UPDATE: … and there it is, the Well He Sure Did’est photo of them all, hiding in plain, undeniable, no longer ironic sight on the cover of David Housel’s 1973 classic “Saturday’s To Remember.”
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“Like, actually on the field?” an Auburn city councilman asked yesterday upon hearing—and trying to come to terms with—the news.
Yep—it wasn’t just a gag gift he took out of a desk drawer to freak out recruits, or a Sunday mass showpiece. Shug wore a houndstooth hat—his daughter says he had at least two—on the field in the late 1960s. Frequently.
Here he is, hat in hands, after Auburn’s win over Arizona in the 1968 Sun Bowl:
Lookin’ great in ’68:
Lookin’ fine in ’69: 
Houndstooth high Auburn’s 1969 win over Georgia in Athens (both teams wore their home jerseys):
Auburn coed Kathy Owsley caught Shug’s hat when he threw it into the stands after Auburn’s epic-enough-to-say-epic win over Alabama in the 1969 Iron Bowl. She returned it to to him to bring him luck in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl against Houston. It didn’t. “But we don’t talk about that,” says Owsley (now Kathy Moates), who got the hat back from Shug after the game and brings it out of the closet each football season.
1970—Bear who?
And of course, there’s that ad in the 1970 Auburn-Georgia edition of Auburn Football Illustrated that first dropped our jaw.
Photos: 1969, 1970, 1971 Glomerata; Nov. 20, 1969 and Jan. 15, 1970 issues of the Auburn Plainsman.
THE WAR EAGLE READER NEEDS YOUR HELP.
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I’ve never understood how those people have taken over houndstooth fabric. What’s it got to do with Crimson Tide? Also most of Bear’s hats were plaid which is not houndstooth. And it’s also hard to tell what Shug’s were.