Little Rock Touchdown Club Reaches Milestone

Football’s ultimate intimidator, Jon Gruden, the former NFL head coach with the uncanny likeness in appearance and sideline demeanor to the horror slasher Chucky, squirmed.

On a midday in August 2022, Gruden was the guest of a packed house before the Little Rock Touchdown Club. It was his first public appearance after a scandal involving leaked emails containing racist, sexist and homophobic slurs forced him from his second stint as head coach of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders.

The godfather, David Bazzel (Photos courtesy of LRTDC)

LRTDC founder and emcee David Bazzel sat onstage with the coach, asking a series of questions about his life and career. Gruden relished talk of the glory days but found it hard to sit still, knowing the elephant in the room would eventually be prodded. When it was, he responded in a manner that reverberated throughout the football world.

“I’m not going to say anything but honest things here. I’m ashamed of what’s come about in these emails, and I’ll make no excuses for it. It’s shameful, but I am a good person. I believe that. I go to church. I’ve been married for 31 years. I’ve got three great boys,” he said, as the emotion crept into his face with each syllable, almost overtaking him as he continued.

“I still love football. I’ve made some mistakes, but I don’t think anyone else in here hasn’t. I just ask for forgiveness, and hopefully, I get another shot.”

Former NFL coach Jon Gruden with David Bazzel at Little Rock Touchdown Club.

Gruden’s troubles did not end with his appearance at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, but that does not diminish the fact that of all the media outlets that hounded him for comment, it was a simple gathering of football fans in Arkansas who got the privilege of witnessing his humility. News organizations around the country relayed the exchange, and with it, millions learned of a Little Rock sports institution.

“This was the game changer,” Bazzel said, reflecting back on the history of the club, which marks its 20th season this fall. “That changed us from a really good touchdown club to the best in the country. When Coach Gruden gave his first public appearance since he’d been fired and all the lawsuits that followed, it went nationwide.”

Such a get would probably have been inconceivable when Bazzel and legendary columnist, football commentator and Arkansas archivist Rex Nelson put together the first season of the club. Back then, the roster was compiled largely of in-state coaches and guests landed through Bazzel’s playing-days connections delivered to a modest audience.

Over the two decades since, the Little Rock Touchdown Club has established itself as one of the very best in the country, boasting an alumni roster of speakers that reads like a football hall of fame. Former NFL’ers Peyton, Eli and Archie Manning, Terry Bradshaw, Marcus Allen, Ed “Too Tall” Jones, Tony Dorsett, Earl Campbell, and Joe Theismann merely scratch the surface of players to grace the stage, along with equally legendary football coaches Mike Ditka, Barry Switzer, Dan Reeves, Lou Holtz and Bobby Bowden, to name a few. More recent years have also carried heavy hitters from the sports media world, a list headlined by Pat Summerall, Kirk Herbstreit, Paul Finebaum and Verne Lundquist.

Yet for all the star power, the event has lost nothing of its soul. Intended as a casual gathering of like-minded football fans discussing the sport they love, the event remains the kind of place blind to societal rank or economic privilege. Here, the bank president breaks bread with the cotton farmer, and the U.S. senator debates the coming Saturday’s matchups with the steelworker.

“It’s kind of a community picnic atmosphere is what I call it,” Nelson said. “I mean, we’re not outside, but it feels almost like a community picnic with these long tables where you sit down, and you could be sitting by anybody. The thing that I really love about the club is that you have that mixture of all social strata in Little Rock who give up part of their Monday to come hear our speakers, and they’re all on the same wavelength.”

Nelson and Bazzel proved kindred spirits in conceiving the club. Both men were aware of similar organizations around the country and felt it was high time central Arkansas had the same.

“In the South, the touchdown clubs, or quarterback clubs as some of them are called, have been around for a long time,” Bazzel said. “As a kid, I had always heard about them. I just felt that there was a void here in central Arkansas for that kind of thing.”

“With my long interest in football and having broadcast football for many years, I realized that we were probably the largest Southern city that didn’t have some kind of football club. It just seemed to be a missing element in Little Rock,” Nelson added. “I invited David to lunch one day, and I can still remember it vividly. As soon as I suggested the idea, David said he had been thinking about the same thing. To give credit where it’s due, he’s the one who really took the ball and ran with it at that point.”

Despite challenging timing — the first organizational meetings began in summer 2004 — the Little Rock Touchdown Club opened its inaugural slate of 10 meetings that fall and played to weekly audiences well below 100 onlookers. Modest though that sounds, the response was encouraging enough to convince Bazzel that the idea could work and gave him enough ammo to approach a local bank for some modest funding to keep the momentum going.

“I wanted it to be the best. I want to be the best there is in whatever I do, if it’s creating an award or hosting a radio show,” Bazzel said. “I never thought, though, that within a couple of decades, this would be one of the best, if not the best touchdown club in America.”

Over time, the rosters got longer, the crowds got bigger and Bazzel got better at the fine art of booking guests. Two decades have provided enough stories of near misses, averted catastrophes and just-in-time solutions to fill volumes, but both Bazzel and Nelson insist the overwhelming majority of guests have been gracious and well worth the growing memberships’ time.

“You know, sometimes people won’t be exactly like their image, but then again, sometimes they will,” Nelson said. “[Former Florida State coach, the late] Bobby Bowden had always come across as this really friendly, grandfatherly type, and I got to visit with him about 30 minutes before our lunch the day he was there. He was everything I thought he would be, one of the nicest men I’ve ever met. Both Peyton and Eli Manning, you know, those personas are real. They’re not an act. They’re both just genuinely nice people who seemed to enjoy being here, rather than coming here just to collect a speaking check.”

Peyton Manning speaking at Little Rock Touchdown Club

“We’ve just really been fortunate,” Bazzel said. “We really haven’t had anybody that’s been a jerk to deal with. Hey listen, I’ve done this for 20 years and booked probably 250 speakers, and to see that many and hardly any of them are a problem to deal with is pretty amazing.”

The affection between the club and its guests appears to run both ways. In addition to Gruden, there have been other moments that have solidified the reputation of the club, as much for the respect shown to speakers by the crowd. Nowhere was that more apparent than when former Razorback Head Coach Bobby Petrino appeared in 2019, the first time he addressed the Razorback faithful since being fired in 2012. Petrino was sent packing in the wake of revelations he was carrying on an affair with staffer Jessica Dorrell, a relationship he did not disclose when she was hired by the university.

In an era when public discourse of any kind, even sports, is typified by vitriol, the crowd’s standing ovation and warmth for the former coach spoke volumes.

“I wanted to be able to come here and apologize to everybody, the fans, the players, and truly tell you how sorry I am for the way it ended, but I also wanted to come here and thank you for what the people in this room and this state did for me and my family. You were great to us,” he said through tears.

Petrino’s appearance also piqued national news all over the country, as did the 2018 mea culpa by Hugh Freeze, former Ole Miss and Arkansas State University coach, who addressed the personal misconduct that started with the school’s investigation into his calls to an escort service that brought him down in 2017.

“July 21, [2017], I professionally hit rock bottom. I paid a heck of a price for it. It’s not been much fun,” Freeze said. “I’ve been spending the last year and a half wondering how do I get back the pure motives for what you do and why you do it?”

Another moment of a more humorous variety that catapulted the club into the national spotlight came courtesy of Ed Orgeron, who had recently been let go as head coach of LSU. A colorful storyteller with a flair for phrase, Orgeron told the crowd of the termination meeting with school officials.

“I’ve got to tell you, we had a meeting. They said, ‘Coach, things are not going well.’ No sh–. Ray Charles could see that, brother,” Orgeron said in the now-famous clip. “They said, ‘Coach, you got $17.1 million on your contract. We’re going to give it to you.’ I said, ‘What time do you want me to leave, and what door you want me out of, brother?’”

“You know, it got probably 5 or 10 million views on social media, spread everywhere,” Bazzel said. “My favorite was we had a writer down in Louisiana who called us the Oprah of touchdown clubs in America because we were getting all these great emotional interviews and they were going nationwide. Another one of my favorites was a nationally syndicated sports program saying on the air ‘I don’t know who’s booking guests for the Little Rock Touchdown Club, but we need to hire that guy for this show.’”

While nationally known speakers are the LRTDC norm these days, the club has also stuck to a proven formula of honoring the sport of football over the fame or notoriety of any individual guest. For 20 years, a portion of weeks are reserved for football coaches from various Arkansas institutions, and even the club’s name underscores its football agnosticism.

“You know, it’s just a way for people to come together every week and share an activity they love, talk about it, review the previous weekend,” Nelson said. “I felt very strongly, and David felt the same way, that while much of the focus probably would be on the Razorbacks, that this would not be a Razorback club. It would be a football club. I think that’s been another key to our success is that we celebrate the sport and not just one team. We celebrate the history and the traditions, and those have all been keys to giving this market something that it really didn’t have before.”

Today, one need only see the intrigue surrounding the reveal of each year’s closely-guarded slate of speakers — Bazzel is protective to the point of paranoid about early spoilers leaking out — to see how much the LRTDC has ingrained itself among the state’s most-beloved football traditions. As for the future, there is always a new target to go after, someone who has yet to grace the club’s stage for the first time. Heading the list for the foreseeable future are retired Alabama coach Nick Saban and two former New England Patriots, retired quarterback Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, former head coach.

Whatever he has up his sleeve in years to come, Bazzel also perennially chases the specter of his own personal white whale, a legendary football figure that two decades of trying has never allowed him to reel in.

“Well, the guy that I’m most disappointed I haven’t been able to get, and I don’t know why, is [Dallas Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones,” Bazzel said. “You know, I got all the great Cowboys — Roger Staubach, Michael Irvin, Tony Dorsett and others — but I just have not been able to get Jerry. You’d think he’d be the easiest to get, him being from Arkansas, but I’ve tried year after year, and he’s the one that I’ve missed for 20 years. For me, there really isn’t a bigger whale than that.”