating from Sewanee with a master’s degree in 1900, Lea went on to form the Nashville Tennessean newspaper in 1907, was elected to the US Senate from 1911 to 1916 and served in the US Army during World War I.

“All of the stuff that happened to him later in life helps paint the picture of him as a young man running this team,” Drews said.

Claiborne was a spiritual leader for the Tigers who was also the biggest player for the team with his role in the novel being portrayed by a character named Telfair “Prayer Bear” Embree.

“(Claiborne) was blind in one eye, had a patch over his eye, and to intimidate the guy that lined up across from him, on the first play, he would rip the eyepatch off, point at the eye and he said ‘I got this last time out’,” Drews said before referring to Claiborne’s religious background. “He had this other side of him that was devoutly religious and compassionate. I just found him as a fascinating figure in history. When he graduated from the Sewanee seminary, he went into the hollers in the Cumberland Mountain and preached to the people who lived in extreme poverty and in the depths of the woods in the mountain.”

The game of football was vastly different when the Tigers took the field in 1899 with the forward pass not being legalized in the sport until 1906. Drews said that this different ruleset made punting an incredibly important part of the game which is captured in Lea’s play-by-play and in Drews’ depictions in the novel.

“Punting was basically the equivalent of the forward pass. They had three downs to get five yards. They would often punt on first or second down because they felt they had a superior punter. They felt that they were going to win the field-position battle,” he said. “The ball would sail back and forth, and the crowd just went nuts for that. My sense is that it was like when we see long passes made and you get to watch the beauty of a spiral arcing through the air.”

Drews will be holding a book signing for “Iron Tigers” on Oct. 7 at the University of the South’s bookstore. A time for the event had not been confirmed at the time of writing.

Drews said he plans to return to late 1800s football with his next book which will focus on Richard Von Albade Gammon, a Georgia player who passed away during a game against Virginia in 1897. The death of Gammon nearly led to football being banned in Georgia, but the player’s mother, Rosalind Burns Gammon, played a key role in the sport remaining legal.