Our Greatest Letterman: UT Unveils Statue Honoring Jim Haslam
As many great sport stories begin, a football coach changed everything for a young kid. The Haslam story is no different. In 1958, a 27-year-old University of Tennessee college graduate (and former college football captain) walked into a run-down four-pump gas station in Gate City, Virginia, and bought it for $6,000. He had no idea he was laying the first brick of what would become one of the largest privately held companies in America. His name was James Arthur Haslam II. But, in Tennessee, everyone just calls him Jim.
A Detroit Kid Who Became A Volunteer
James Arthur Haslam II was born December 13, 1930, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Melitta Haslam and James Arthur Haslam, a World War I veteran who worked for the Studebaker Corporation. The family eventually settled in St. Petersburg, Florida, where young Jim became a star football player at St. Petersburg High School, drawing college recruiters from across the country.
As many great sport stories begin, a coach changed everything for a young kid. It was a visit from a legendary Tennessee Football coach that changed everything for this Michigan kid. Jim Haslam listened to the pitch from the General. He chose to head north to Knoxville, and it proved to be the defining decision of his life. Haslam was a starting tackle for Tennessee from 1950-52 and served as team captain in 1952. He also helped the Vols win the 1951 consensus national championship under coaching legend Gen. Robert R. Neyland. The coach was a man who would remain a mentor to Haslam for years afterward.
From The Army To A Single Gas Station
After graduating from UT in 1952, Haslam served in the U.S. Army before joining the Fleet Oil Company, where he cut his teeth in the fuel business. But working for someone else’s company wasn’t the plan forever. As Haslam has said of the leap he eventually took, running someone else’s operation had shown him he was ready to build his own.
In 1958, he founded Pilot Oil Corporation, buying his first gas station in Gate City, Virginia, for $6,000. It as a four-pump station that sold cigarettes and soft drinks. It was a modest beginning by any measure. But by 1965, Pilot had grown to 12 gas stations, and Haslam kept pushing outward. The company opened its first convenience store in 1976, followed by its first full-service travel center in Corbin, Kentucky, in 1981. Throughout the 1980s, Pilot built out a nationwide network, adding fast-food restaurants to its travel centers in 1988. It’s a move that eventually made it one of the largest quick-service restaurant franchisees in the world.
Haslam became chairman in 1995, and under his leadership Pilot grew into the largest seller of diesel fuel in the country and, at one point, the seventh-largest privately held company in the United States. Today, Pilot Company ranks as the 10th largest private company in America according to Forbes, and is the leading supplier of fuel and largest operator of travel centers in North America. It’s a legacy his son Jimmy later took over as leadership of Pilot, serving as CEO from 1996 to 2020 and chairman from 2020 to 2023 Haslam has never been shy about what he thinks built his success. He is a first-generation college student who credits his education at Tennessee as key to founding Pilot, a debt he has spent decades trying to repay to the university that gave it to him. The foundation for his entire life, started with a coach. It started with higher education.
Giving Back to Rocky Top
Long after he’d made his fortune, Haslam kept finding his way back to Knoxville. He served as vice chair of the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees and became a UT Distinguished Alumnus. More than that, he became one of the university’s most transformative benefactors. A landmark 2014 gift established UT’s business school as the university’s first-ever named college, The Haslam College of Business. The family’s giving to the university now totals more than $100 million. In June 2026, his son Jimmy and daughter-in-law Dee Haslam gave UT $130 million — the largest gift in the university’s history — with $100 million of it directed to the Haslam College of Business to recruit faculty and support students, and the remaining $30 million spread across the university to boost faculty hiring campus-wide. It brought Jimmy and Dee’s own lifetime giving to the university past $195 million, extending a family tradition of generosity that Jim Haslam started decades earlier.
For Haslam, it was never just about writing checks. It is about a place that had shaped him. It is the campus where he played college football, met lifelong friends, and found the values that carried him through a career in business. That thread runs through his 2020 memoir, Co-Piloting: Luck, Leadership, and Learning That It’s All About Others, which traces his path from that single gas station in Gate City to the head of one of the country’s largest private companies. The book includes reflections from his wife, community philanthropist Natalie Haslam, along with Peyton Manning, longtime UT coach Phillip Fulmer, and others whose lives intersected with his. As Haslam put it himself, the book was meant to inspire people to embrace life and hold firmly to the values that form the foundation of who they are.
A Family Legacy
Jim Haslam’s imprint on Tennessee continued to his children. Jimmy Haslam, who now owns the NFL’s Cleveland Browns and runs Pilot Company; Bill Haslam, who served as mayor of Knoxville and later as governor of Tennessee; and Ann Haslam Bailey, who leads the family’s philanthropic foundation. It’s a rare thing for a gas station bought on faith, to ripple outward into a business empire, a governorship, and an NFL franchise. But that’s the scale of what Jim Haslam built.
“Our Greatest Letterman”
Today, at 95 years old, Haslam is being honored in the place where his story truly began. At 5 p.m. on September 18, the University of Tennessee will unveil a statue of him at the north entrance of the Neyland-Thompson Sports Center. It is steps from the field where he once played as a national champion.
It’s why, in Knoxville, they call him by a title that needs no further explanation.
