Where Are They Now: Rocky Turner

It’s football. He enjoyed playing it. And because of the game, H.J. “Rocky” Turner III would receive a scholarship to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he’d earn bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemistry. He didn’t expect to be, or even thought about, playing at the next level until the wide receiver was chosen by the Jets in the 1972 NFL Draft.

“I was in my college parasitology lab doing research when the draft happened,” Turner said. “It was not something that I planned to do. I was told that I might get the opportunity, and I had some other plans. I always had planned to go to the veterinarian school, actually. Or I was going to go to Alaska and homestead.

“That’s what I really wanted to do. I had a friend that was on the football team that wanted to do it too. And I said, ‘Hey, let’s do that if we don’t have something else going on.’ Well, then I ended up getting married instead, which changed all my homestead plans. So I said, ‘Since I got drafted, I guess I’ll go give it a try.”

With a new bride and plans to explore the last frontier of Alaska on hold, Turner set his sights on experiencing something new that was closer to his hometown of Augusta, GA.

“When I showed up to training camp, I had an old leather suitcase that my daddy had, that had busted latches and tape around it to hold it together, and a paper grocery bag. That’s what my stuff was in,” Turner laughed. “I got off the train and got into Hofstra and I looked like country coming to town, for sure.”

The young country gentleman didn’t exactly come across anything that would have been mistaken for southern hospitality when he joined the other players in New York.

“I had one guy that I kind of knew of before I got there, and that was Don Maynard. But I knew Vernon Studdard, who was a wide receiver also. He played at Ole Miss and I knew him through other friends. And Vernon wasn’t the kind of guy that was going to help anybody out. He was more likely to get you in trouble,” Turner…