ESPN’s Paul Finebaum reacts to the death of Harvey Updyke, the Auburn tree poisoner
Paul Finebaum had just finished his radio show Thursday night in Charlotte when his wife broke some news to him that he didn’t know exactly how to take: Harvey Updyke had died, at age 71.
Updyke and Finebaum will always be linked — not as friends, but not as enemies, either. It was complicated.
Updyke is the infamous Alabama football fan who made national news in 2011 when he called Finebaum’s radio show and claimed he had poisoned two beloved oak trees at Auburn University’s Toomer’s Corner. It turned out Updyke really had done so and would go to prison for it.
“That’s the singular most memorable moment that I’ve ever had,” Finebaum said Friday in our interview. “ I’ve had a lot of happier moments and more enjoyable, but never one that just is stuck to you like that…. Whatever you do in life or in your career, you can’t run away from it. And I’ve always felt from that moment on, I would never be able to outrun him — even though I’ve tried.”
Updyke spent a little more than 70 days in prison for the tree poisoning.
Finebaum — who moved to Charlotte in 2013 to become the face of ESPN’s new SEC Network — visited Updyke while he was imprisoned in Alabama. He took calls from Updyke, on and off the air, for a number of years.
His overall feelings about Updyke? Mixed.
Finebaum told me Friday he felt “terribly” about Updyke dying since he had gotten to know the man well. But the last time they spoke — in November 2019, on Finebaum’s radio show again — Finebaum publicly called Updyke an “idiot” and a “lunatic.”
“By no means were we friends,” Finebaum said when we spoke Friday. “In the last call, I was fairly ugly to him.”
Still, Updyke and Finebaum stayed in touch, off and on, for nearly a decade.
“There was an attraction to him,” Finebaum said, “like there’s almost an attraction from a newspaper reporter to a serial killer. You want to leave those lines of communication open, because when he was calling me he was still in the news…. But he just became, sadly, a carny barker as time went on.”
Updyke’s original call to Finebaum in January 2011 is embedded in sports radio lore. Updyke was angry in part because Auburn fans had placed a Cam Newton jersey atop a statue of Bear Bryant following Auburn’s come-from-behind win over Alabama in 2010. Updyke, who had named his first child “Bear Bryant” and his second one “Crimson Tyde,” took this as a traitorous act.
“Let me tell you what I did,” Updyke told Finebaum on live radio. “The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn because I lived 30 miles away, and I poisoned the two Toomer’s trees. I put Spike 80DF in ‘em. They’re not dead yet, but they definitely will die.”
Finebaum asked if that was legal.
“You think I care?” Updyke said. “I really don’t. Roll damn Tide.”
Updyke would plead guilty in 2013 to a felony charge of criminally damaging an agricultural facility and spend more than 70 days in prison. A former Texas state trooper, Updyke was ordered to pay about $800,000 in restitution for the damage he caused, but he had paid only about $6,900 of that as of last October, according to an AL.com report. Auburn eventually cut down the oak trees — which were toilet-papered after big wins — and had them replaced.
“It’s just an amazingly sad story that a guy that would become so consumed with Alabama that he would do what he did,” Finebaum said.
In an earlier interview we did this summer, Finebaum said his own obituary would likely include information about Updyke in its first paragraph.
“If I died next week, The Charlotte Observer would probably have like a three-paragraph brief on page D-17,” Finebaum said then. “And the first line would be, ‘Paul Finebaum, who took the most famous call in sports radio history from some crazed lunatic who admitted poisoning an iconic tree at Auburn University….’”
Finebaum said Friday that Updyke had told him several times that he poisoned the trees “for Nick Saban” because it was unfair Saban lost the 2010 game to Auburn — it was Updyke’s belief that Newton shouldn’t have been eligible to play the game in the first place.
The duo’s final conversation came on Nov. 8, 2019, and is preserved online. Finebaum took a call on-air from Updyke the day before the LSU-Alabama game.
Updyke downplayed poisoning the oaks, saying they were only trees after all, and he at least hadn’t tried to kill LSU’s tiger.
Remembers Finebaum now: “I immediately interrupted him about 20 seconds into it after he just went into some insane diatribe about Auburn. And it was fairly offensive…. I ended up kind of unloading on him on the air… He got pretty belligerent. So it was not a great final call.”
During that call, Finebaum also asked Updyke a question: When he died, would he want to be remembered as the man who poisoned Auburn’s iconic trees?
“Paul, it don’t matter what I want,” Updyke said. “They’re going to remember me that way anyway.”
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 12:07 PM.
