An All-American football player, Hickman (’32) played guard from 1929 to 1931 and was All-American in 1931. He also held the UT shot put record. He was a professional wrestler, wrestling under the name Tennessee Terror, and being known also as the Tennessee Cannonball. He coached at North Carolina State and Army before becoming the first non-Yale alumnus to coach the football team at Yale. He was a writer on the first staff of Sports Illustrated. He became famous as a teller of “kinfolk” stories, as an apostle of Tennessee football, and as a salesman for East Tennessee in general. Grantland Rice once dubbed him the Poet Laureate of the Smokies.