If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

by Lewis Grizzard

  2. Role-player: A guy who has something on the general manager because he still gets to pinch-run on occasion and he can still pick up his fat paycheck when he should be in Double-A.

  3. Aircraft carriers: What basketball analyst Al McGuire, who used to coach, calls large basketball players who could dunk their Porsches.

  4. Possession time: How long Olphonsio McGree, the brilliant linebacker of the Rams, will be in jail for getting caught with cocaine while going 175 miles an hour down a suburban street in his Porsche.

  5. My good friend and colleague: What the announcer calls the ex-jock who keeps interrupting him with a bunch of nonsense during the game.

  6. Game of the Decade: There are about thirty of them each year.

  7. Quality starts: A pitcher lasting five innings without getting shell shock before being relieved by some guy who throws split-finger fastballs for $176 million a year.

  8. Lance Ten Brook: Some golfer you never heard of who is leading the San Antonio/Bisquick/Federal Express/Wild Russian Vayna/Oreo/Republican Party/Tidy-Bowl/Salvation Army/Perry Como/Cher/Hard Rock Cafe/Fuji/Alaskan Board of Tourism/Häagen Dazs/Open when Saturday’s broadcast of the third round begins.

  9. Rising star in women’s golf or tennis: Any player with large breasts, thin legs, and a pretty face who hasn’t had a lesbian affair yet.

  10. Graduation rate: What a losing college coach can point to when he’s just had an awful season and the alumni want his house back. He’ll still lose his job, but liberal editorial writers can point out he is the sort of individual college sports need more of.

  11. Car salesman: The coach’s next job.

  12. Exploitation of black athletes: “A Jaguar? Clemson offered me a Rolls-Royce.”

  13. Burner: Member of the University of Miami football team with an arson charge pending.

  14. Speed merchant: Sells drugs to fellow players.

  15. Paternity suit: What Steve Garvey will wear at his trial.

  16. Graphic: What television announcers call the things that come on your television screen showing Nebraska lineman LaMont (Big Hawg) Jackson is 6–11, weighs 350 pounds, leads the team in tackles and dormitory sexual assaults, and is majoring in asphalt paving.

  17. Top of the show: Televisionese for “When we came on the air,” as in “At the top of the show, I thought Howard was too drunk to get through this thing.”

  18. Time-out: “Get some black coffee in Howard.”

  19. Nonqualifiers: “I know the sumbitch can’t read, but he’ll knock your jock off.”

  20. Jesus Christ: Fixes games, as in, “If it hadn’t been for my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, I’d never have made that three-pointer at the buzzer.”

  These were much simpler times in 1964, of course. One never read of agents, arbitration, training-camp lockouts, drug abuse, or Brent Musburger. Sportswriters were doing columns on the infield fly rule (Just as I was about to catch the ball, a fly got in my eye!), and sportscasters were still saying things like, “He won’t hang up his spikes until they tear the uniform off his back,” which translates as, “This time next year, he’ll be pumping gas.”

  Before I move on here, I need to stop and give a little credit to a couple of other people who helped me with my Start—not as much as Ed Thelinius did, but they certainly contributed.

  Charlie Harris was the head football coach at Newnan High. Charlie had played end at Georgia and was known as the Gliding Ghost of Goodwater. Goodwater being Goodwater, Alabama, Charlie’s hometown. After college, he’d played service football and got a job in the pros when the American Football League was formed. I’m not clear as to exactly how he wound up at Newnan High School, but it was a break for me.

  I didn’t play football in high school. I was afraid to. But I did take Charlie Harris’s informative health class my senior year.

  I don’t know what they teach in health classes today, although I did write a column once about parents in Bowdon, Georgia, losing it when they found out a local nurse had demonstrated to a class the proper way to use a condom by putting it on a banana. It could have been worse. She could have used a cucumber.

  This was before such things as rampant teenage pregnancy, AIDS, and rock music with filthy lyrics that cause our children to go into immediate heat upon hearing them.

  In Charlie Harris’s health class, we learned the proper way to brush our teeth, the names of the various food groups, what causes dandruff, never to mash a pimple, and that alcohol is a depressant while coffee is a stimulant. Or was it the other way around?

  It doesn’t matter. Coach Harris recognized early the fact I was a bright and promising young man, a fact that went over a lot of other people’s heads.

  I knew of his background at Georgia, and he knew of my future goals. Nice guy that he was, he wrote a letter to Dan Magill, sports information director at Georgia, introducing me as a bright and promising young man who never mashed a pimple.

  Magill, meanwhile, turned the letter over to his crack assistant, Loran Smith, who wrote me late in my senior year at Newnan and said, “Dear Louis [I later forgave him for this oversight], Coach Charlie Harris tells me you are a bright and promising young man who wants a career as a sportswriter. Come to see me when you arrive at Georgia and if there is anyway I can help you, I certainly will.”

  It took me about eight seconds to locate Loran Smith when I arrived on campus. Incredibly, Loran Smith did a Thelinius on me. Yet another miracle.

  But first, some background:

  Everybody in the state of Georgia knew the phrase “them lyin’ Atlanta newspapers.” It was first introduced by Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge in the thirties. Whenever the papers would criticize him, he would go to South Georgia somewhere and talk about “them lyin’ Atlanta newspapers.”

  In fact, Talmadge would put a plant in his audience to bring up the subject.

  “They say I stole! Well, I did! But who did I steal for! I stole for you, the poor people of Georgia, that’s who!”

  At which point, Talmadge’s plant would scream out, “Tell ’em ‘bout them lyin’ Atlanta newspapers, Governor,” and Talmadge would reply, “I’m a-comin’ to that.”

  (Incidental to that is the fact that in the movie Blaze, the story of Louisiana governor Earl Long and his romance with stripper Blaze Starr, Paul Newman, who portrayed Long, says to his constituents: “The poor people of Louisiana have only three friends: Jesus Christ, Sears and Roebuck, and Earl Long.” I grew up hearing this quote attributed to Gene Talmadge, and I’m sticking with him.)

  In the 1950s, the afternoon Atlanta Journal, owned by the Ohio Cox family, acquired the morning Atlanta Constitution, giving the family what every newspaper owner longs for, a monopoly.

  What further stirred the white masses of Georgia was the fact Ralph McGill, publisher of the Constitution, was given a front-page column, and he used it to assail segregation. McGill later won a Pulitzer Prize and achieved international acclaim as a man of courage, kindness, understanding, and vision. But that’s not what they thought in most of Georgia’s 159 counties. Ralph McGill became “Rastus” McGill, and that often was lengthened to “that nigger-lovin’ Rastus McGill.”

  The Atlanta papers took a liberal editorial stance on most all subjects. They endorsed John Kennedy for president in 1960, further rankling many of their readers who saw Kennedy as a threat to the continuance of segregation, and a president who would get his orders direct from the Vatican. (There weren’t many Catholics in rural Georgia. In Moreland, there was only one Catholic family, and a lot of people were afraid of them because of the rumor that Catholics went around kidnapping babies.)

  As the civil-rights movement began to move in earnest and the Civil Rights Bill was being introduced, a score of wealthy white conservatives started a third newspaper in Atlanta, the Atlanta Times. It had been publishing for less than a year in the fall of 1964.

  But here’s what else:

  The Atlanta Times also had a sports section, and Loran Smith said to me at ou
r first meeting, “I think I can help you. Al Thomy’s the assistant sports editor at the Times, and he’s looking for an Athens correspondent.”

  I didn’t ask what the job paid, what I would be asked to do, or if I would have to vote for Barry Goldwater. It didn’t matter.

  The next day, Al Thomy came to Athens to do a Georgia football story, and we met. He explained that I would cover Georgia football practice whenever a regular Times staff member was not available to do so.

  I would file feature stories, the head coach’s comments, updates on injuries, and any other pearls of information I came across. For this I was going to be paid ninety dollars a month. I nearly wet my pants in the excitement of the moment.

  It didn’t stop there. The local paper was the afternoon Athens Banner-Herald. It might not have been the worst daily in the country, but it had to get dishonorable mention. Local readers referred to it as the Athens Boner Herald, or the Athens Banana Herald. (Making up funny names for newspapers is sort of a universal exercise, I would learn. The Atlanta Constitution often was the Atlanta Constipation, and the Atlanta Journal was, what else, the Atlanta Urinal.)

  The Banner-Herald had been in operation for several thousand years (I think Johannes Gutenberg served his internship there). It was owned by an old Athens family that really didn’t give a damn. If it had, it would have been terribly embarrassed.

  The Banner-Herald was dull, full of errors, and didn’t pay its employees squat. When I was offered a job there, I accepted it in a heartbeat, however. It was still better pay than the Red and Black, and it didn’t have training wheels.

  Wade Saye, a journalism graduate in his middle twenties, was-sports editor of the Banner-Herald. He was an Athens native and didn’t want to leave, which was the only conceivable reason he continued to work at the paper, receive lousy pay, and not be able to rent a motel room when he covered the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, which was eighty miles away. He drove over to each round in the morning, returned to Athens to write his story, and I’m not even certain he was reimbursed for his mileage, which was nothing compared to when Dan Magill, introduced earlier as sportsinformation director at Georgia, was the fourteen-year-old sports editor of the Banner-Herald. He was paid in free movie passes.

  Wade had begged and pleaded with the paper to allow him to have an assistant. He was routinely doing eighteen-hour days, getting paid minimum wage for only eight hours of work. Overtime was not an operable term at the Banner-Herald.

  Finally, after Wade became quite pale and began to lose weight, I suppose the paper wondered where it would find somebody else to take Wade’s place when he died from exhaustion, so they gave in on the assistant thing. Wade could hire somebody to work for a dollar an hour, twenty hours a week.

  I had just walked out of the broadcast booth at halftime of the Georgia-Clemson game to get a free piece of fried chicken and a Coke when Wade Saye walked up to me, explained the details of the job, and asked if I were interested. I mentioned earlier how long it took me to accept.

  Four mornings a week, I reported to the Banner-Herald at six-thirty in the morning and worked until eleven-thirty. Wade taught me how to write headlines, how to call the Georgia sports information office to find out how the wrestling team did on the road and write a four-paragraph story on it, and what glue pots were for.

  Before newspapers discovered high tech, the glue pot was an essential tool. You wrote a three-page story, and before you sent it to the Linotype operator to cast your words in lead, you pasted the three pages together. And if you took three stories off the wire and put them together to make one, you pasted those pages together.

  Some bad things could happen if you didn’t know anything about glue pots. First, there was a brush that went through the lid to the glue pot. You unscrewed the lid, pulled out the brush, and applied the glue to the pages.

  The key was to make certain the brush got back into the glue pot. A brush not returned to the glue pot would become dry and rigid. Very dry and rigid. Leave the brush out of the glue pot and when you tried to paste pages together, it was like trying to paint with a yard rake.

  Another bad thing that could happen is if you forgot to put the lid and the brush back into the glue pot, there was the chance you could knock the glue pot over and get glue all over everything.

  This happened to me. I was editing a wire story about the World Series, and I knocked over the topless glue pot. Glue got all over the story, my desk, my clothes, Wade’s shoes, and the floor. It took an hour to clean up the mess, and Wade had to cut himself out of his shoes before he could go to bed.

  I also think glue pots had a lot to do with sportswriters often exhibiting odd behavior. You pass that glue pot around, you obviously are going to inhale some of the fumes from the glue. I think a lot of sportswriters used to get high on glue fumes, then do things like actually pick up a bar tab, wear paisley ties with striped shirts (with frayed collars), and ask for the bowling beat.

  I swear I was told about a bowling writer up North somewhere whose name was John “Skid” Rowe. His bowling column was entitled “In the Gutter, with Skid Rowe.” There’s an overturned glue pot in that story somewhere.

  And as long as I brought up the immortal Skid Rowe, I might as well expand on other names that further indicate inhaling gluepot fumes may be at the bottom of a great deal of questionable creativity.

  I knew a guy in South Georgia who wrote a column called “Disa and Data.”

  I also would like to say I once saw a hockey column called “Up Your Ice,” but I never did. I also never saw a column about prostitute bridge players called “Trumps ’n’ Tramps,” a wrestling column entitled “Inside the Tights,” a baseball column dealing with overweight, spoiled bums making $3 million a year who hit .228, “Brats ’N’ Balls,” a mixed-doubles tennis column named “Jocks and Jills,” an auto-racing column called “In the Pits,” a horse-racing column known as “Out Behind the Barn” or “Manure Matters,” a dog column called “Licks ‘N’ Ticks,” or a golf column entitled “Never Up, Never In,” which also would make a good name for a column offering sexual advice.

  However, I didn’t make this one up: The sports editor of the Gainesville (Georgia) newspaper wrote a column he named “Who Cares?”

  There was a man who obviously knew his readership. A lot of columns, both sports and otherwise, could have been entitled “Who Cares?” Unfortunately, nobody would have noticed the name.

  I took on too much my freshman year at Georgia: three jobs (radio spotter, Times correspondent, and Wade Saye’s assistant), a full academic load, and, worse, no car. Freshmen were forbidden to have cars, the thinking being that if they had them, they would be even more dangerous than they already were.

  This theory didn’t come to me until I was an upperclassman, but the reason freshmen are so dangerous is most of them are away from the parental nest for the first time in their lives. That first surge of freedom can make a person do some odd things, such as eating library books, pouring lighter fluid under the door of another dorm room and lighting it, taking the sand out of a hall ashtray and making a tee out of the sand and hitting golf balls down the hall at three in the morning, going to the movie with three bottles of fifty-nine-cent Red Hurricane wine and throwing up in the box of popcorn that belongs to the person sitting next to you, and stealing pigs from the School of Agriculture and letting them loose in the sorority house where the girls tended to be fat and have mustaches.

  Giving freshmen cars would have been akin to giving terrorists their own airline. With mobility, college freshmen could have done such things as leaving the dorm at midnight to drive to Wyoming, just for the hell of it, or running over science majors, who dressed funny, weren’t in fraternities, and still had a face full of zits.

  Again, forgive me for leaving the subject at hand for a brief move elsewhere, but I can’t allow the subjects of zits to go by without further discussion.

  Like all teenagers, I had zits. I often wore enough Clearasil to clog Hoo
ver Dam. However, by the time I reached college, most of my zits had disappeared.

  Then something awful happened. A friend of mine fixed me up with a girl from Macon, who didn’t have any zits but did have large things that rhymed with them.

  A day or so before my date, I awakened with a zit on the end of my nose. It got bigger by the hour. In Geography 104 class, my first of the day, it was the size of the taillight on a 1954 De Soto. By Georgia History, it was blocking my view of the blackboard. By Introduction to Journalism, my classmates were hooting at me and calling me “Rudolph.” By the time I got back to the dorm and hid under the covers to hide it, my zit was no longer a zit. It was a bulbous growth the size of the tomato that could win “Best of Show” at the annual country fair and agriculture exposition in Gooberville, Arkansas.

  How could this be happening to me? I’d gone all through high school having to deal with zits, but I thought they were behind me forever now that I was in college.

  There were a couple of things I considered: One, I would stay in bed and under the covers as long as I had my zit, I didn’t care if it took three weeks.

  But there was the matter of class and work, and I did so much want to keep my date with the buxom lass from Bibb County. So I decided on surgery. Charlie Harris had taught me not to try the mash technique. I found a safety pin and sterilized the sharp part with a match. (I earned a first-aid merit badge in the Boy Scouts.) Then I went to my mirror and made several painful incisions into my zit in order to drain it. I will spare you any details of what resulted from my incisions.

  When the draining was over, I washed off my nose. I still had my zit, but at least it was flat now and didn’t protrude six inches ahead of me. Then I applied a coat of rubbing alcohol. I bit down on the hot-water handle of the sink until the pain subsided.

  After that, I applied a coating of Clearasil I had purchased from the drugstore. After that, I applied a large Band-Aid. I realize a person with a Band-Aid on his nose looks silly and will be asked a thousand times, “What happened to your nose?” but it was better than walking around with a zit the size of Jefferson City, Missouri, while people laughed, pointed fingers, and made references to unicorns. At least, I thought so at the time. But the first thing my date said to me was, “What happened to your nose?”