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

by Lewis Grizzard

  A man walked into the press box and sat down next to me. He wore a pair of sunglasses, and what had once been a fully-grown cigar was sticking about two inches out the right side of his mouth. The man didn’t say anything at first. He just sat down next to me and stared out at the field.

  Wjozlfmepzjski singled to left. The next batter was named Papachini. I had no trouble with that. Most Italian names rhyme with a vegetable.

  The man sitting next to me spoke. “Are you going to have to go into the army when you graduate?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. A heart-valve problem had saved me from getting one between the eyes from some guy named Chow Ding Chu in a rice paddy in Vietnam. They threw Wahjahjocoski, or whatever his name was, out at the plate in the top of the ninth, and Georgia beat New Jersey A&M by a run.

  “You want to come to work for us?” was the man’s next question.

  The man in the press box was James G. Minter, Jr., executive sports editor of the Atlanta Journal. I’d read his stuff many times. I’d seen him with Furman Bisher on Football Review, Bisher’s Sunday television show where Atlanta sportswriters analyzed the preceding Saturday’s major southern college games.

  He didn’t introduce himself to me when he sat down next to me in the press box. I suppose he assumed I knew who he was. There had been no preliminary small talk, save the question about the army. Vietnam was raging. They were shipping twenty-one-year-olds off by the droves.

  There was an opening on the Journal sports staff. No use wasting time on somebody who might not live six more months.

  Just, “You want to come to work for us?”

  It was happening again to me. Out of the blue came the Miracle offer. I’m just sitting there, with no prior knowledge of what was about to happen, and here’s Jim Minter offering me a job at the Journal.

  Again, I have no idea of the exact words I chose to answer him with. There had to have been a “Great Gawdamighty yes,” in there somewhere, however.

  Minter took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Be at the Journal Saturday morning at nine.”

  “I’ll be there,” I managed to say.

  He put the cigar back in the side of his mouth, got up, and walked out of the door. I went back to the office, got the sports section out, went home, told my wife we were moving to Atlanta, and called Glenn at home and said I needed to talk to him the next day.

  I wouldn’t be going to Toccoa with him. I had to see the big time. The good fight at the Daily News was over and nothing would bring it back. Ever.

  My wife said, “We’ll have to find an apartment where they’ll let us have the dog.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said.

  “How much money do you think you’ll make?” she asked.

  “I might get as much as a hundred-fifty dollars a week,” I said.

  “Let’s buy a car with air-conditioning,” she said.

  The little VW Beetle was a little slice of hell during the summer.

  “If I can get a hundred-fifty, a week,” I told her, “we can buy a new Pontiac.”

  Four years earlier, as the southern saying goes, I couldn’t have afforded syrup if it had fallen to three cents a sop. And here I was thinking about $150 a week and a new Pontiac with air-conditioning.

  Bring on the good life.

  The old man in Toccoa decided not to sell his paper, Glenn wound up leaving Athens to move back to Columbus, where he quickly became publisher of the jointly owned papers there.

  We both eventually got out of the actual business of getting the paper out every day. I turned to column writing, and Glenn took to working on annual budgets. I ran into him at the Atlanta airport one day years later.

  “I wonder what would have happened if we had gone to Toccoa?” I asked.

  “We’d have had some fun,” Glenn said. That old enthusiasm.

  And then he was off to Ottawa or some such place to look at a new press. I caught a plane to San Antonio to address the National Association of Truck Stop Owners. I laughed to myself as I recalled Dr. Aderhold’s wife’s chicken. I still can’t think of the chicken’s name, though.

  Four years almost to the day that I stood alone in the vacant sports department of the Atlanta Journal and vowed to return, I walked back in, older, wiser, and hoping to God I’d get an offer for $150 a week.

  I walked into a major crisis.

  The Journal, an afternoon daily, still published a Saturday edition in 1968, and in the midst of getting that out, there was also the matter of the first Sunday edition, which usually hit the streets around four Saturday afternoon.

  This first Sunday edition was known as the “bulldog.” As soon as the Saturday afternoon edition was finished, a designated “bulldog man” would then go to the composing room and put together the early Sunday sports section. It would contain stories printed overnight on Friday. All the columns that were to run in every edition went in the bulldog. The rest of it usually included wire-feature stories that had come in all week. They would be pulled in later editions to make room for breaking sports stories.

  Furman Bisher’s Sunday column went into the bulldog, of course. It always ran down the left-hand side of the front sports section.

  There were rules about Furman Bisher’s column. Serious rules. Written-in-blood rules.

  * You didn’t jump Furman Bisher’s column from the front to an inside page.

  * You didn’t cut anything out of Furman Bisher’s column.

  * You didn’t edit Furman Bisher’s column. Every word was a pearl.

  When I walked into the Journal sports department at approximately 9:08 that last Saturday in May, there was panic throughout the place.

  Bisher’s column was missing, he had neglected to leave a carbon, and he was out of town and couldn’t be reached.

  The composing-room foreman checked with all the Linotype operators, and they all said they hadn’t seen Bisher’s column. But the bulldog man swore he had sent it down through the pneumatic tubes Friday afternoon.

  I walked in, looked around for Jim Minter. His desk was to the left of the slot, across from Bisher’s office. He was on the phone talking to the composing room when I reached him.

  He was telling the composing-room foreman what he thought of him, which obviously wasn’t very much. He slammed the phone down, looked up and saw me, and said, “Get a chair somewhere. We’ve got a problem. Bisher’s column is missing.”

  So I grabbed a chair and just sat there and watched the drama that unfolded in front of me.

  After he got through with the composing-room foreman, Minter jumped on the bulldog man.

  “You should have made sure Bisher gave you a carbon,” he said, sternly. Minter’s tone frightened me—and I was just sitting there in a chair watching.

  He went back to his desk and to his phone. He called the composing-room foreman again and said, “I know damn well Bisher’s column was sent down. Now get off your butt and look for it. It’s got to be down there somewhere.”

  There were anxious moments that followed. If Bisher’s column couldn’t be found, it not only wouldn’t appear in the first edition, but might not make the Sunday paper at all. Bisher would go nuts when he found out about it, and when Bisher went nuts, hell had no like fury . . .

  I felt as though I were in an airport-control center and a plane was coming in without its landing gear.

  The phone buzzed. Somebody picked it up and said to Minter, “It’s the composing room for you.”

  The office fell silent.

  “Well, it’s about goddamn time,” Minter said into the phone.

  The composing-room foreman had found Bisher’s column. It was someplace it shouldn’t have been. Precious lives had been saved.

  “I can pay you one hundred sixty dollars a week,” Jim Minter said to me after the Bisher crisis was over.

  “How much?” I asked him.

  “One-sixty,” he said.

  My God.

  “Bill Clark is coming down from the Cons
titution to cover colleges for us. You’ll be number two to him.”

  That was also good news. The one thing I wanted to avoid was being relegated to the high school beat. I’d covered Georgia for two years and had got a taste for large press boxes, charter flights with the team, and big games in front of thousands in such exotic places as Auburn, Alabama; Jacksonville, Florida; and Jackson, Mississippi.

  I suppose if Minter had put me on high schools, I still would have taken the job, because it at least would have got me through the front door. But to be number two on colleges! To work with Bill Clark, whom I’d read for years and seen on Bisher’s Football Review, was an awesome thought. And 160 big ones a week! God didn’t make that much money.

  Minter would tell me later how he got my name. He was in Athens speaking with Joel Eaves, the Georgia athletic director. He asked Eaves, “Any young sportswriters around who have impressed you?”

  Joel Eaves was a tall, silver-haired man with a deep, commanding voice. He ran the Georgia athletic department with an eye on every penny that came in and went out. He had been brought in to straighten out the mess that was the Georgia athletic program in 1963.

  Coach Eaves—which is how he was always referred to—had treated me with surprising respect as sports editor of the Daily News. I was nineteen. He had to deal with the Atlanta papers and veterans like Bisher and Minter, but he never refused me an interview, and even fed me a few scoops on occasion.

  Coach Eaves had even offered me a job earlier in the spring. There was an opening for assistant sports-information director in the athletic department. The assistant SID kept statistics, wrote press releases, went to get things for the SID, and took sportswriters out for drinks and dinner. Coach Eaves offered me seventy-two hundred dollars a year. But it was too late for me. I was a newspaperman. I had sniffed the glue pot, beat more than my share of deadlines, and had seen combat in a newspaper war. I was committed. He told Minter about me.

  Minter would tell me later, however, that Georgia’s basketball coach, Ken Rosemond, actually had more to do with the fact he sought me out and offered me the opportunity to join the Journal

  Rosemond had inherited a terrible basketball tradition at Georgia. Until 1963, Georgia played its home games in a barn called Woodruff Hall. Finally, the state built the school a new coliseum, but it was the same old losses, just surrounded by a little better scenery.

  Rosemond had played on Frank McGuire’s 1957 national champion North Carolina team that beat Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas in the finals in triple overtime. McGuire, a New Yorker, had organized a tremendous talent pipeline from New York to Chapel Hill. When Rosemond got to Georgia, he figured he would do the same thing.

  What he actually did was alienate every high school coach in the state by saying he couldn’t win with Georgia kids. So he went to New York and came back with a cast that didn’t do very much better than their home-grown predecessors.

  For some reason, Rosemond didn’t like me very much. He was tough to interview and very defensive. His team was hosting Georgia Tech in Athens one evening. Tech had a strong team. A large crowd, by Georgia basketball measures, was expected. It was Rosemond’s avowed intention to do away with Georgia’s image as simply a football school.

  The afternoon before the game, Rosemond ran into football coach Vince Dooley in an athletic-department hallway. “Are you coming to the game tonight, Coach?” Rosemond asked Dooley, already on his way to legend status.

  “I’m not sure,” said Dooley, matter-of-factly. “Who are you playing?”

  Rosemond turned fourteen shades of red and stalked back into his office.

  Minter had also run into Rosemond the afternoon Coach Eaves had given me his recommendation. Minter asked Rosemond the same question: “Any young writer around impress you?”

  Rosemond recommended his manager, who also wanted to go into sportswriting. Minter told me later that he asked, “What about this Grizzard kid?”

  “He’s a troublemaker,” said Rosemond.

  “That convinced me,” said Minter, who strongly believed that if coaches or players of the team you were covering actually liked you, then you weren’t doing your job.

  Rosemond’s manager, incidentally, was named Henry Freeman. He became sports editor of USA Today, and his sections have been so packed with information and organized so well, practically every sports section in the country has stolen at least a couple of his ideas.

  Just like that, the job was mine. Less than four years after high school, I had, in a manner of speaking, fulfilled my lifetime ambition, to be a member of the Atlanta Journal sports staff. Jim Minter just walked into the press box at the Georgia baseball field, asked me two questions, and four days later he made it official and hired me. I would report to work a week from the following Monday.

  And I never did do the trade journal. I told my professor about the job in Atlanta, and there was no way I could be moved in a week and complete the assignment. He was nice about it. He said, “I’ll give you an incomplete. Just try to finish it by the end of summer so you can graduate.”

  Right.

  Paula and I drove to Atlanta in the hot VW the following Tuesday and wound up with an apartment in suburban Smyrna. It was okay to have a dog, the resident manager said. I’m still not certain how we wound up in Smyrna, the Jonquil City, since it was a thirty-minute drive downtown to the newspaper. And I used the term “suburban” earlier. Now, since Atlanta is about six hundred times larger than it was in 1968, Smyrna is suburban. When I moved there however, the term “boonies” fit better.

  But there was a good barbecue place nearby, as well as several chiropractors’ offices, and a religious bookstore. If I ever got hungry for barbecue and suffered whiplash in an accident on the way to the restaurant and became born-again in the middle of all that, I was in a dandy spot to fulfill all my needs.

  My last day at the Daily News was a Friday of the last week in May 1968. Nobody threw me any kind of a party. As a matter of fact, that last night was supposed to be fairly routine.

  I wrote an occasional front-page column called “Lewis Grizzard on Sportz.” I thought misspelling “sports” was a cute idea. It wasn’t.

  I wrote the obligatory farewell column, laid out the Saturday morning sports section with every intention of getting the section in early and getting out of that place for good. I still hadn’t forgiven management for making the Daily News staff move its own furniture and then rewarding us with a stupid case of beer.

  But early that evening there had been an auto accident, and a friend had been killed.

  Carl Gilbert was only twenty-two. He had been a star athlete at Athens High and then had played baseball at Georgia. His younger brother, Paul, was the quarterback on the 1965 Athens High team I had covered my first year at the Daily News.

  I met Carl Gilbert through another friend, Bill Johnson. Bill did Athens High football and basketball play-by-play for the local radio station, WGAU.

  I crashed my car after an out-of-town Athens High football game in 1965, and Bill gave me a ride back to Athens. Carl Gilbert kept statistics for Bill Johnson on the broadcasts. I became friends with both of them. In fact, Bill and I became close. He was married and so was I. We were both working our way through Georgia. He wanted to be the next Ed Thelinius. I wanted to be the next Furman Bisher. He had one of those draft-beer containers in the icebox at his apartment. I thoroughly enjoyed draft beer. It was over many gallons of his draft beer that we discussed our dreams.

  “We’ll make it,” he often assured me.

  I took to riding with Bill and Carl to all out-of-town Athens High games. Bill got the WGAU station wagon for those trips, and anything beat driving halfway across the state in that damn VW of mine.

  Bill graduated in 1966. He was in the air force ROTC program, and his broadcasting career would have to be interrupted by six months of duty in Texas. The day before he left Athens, we sat in his apartment, poured down the beers, and toasted our futures.

  It was n
ice to have a friend who could relate to my dream. Not only had he done the Athens High broadcasts, he’d also signed on the station on weekdays at the crack of dawn.

  “You ever get up in the morning and ask yourself, ‘Why am I putting myself through this torture?’ ” I had asked him.

  “When I hit the big time,” he answered, “I figure it will all have been worth it.”

  That last day he was in Athens was the last time I saw Bill Johnson alive. We hugged when I left his apartment. We would stay in touch by mail.

  Bill never did mention anything about his illness in his first letters. I found out from his pretty blond wife, Carol, who had stayed behind in Athens. I dropped by to see her one day and found her alone and crying.

  “Bill’s real sick,” she said to me. She was leaving that afternoon for Texas to be with him.

  It had something to do with a virus that attacked Bill’s heart. They said he lost a lot of weight before he died, and looked awful. His casket wasn’t open at his funeral in his little hometown of Summerville, Georgia, in the north Georgia foothills.

  “We wanted his friends to remember him as he was before he got sick,” Carol had told me.

  I was devastated by Bill’s death. My last letter from him had come in early December. He wrote that he was improving since Carol had joined him, and that doctors were considering allowing him to go to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas January 1, to see Georgia play SMU.

  But a week or so later, he was dead. We had been in this together. Two promising young men who were willing to work our butts off to get to the place we wanted to be.

  As I walked out of the Journal-Constitution building the Saturday morning after Jim Minter hired me, I thought long and hard about Bill. Had he lived, where would he have been at that delicious moment in my life?

  He had the voice. He knew the games. And his desire and energy were limitless. He would have made what we considered the big time, too. I was convinced of that. But damn the Fates.

  And here I sat on my last night in Athens, and Carl Gilbert was dead, too. We’d traveled all over the state together. Bill usually drove. Carl sat in the front passenger seat, and I took the back. Three of us in that car, and now two were dead. You are going to live forever when you’re twenty-one. But now two of us were dead.