John Emmett "Boozer" Pitts Sr. (November 25, 1893 – February 10, 1971) was an American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at

Auburn University Auburn University (AU or Auburn) is a public land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama. With more than 24,600 undergraduate students and a total enrollment of more than 30,000 with 1,330 faculty members, Auburn is the second largest uni ...

from 1923 to 1924 and again for the final seven games of the 1927 season, compiling a career record of 7–11–6. He was also a professor of

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

at Auburn in the 1930s.

Playing career

A native of Pittsview, Alabama, Pitts was a prominent center for coach Mike Donahue's Auburn Tigers football team in

1913 Events January * January 5 – First Balkan War: Battle of Lemnos (1913), Battle of Lemnos – Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forces the Turkish fleet to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, from which it will not ven ...

and

1914 This year saw the beginning of what became known as World War I, after Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austrian throne was Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. It als ...

. He entered Auburn at the age of 15, having only read about football. Pitts was selected All-Southern and was a member of an All-time Auburn Tigers football team selected in 1935, as well as coach Donahue's all-time Auburn team. One writer claims "Auburn had a lot of great football teams, but there may not have been one greater than the 1913–1914 team." Pitts weighed some 190 pounds.

Army

Pitts later served as a colonel in the United States Army during World War II. In late 1958, he had his

larynx The larynx (), commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the top of the neck involved in breathing, producing sound and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. The opening of larynx into pharynx known as the laryngeal inlet is about ...

removed during surgery for cancer."He Can't Talk Or Eat Food, But 'Boozer' Writes Poems", ''The Morning Herald'', Thursday, December 31, 1959,

Hagerstown, Maryland Hagerstown is a city in Washington County, Maryland, United States and the county seat of Washington County. The population of Hagerstown city proper at the 2020 census was 43,527, and the population of the Hagerstown metropolitan area (exten ...

One of his sons, John E. Pitts, Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force.

Head coaching record

Selected works

Notes

External links