BYU freshman quarterback Tanner Mangum has more skin in the Cougar game than one might think.
Some may call it a kind of destiny.
In high school in Eagle, Idaho, when he became an Elite 11 quarterback and recruiters came calling, his high school offensive coordinator, Scott Criner, fielded a lot of the calls. Criner’s family has huge ties to Boise State, Idaho and Idaho State and Scott’s father had been an assistant coach at BYU in LaVell Edwards’ early days.
When Boise State came hard after Mangum, BSU recruiters asked Criner what he thought BSU’s chances were of landing the star quarterback. At the time, Mangum had BYU as his leading choice and Criner gave a sobering answer.
Criner told recruiters the biggest obstacle they would need to overcome was the fact that “there are probably three buildings on the BYU campus that are named after a Mangum or some other relative of Tanner.”
The bloodlines run deep blue, as blue a hue as you can get.
Tanner is the son of Michael Mangum, who is the son of Alice Wilkinson Mangum Anderson, daughter of Ernest L. Wilkinson, president of BYU from 1951 to 1971. Tanner’s great-grandfather supervised the greatest growth of BYU’s student body (5,000 to 25,000) and facilities in its history. He was famous for doing pushups at basketball games in the Smith Field House. The campus student union building, which houses the bookstore, is named after Wilkinson.
Michael Mangum is the son of John Mangum who is the son of Jennie Knight Mangum, daughter of Jesse Knight, a mining mogul and philanthropist who helped BYU when it was in financial need during the early 1900s. According to historian Richard H. Peterson, writing in Utah Historical Quarterly (1961), Jesse Knight’s donations surpassed $500,000 from 1898 to 1921 (about $6.2 million in 2015), a small fortune at the time. He also gave BYU irrigation bonds and a $200,000 endowment as well as 7.5 acres of land on Temple Hill.
Several buildings on campus were named after Tanner’s great-great grandparents including the Jesse Knight Building and Amanda Knight Hall.
Wilkinson, a lawyer, was a Harvard and George Washington University graduate who served as attorney for the Ute Indian Tribe against the U.S. Government, which resulted in the tribe being awarded $32 million.
Jesse Knight was born in the Mormon enclave of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1845. His father, who died when Jesse was 1, was in charge of the first 50 teams to cross the Missouri River during the Mormon exodus in 1846. Jesse grew up barefoot, without a formal education and doing hard labor on farms. When he was 25 and making deliveries throughout the West, he invested an early paycheck in a dairy farm near Payson and humble capital from that venture went to buy mining investments. Later, he owned more mining patents than nearly anyone in the Intermountain area.
Mangum’s father Michael says his mother Alice Wilkinson attended BYU for one year before her father became president. “So, she basically went from a dorm room to the President’s home, which in retrospect would have been a bit strange,” said Michael.
“She would later marry John Knight Mangum. My father was killed in a midair collision in 1971 between a commercial DC-9 and a Navy F4 Phantom jet. This accident took the lives of many prominent Salt Lake businessmen. My mother later married Floyd Anderson, hence her long name,” said Tanner’s father.
Michael Mangum remembers sitting in the President’s Home on a hill that overlooks BYU’s current Smith Fieldhouse, Student Athlete Building, Richards P.E. Building, Indoor Practice Facility and new soccer stadium. “I have fond memories of being there for Thanksgiving dinners, followed by games of touch football in the yard,” said Michael of those days when he visited his grandfather, President Wilkinson.
So, this was a historic kind of season for Tanner Mangum, who became the 13th member of the 3,000-yard season QB Club in BYU's win over Utah State last Saturday.
He earned this membership with hard work and invested blood.
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