KNOXVILLE — Hollis Loy, 77, retired from the Neyland Stadium operations office in 2011 and comes back Saturdays anyway, mostly to sit with the lost-and-found shelf. It holds 31 left shoes, going back to the fall of 1986, when he started writing them down. There is not a right shoe on the shelf and there never has been.
Loy keeps a green hardbound ledger with columns for the date, the opponent, the size, the color and the section where each shoe turned up. He can tell you that most of them came from the stairwells.
“It’s always the left,” he said. “I don’t know. You come down the ramp holding a drink and you’re looking at the field, and the left one gets caught on a step. And then there’s people behind you, so.”
He has never turned one over to an owner. In 1997 a man came by the office on a Monday and asked for a right shoe, a brown loafer, last seen after the Florida game. Loy told him all they had were lefts. The man asked to see them anyway, looked down the shelf, and said he already had a left. He thanked Loy and shook his hand.
The shelf is a gray metal one from the old ticket office. Loy said the shoes get dusted every August, and that he does the dusting, which the athletic department doesn’t know. The most common size is 10½, which is also his, though he has never tried one on.