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Remembering Phillip Marshall and his untouchable legacy

·32 min·2 clips

"Young lady, you're about to make the easiest sale of your life," Marshall told a Nashville shoe clerk while barefoot.

1. The Auburn Undercover podcast on the 24-7 Sports Network records a tribute episode after Philip Marshall's death on the previous Friday, following roughly half a century covering Auburn sports. 2. Nathan King hosts with Jason Caldwell, Christian Clemente and publisher Ronnie Sanders, who recruited Marshall to the site in 2008 and made his first phone call to him after securing investor approval. 3. The central theme is that Marshall's standards of accuracy, kindness and relationship-building shaped the staff, and King says "there was only one Philip." 4. Sanders recalls a shouting phone call from a Charleston hotel room about three or four months in, when Marshall threatened to return to the Huntsville Times before the two worked through it and went on to cover a coaching search. 5. Caldwell and King describe his reporting ethic: Marshall would "give you the shirt off my back" but not a story, and he questioned an unconfirmed transfer portal report seen only on social media before the Auburn-Chattanooga basketball game. 6. Sanders says Marshall broke the Chizik hire while the site was part of ESPN, and that Marshall pushed back when ESPN staff said he would have to prove himself, saying he had been "proving myself for 40 years." 7. Clemente and King recall Marshall's tendency to ask about a person's background rather than statistics, citing Jeremiah Cobb's loyalty, Peyton Thorne's family and the late Jeff Thorne, and Johni Broome's tattoos of his family and hometown. 8. Marshall's humor runs through the episode: he wanted to interview a horse because equestrians "deserve spotlight," he woke barefoot in a Nashville media center before an SEC tournament game, and he called Joe Whitt "Josephine." 9. Sanders quotes Marshall's advice that he broke big stories by not breaking a bunch of small ones, and King recalls his line "everybody's just a kid from somewhere just trying to do their best." 10. Fans of Auburn sports history and of old-school sports journalism will get the most from it.

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