Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  “Number 14 and number 15 were both disasters. At 16, they threw beer at me. At 17, I twisted my ankle. My playing partner tripped me. At 18, they sang ‘Turkey in the Straw’ while I tried to hit out of the rough.

  “After I finally putted out, they put my card in the paper shredder and I had to hightail it to the locker room. The tournament committee had ordered sniper fire from the roof of Ike and Mamie’s cottage.”

  Tough luck, Gatewood, but hang in there. From the nearest magnolia. Incidentally, Tommy Weiskopf usually brings extra rope.

  I AM THE WIND

  I HAVE RECEIVED A lot of nasty mail from joggers lately. All I said was joggers make lousy conversationalists and their feet smell bad.

  Even Gayle Barron, the famous runner, agreed with me in part. “The last thing I want to talk about at a party,” she told me, “is how far everybody ran that week.”

  Gayle Barron is the prettiest jogger I know. It’s OK if her feet smell bad.

  I am not against physical fitness. I am against talking about it night and day. There are too many other topics that interest me more. Like famous left-handed Chinese yacht racers.

  A man from Sandy Springs finally got to me. “The reason you don’t like joggers,” he wrote, “is you are jealous. I’d like to see you run the Peachtree Road Race. You wouldn’t make the first one hundred yards.”

  I can’t believe he said that. I took it as a dare. Never let it be said I am the kind of man who would back down from a challenge. My boyhood friend and idol Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr., a great American, once dared me to put a dead frog down the front of Kathy Sue Loudermilk’s dress in biology class.

  I would have done it, too, but there was a problem. There wasn’t room for anything else down the front of Kathy Sue’s dress, that lovely child.

  I won’t run in the Peachtree race Tuesday with the 12,000 official entrants. It is a matter of principle.

  Let Hal Gulliver, our editor, carry the Constitution’s banners. Hal Gulliver, incidentally, is the perfect example of what can happen to a person who jogs. Before he started jogging, he looked like Tarzan. There was a picture of him in his running clothes in the paper. Now he looks like Jane.

  I didn’t want to mention it, but the smart-aleck letters have forced me to reveal I have already run the Peachtree Road Race 6.2-mile course.

  I did it over the weekend. Alone. Just me, my swim suit, and a pair of slightly used jogging shoes I borrowed from my neighbor who recently gave up running.

  “I had to,” he explained. “My wife wouldn’t run, and I didn’t think we could survive a mixed marriage.”

  I made my run under the cloak of darkness. I wanted no publicity, no spectators, no big-name hoofers to run behind.

  I departed Lenox Square from what will be Tuesday’s starting line at 3 a.m. I crushed out a final cigarette, took a deep breath of the humid air and jogged away into the night.

  Lonely is the nocturnal runner. The only sound was the rhythmic beat of the soles of my neighbor’s jogging shoes. Clop. Clop. Clop. The first mile fell to its knees behind me.

  Like an eagle swept through the air by some unseen current, I reached the International House of Pancakes, which was closed, still in a smooth, graceful glide.

  Only an occasional passing motorist and an empty MARTA bus broke my solitude. That and a wino asleep in the entrance to an adult movie house in Buckhead and two fellows strolling on the sidewalk near West Wesley. I think they were more than pals.

  I imagined myself upon a gallant steed, loping toward the dawn and the liquor store, which was also closed, at the top of the next hill.

  On past Brookwood station and past Spring street. I reach Colony Square, slowing down, but still in forceful stride.

  I am the wind.

  I turned left on Twelfth Street, crossed Piedmont, and swept into the park. I rounded the lake and headed toward what will be Tues day’s finish line. My strength was fading, but my courage was not. Frank Shorter was on my heels. I left him in my wake.

  Finally, it was over. The eagle had landed. My time is not important, for I ran not for glory. I ran simply to prove to a clod in Sandy Springs with jock itch on the brain I could conquer his silly 6.2 miles of asphalt.

  Mission accomplished.

  THE GRIEF PASSES SLOWLY

  BILLY HENDERSON HAS ONE of the last crew cuts in captivity. When he talks, he talks about how much he enjoys doing a job that involves young people, and there is no doubting his sincerity. Saturday is an important day in his life. In the evening, the football team he coaches, Clarke Central High School, will play Valdosta High for the state AAA championship. The game will be played in Athens.

  Billy has been the full twenty yards during his career. Once he played before 73,000 people in the Sugar Bowl. Wally Butts was his coach. Georgia was his school. And he has seen the view from the other side, too. Before he moved to Clarke Central, he coached at tiny Mt. de Sales, a private school near Macon. When he went to Athens to interview, the nuns at Mt. de Sales held a mass and beseeched Providence to keep him in their fold. It was Clarke Central’s prayers that were answered.

  Billy took his team to Jekyll Island for its preseason training camp back in August.

  Four months and thirteen games later, it is still undefeated. And it still remembers what happened on Jekyll the day it broke camp. These things are always so sudden. But the shock lingers. And the grief passes so slowly.

  It was August 19, at 1:20 p.m. to be precise. Barry Malcom was sixteen. Billy Henderson, who cared for him deeply, recalls every detail.

  “We were having our final lunch before heading back to Athens. Some of the players’ families always come down for a few days at the beach together.

  “We were about to eat when Mr. Malcom, Barry’s dad, came up to me and asked if Barry could join the family. I invited him to stay for lunch. He said he’d come back later.

  “After we ate, Barry left with his dad for their motel. We left for Athens. I was listening to the radio later that afternoon. The news came on. A youngster had been struck by lightning and killed on Jekyll. I froze. I was speechless. It was Barry.”

  Barry Malcom was a guard on the Clarke Central team. He weighed only 150 pounds. “But he would tackle a giant,” said Billy Henderson. “He was a shining example.”

  Barry was standing outside, fifty yards from the front door of the Jekyll motel, when the bolt struck. Every effort was made to revive him. His father put him in his car and drove him into the hospital in Brunswick. At four o’clock that afternoon, he was pronounced dead.

  “We drove on into Athens,” the coach said. “There was the tendency to turn around and go back, but we knew there was nothing we could do. When we pulled into the parking lot at the high school, cars were lined up for blocks. They didn’t know if we had heard the news.”

  What still hurts Billy Henderson is to talk about the Malcom family’s drive back to Athens that night. “I don’t know how they did it,” he said. “They came all that way, with that burden, in the rain.”

  Life goes on. The season would open soon, against rival Cedar Shoals. “The team wanted to do something,” Billy said. “They wanted to do something that was a tribute to Barry.”

  Barry Malcom would have worn number ‘65’. That number is on the top of every Clarke Central player’s jersey. The mothers did the sewing.

  Barry Malcom’s parents have seen every game this season. They will be at the field behind Clarke Central High School Saturday night for the game of the year.

  “They are wonderful people,” said Billy Henderson. “It’s not a wealthy family, but they have stuck by us. They are a part of us.”

  As we talked, Billy had to choke some of the words out. Death took a favorite player. It is obvious, his coach is still taking it hard.

  Thirteen years ago, he had gone through the same thing. Billy Henderson was coaching football at Willingham High in Macon. His team opened with a 21-0 victory over Warner Robins.

  Monday was Labor
Day. One of his players was parked at a stop sign in Macon with his girl. Somebody ran the stop sign and crashed into them. Both the player and the girl were killed.

  The player was Billy Henderson’s quarterback. He was also sixteen. His name was Brad. Brad Henderson, Billy’s eldest son.

  BOSTON

  BOSTON—AS I SIT on my rump smoking cigarettes and typing this, I can still see runners coming in from the suburb of Hopkinton, 26 miles and 385 yards from the Boston Marathon finish line at the downtown Prudential Center.

  It will be hours before the last of the 7,800 official entrants, and maybe a couple of thousand more who ran anyway, finally come to the end of their exhausting journey.

  The big names arrived to the cheering throngs what is now nearly two hours ago. Bill Rodgers was first. Actually, a cop on a motorcycle was first, but Bill Rodgers was right behind him with a record time of two hours, nine minutes, and twenty-seven seconds. It was his second straight Boston Marathon victory.

  Appropriately, Bill Rodgers is from Boston and he sells sneakers. For accomplishing his feat, Bill Rodgers had a laurel wreath placed upon his head, and a medallion was hung around his neck by the governor of Massachusetts, Edward King. The crowd booed Edward King on Patriots Day in Boston.

  What else the winner of the Boston Marathon gets is a bowl of beef stew. I hope they never change that. What occurred here Monday in cold and drizzling rain was a sporting event—a human event—that is still relatively pure and unspoiled by promoters and agents and television, not to mention candy bar and beer companies that want to get their names in the newspapers.

  Bill Rodgers crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon Mon day was as thrilling a moment as I have seen in sport. My goose pimples from the cold doubled in size.

  But what is even more thrilling is watching now, watching the stragglers, the “nobodies”—the teachers, the housewives, the doctors, maybe even a cop or two, or Joe Futz the insurance salesman from Pottsdown—push their tired and worn bodies to limits they probably never believed possible when they ended a two-pack-a-day habit and decided to become athletes.

  Grown men are hugging each other at the finish line. Many are finishing in tears. A medical center is located in a nearby garage. Freezing, cramping runners are wrapped in cellophane sheets and placed on cots. Doctors move from cot to cot treating frightful blisters. It’s the rescue center after an earthquake.

  I asked a man who looked like he was dying was it worth it.

  “I ran the sonuvabitch,” he said, “and I beat it.” On his soaked T-shirt were the words, “Human Power.”

  As I looked at him, I thought about Bob Horner of the Braves and Pete Rose and what’s-his-name Parker with the Pirates and Reggie Jackson of the Yankees, as well as Jim Rice of the Red Sox, who at that moment was only a few blocks away at Fenway Park, lolling around in left field for something like $50,000 a game.

  Columnist Leigh Montville of the Boston Globe was apparently thinking of the same sports millionaires’ club when he so aptly advanced the Boston Marathon Monday morning.

  “There are no agents involved today,” he wrote. “There are no options being played out, no deals being made, no fleets of Mercedes being pulled into any special parking lot.

  “The athlete of the day is an athlete, period, not some modern Clark Gable figure, some Photoplay sports god, cast in bubblegum and set atop some big rock-candy mountain.

  “He is one of us again. As he runs the grand promenade from Hopkinton to the Prudential Center, he beckons us to come along, to sweat and enjoy. . . .

  “The runner in the eighty-third Boston Marathon returns fun and games to fun and games. Somehow, he makes the rest of the sports page seem silly on this day.”

  You sense the trend vividly here, the fitness trend that has 20 million Americans running, the trend that has the rest of us at least thinking every time we light up a cigarette or spend another wasted, stinking afternoon watching overpaid balloonheads perform on that wretched talking box in our living rooms.

  Grandmothers and grandfathers ran in the Boston Marathon Mon day. A woman was telling her dinner companions in Boston Sunday night about announcing to her husband two years ago she was going to run in this race. His reply can’t be printed here. But Monday, she showed him. There was a wheelchair brigade in the race. There were no fat people. A husband and wife, wearing matching outfits, finished together in an embrace.

  Human Power. May the first promoter with the idea to turn this event into $100,000 Colgate Foot Race of Champions and move it to Las Vegas be shot at the next available sunrise, and may Howard Cosell never get close to it.

  For the record, the Boston Marathon champion, Bill Rodgers, made a salary of $7,000 last year selling shoes. He drives a dented, 1963 Volkswagen. He lives with his wife, and they pay $165 a month in apartment rent.

  Somebody once asked him what he thought of golf as a sport.

  “You get about the same exercise in a hand of canasta,” he said.

  In the same interview, he was asked if he thought Joe Namath was a great athlete because he could throw a football straight.

  “I’ll be running over his grave,” was Bill Rodgers’ answer.

  FAREWELL TO SPORTS

  I SAW MY FIRST major league baseball game in Clark Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., in July of 1959. You don’t forget your first major league baseball game.

  The White Sox were visiting the Senators. Billy Pierce pitched for Chicago. Camilo Pascual pitched for Washington. It was a warm night.

  There was no score until the top of the seventh. Nellie Fox, who is dead now, singled home two runs for the Sox. Jim Landis brought Fox home with a sacrifice fly. Chicago led, 3-0.

  Pierce had a no-hitter into the eighth. Ron Samford broke it up with a double to left field that scored a runner who had walked. The final score was 3-1.

  Harmon Killebrew struck out three times. Luis Aparicio made two great plays at shortstop. I drank three Cokes and ate two boxes of popcorn and one bag of peanuts. At one point during the game, I looked around at the stadium and spotted an enclosed seating area behind home plate. There were men inside.

  “Who are those people?” I asked my adult companion.

  “Sportswriters,” he said.

  “Do they see all the games?” I went on.

  “It’s their job,” he said. “They don’t even have to pay to get in.”

  That settled it. I was twelve. Anybody, I figured, could become a doctor or a lawyer or a car dealer. Nineteen years later, I don’t own a boat, but I’ve seen a lot of ball games free. And once I went to Callaway Gardens for four days to cover a water-ski tournament and the newspaper paid for it. I made the right choice of professions.

  A week from Sunday, I am moving my typewriter to another part of the building. My boss and I went through lengthy negotiations concerning the switch.

  “Grizzard,” he said, “your column is moving out of sports.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Both the Constitution and the Journal are taking on new graphic faces, and I am to be relocated in a new section that will concern itself with news of city and state. I am told I can still write about sports but that when I choose not to, I won’t have to feel guilty about it anymore.

  I’m not very good at goodbyes, but before I go, there’s a few more things I wanted to say:

  – I will never get used to Al Ciraldo not broadcasting Georgia Tech basketball games and Whack Hyder not coaching the team.

  – The best place to watch a baseball game is Wrigley Field in Chicago. The worst place is Yankee Stadium because crazy people go there.

  – My favorite sportswriter is Dan Jenkins. My favorite sports book is Semi-Tough, which he wrote. My favorite sports movie is not Semi-Tough. It is Bless the Beasts and Children, a movie about shooting buffalo.

  – Soccer and hockey are boring. Horse racing is exciting only if you have money on the race. The Indianapolis 500 should be against the law. Wrestling is fake. Organized spo
rts are harmful to children under twelve. Tennessee has the most obnoxious fans in college football. Alabama is second. I’ll be glad when Woody Hayes retires.

  – Jesse Outlar wrote the best line I ever read about the National Basketball Association’s long-winded playoff system: “If the NBA had been in charge of World War II, Japan and Germany would still be in the running.”

  – I still miss Harry Mehre.

  – The sixteenth hole at Augusta National on a Sunday in April is the prettiest place in the world.

  – There will never be another pitcher like Sandy Koufax, another college quarterback like Joe Namath, another stockcar driver like Fireball Roberts, another stockcar writer like Bill Robin son, another golfer like Arnold Palmer, and I wish Rod Laver were twenty years old.

  – I loved it when Dan Jenkins wrote, “The only thing worse than track is field.”

  – Al McGuire is beautiful. Once he said, “The only time winning is important is in surgery, and war.”

  – The second best line I ever read about the NBA’s long-winded playoff system came from a guy in Philadelphia who said, “The only uncomfortable thing that lasts longer than an NBA season is pregnancy.”

  – Of all the people I have met in sports, Dan Magill, the Georgia tennis coach, is the most unforgettable. “Can I help you?” asks the waitress. ”A Heineken’s, honeykins,” replies Magill, “and a sliced, barbecue, pork-pig sandwich.”

  – If Alex Hawkins says that pot was planted in his car, I believe him.

  6.

  FERGIT, HELL!

  I make no apologies for anything that appears in this chapter. I was born in the South and I love the South and once my grandmother told me we had a relative who fought with Stonewall Jackson. That would be Uncle Beauregard Grizzard who died in 1882, singing “Dixie” and hating Yankees.