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

by Lewis Grizzard

  We staffed between eight and ten college games each Saturday. Bisher and Constitution sports editor Jesse Outlar would flip-flop on Georgia Tech and Georgia games. At least two other writers would also be at the Tech and Georgia games to write what we called sidebars, since Bisher would never leave the press box and go to the locker room to find out what the coaches and players had to say. He figured he could write better than they could talk. He was right. The sidebars guys would get the quotes. The winning coach would always say, “First, I want to give [the losing team] a lot of credit. They played well and were coached well.” Nobody ever said, “But, Coach, you won fifty-eight to zero.”

  The losing coach would always say, “We got outplayed and outcoached.” Nobody ever asked him, “You got any more startling news?”

  Other staffers from both papers would cover Southeastern Conference games, and we usually were wherever Clemson, South Carolina, and Florida State were playing. We’d have everybody with a camera out as well.

  But staff coverage of college games was only a part of it. Anybody who has the task of producing a newspaper sports section would like if team sports seasons didn’t overlap. Basketball season should begin in January and go until spring-training baseball begins. Baseball should go from April until Labor Day. Football would start after that and go until January 1, when basketball would start again. But that’s not what happens anymore. They bounce a basketball almost until the Fourth of July now. I’ve had a great deal to say about Furman Bisher, sports editor of the Journal, but Jesse Outlar, sports editor and columnist for the Constitution, certainly had his moments. My favorite line of his was, “If the National Basketball Association had been in charge of World War Two, Germany and Japan would still be in contention.”

  Pro-basketball teams start playing exhibition games in October, then play six months of regular season games to eliminate about four teams, and the rest of them start all over again in the play-offs.

  Speaking of basketball, the Atlanta papers on Saturday tried to carry the results of every high school game, boys and girls, played on Friday nights. That’s a lot of basketball results. The effort became so difficult for Rex Edmondson, who covered high schools for the Journal years before I arrived, he was driven to paraphrase a poem, “Song of the Chattahooche,” written by Georgia’s greatest poet (There’s been more than one. James Dickey is from Atlanta), Sidney Lanier. The poem began something like:

  Out of the hills of Habersham

  Down the valleys of Hall

  And then, with apologies to Mr. Lanier, “blah, blah, blah.”

  Edmondson typed his new version and tacked it on the bulletin board. It went:

  Down through the hills of Habersham

  Into the valleys of Hall

  Every son of a bitch and his sister

  Is bouncing a goddamn ball.

  Baseball goes into October, too, when football is in the middle of its season. So, on a Sunday, you’ve not only got 8 zillion college football games to get into the paper from around the country, but, in my case, I also had to deal with the basketball Hawks, the baseball play-offs, and the World Series. I also had to have advance stories on the Falcons and other Sunday pro-football games, and, to borrow from Rex Edmondson, some son of a bitch or his sister was also throwing a golf tournament, a horse race, a car race, or a tennis match—and some fool would always call around ten-thirty, trying to get the results of some local bowling tournament into the paper.

  I would come in at my normal five on Friday mornings and work until twelve-thirty on the Friday afternoon section. After that, I would get the Sunday layouts. The first Sunday edition was called the bulldog. I don’t know why. I should try to find out, but it’s already been a long book, so let’s get on with it.

  Each week, when Minter would do the assignment sheet, he would designate one person to produce the bulldog. It was usually somebody he was mad at. Robinson was always getting the bulldog, it seemed.

  The bulldog Sunday edition gets on the street late Saturday afternoon. Sections like the comics and Travel and Perspective and Arts and TV and Fashion that aren’t concerned with breaking news are produced in the middle of the week.

  Classified and whatever inserts are to be included in the Sunday paper (There seem to be more and more of them. Notice your Sunday paper now weighs more than your car?) are also produced early.

  A lot of people want to get their Sunday papers on Saturday, I suppose so they can figure out early on what houses are for sale, what editorials will get them mad, or what Peanuts has to say.

  That leaves the news section and the sports section. They undergo a lot of changes during Saturday night. Sports more than news, of course, unless there’s a big fire, a plane crashes, or somebody important dies.

  There usually would be only two or three pages in the sports section that wouldn’t change after the bulldog. We usually carried two pages of outdoor news and a pro-football page that remained intact throughout all editions.

  But the rest of the section would change almost every edition, three of them, as the night wore on and stories and photographs from afternoon and night games came in.

  The pages that would change would have to be filled with mostly wire feature stories and photographs for the bulldog. The bulldog man would go through the wire every day for timeless material. Then he would send it down to be set in type. Saturday morning after the Saturday daily was in, he would go down to the composing room and fill the section with the advance type, which would be tossed out later for breaking stories.

  I would take my page layouts home with me Friday afternoon. I would have a list of every football game in the country and the time they were to be played. I would also have a list of whatever else would be taking place on Saturday. The Hawks were in Poughkeepsie for an exhibition game with the Celtics. It was game three of the World Series. And God Knows What Else.

  After dinner, I would go into my bedroom, where I also had a desk. I would lay out each page and check off each game or event until I had a place for it all in the Sunday section.

  But it was never that easy. A lot of things could happen. I will list a few of them:

  * Bisher would get carried away and write thirty inches when I had estimated he would write only twenty-five. Cut Bisher and you die. I’d have to figure out a way to get his entire story in.

  * Something odd would happen at a Tech game. I had to find room for that, too.

  * I would have Alabama-Tennessee on page 8. But Tennessee would pull off an astounding upset, and I would have to move it on to page 1.

  * A plane would crash. That happened to me. I was about through with the next-to-last edition when they called me in the composing room to tell me the plane carrying the Marshall University football team was down, and a lot of people were dead. That had to be the lead story in the section, and I had to rush to set the story into the edition I was trying to close.

  I lowered the eight-column sports masthead and ordered an eight-column, 60-point headline to cover a crash story that would run across the top of the page, five lines deep, and then jump to another page.

  That meant everything else on the page had to be lowered. I jumped more of Bisher’s Georgia story and Outlar’s Tech story and Minter’s piece from the Alabama-Tennessee game, and I cut the feet off the players in the photograph in the middle of the page. Somehow it all fit and, with the exception of footless football players, looked as though I had planned it that way in the first place.

  * The World Series would get rained out.

  * I would block out a vertical spot for a photo to go with the Georgia sidebars. All photographs from the Georgia game would be horizontal.

  * Some pro bowler at the Little Rock Open would bowl a perfect game. Normally, I would put the results of the Little Rock Open bowling tournament in agate type (very small type) under the final results of some car race. But somebody bowling a perfect game is news, so I’d have to find a spot for it.

  * A story coming in over the Wester
n Union telex would catch on fire.

  They never mentioned any of this in journalism school.

  The Constitution’s veteran Charlie Roberts was in Baton Rouge one Saturday for the LSU-Ole Miss game. I had it across the top of page 2. It was a night game being played in a Central time zone, which meant I could expect to have Roberts’s story about ten minutes before deadline.

  I wrote the headline ahead of time. I wrote “OLE MISS STOPS LSU.” The good thing about headlines is the words can be separated by a printer. If Ole Miss won, then fine. If LSU won, all I had to do is tell the printer to move “LSU” where “Ole Miss” had been and vice versa. “LSU STOPS OLE MISS.”

  Writers covering games that will end near deadline will send a page after the end of each quarter. This is called “running.” I had assigned Charlie Roberts to send three quarters of running so that I could have it already set in type before the game ended.

  As soon as the game was over, he would then send a “top” to the running on the telex.

  NPR [night press rate] Collect, Baton Rouge.

  By CHARLIE ROBERTS

  Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

  BATON ROUGE, L.A.—The Louisiana Bayou Bengals, ranked fourth nationally, convinced rival Ole Miss that their ranking is for real with an easy 31–7 romp over the Rebels here Saturday before an aroused gathering of 82,000.

  Then there would be a couple of other paragraphs summarizing who scored what.

  I had the headline set. I had Roberts’s running. I had to close at twelve-fifteen. At twelve, I called the office from the composing room.

  “Got Roberts’s top yet?” I asked.

  “Any minute,” said the desk.

  Five minutes passed. No top. I called again.

  “Nothing yet,” I was told.

  I don’t get the LSU-Ole Miss story and Minter and Bisher will kill me.

  Ten after. I called again.

  “Still nothing.”

  Somehow I felt if I went up to the office and stood by the telex machine and prayed hard enough, Roberts’s top would come to me.

  The minute I got back to the office, I saw the machine had already started.

  “Get me the first paragraph off and run it down by hand,” I said. I started back to the composing room. I would make it. Just make it. But then something caught my eye. It was the Western Union telex machine that was typing out Roberts’s top. There was something odd about the machine. There was smoke coming out of it.

  I broke for the machine. By the time I made the six steps to it, I saw a flame. A flame! The Western Union machine was on fire, and Charlie Roberts’s top was in there!

  I never did find out what caused the fire. Some sort of electrical short, I suppose. But I do know that I reached down among the flames, with complete disregard for my personal safety, pulled the paper away, and saved it (not to mention my ass).

  With all the other difficulties involved in getting a Sunday football section out, there was also the matter of readers calling in for scores. Calls came by the hundreds on Saturday night.

  It was a terrible inconvenience for a desk man, up to his ears in editing stories or writing headlines, to have to answer the phone and hear on the other end, “Hey, buddy, who won the Stanford-Cal game?”

  Nobody in Atlanta really cared who won the Stanford-Cal except people who had money on it, which at times seemed to include about everybody in town.

  What we could never figure out about the callers was why they often would phone in at four in the afternoon to get a west coast score. Didn’t these dummies know about the three-hour time difference between the coasts?

  One afternoon a desk man picked up the phone around four in the afternoon, eastern time, and some nitwit asked, “How’d UCLA and Oregon State come out?”

  The desk man looked at the clock and answered, “They’re warming up,” and hung up the phone.

  I had another staffer, David Davidson, who became my college editor and was one of the best ever to grace the department. He was from Mississippi. If it didn’t happen in the Southeastern Conference, he didn’t care much about it.

  He was in the middle of writing a game story on deadline. The phone was ringing, and he was the only one available to answer it.

  The caller said, “You got a score on Wyoming and Utah State?”

  David said, “Wyoming and Utah State? Who gives a shit?” and hung up.

  Worse perhaps than the score calls were the calls made in order to settle arguments at bars. Two guys get into the sauce and start arguing over where Y. A. Tittle, the great New York Giants quarterback, went to college.

  One says, “We’ll by-God call the paper. They’ll tell you he went to LSU.”

  “He went to Texas, you idiot,” his friend would say, “And I’ve got fifty dollars says I’m right.”

  So there sits somebody like Hyland.

  He answers the phone: “Sports.”

  The guys in the bar always started out the same way:

  “Hey, buddy, look here. Where did Y. A. Tittle go to college? LSU or Texas?”

  “LSU,” Hyland answers correctly.

  But that’s not enough.

  “Tell my friend that,” says the caller. “Just a minute. Hey, Arnold, come over here, I got the sports department on the phone!

  “Hold up a minute. Here comes Arnold. I want you to tell him just what you told me.”

  “Hey,” says Arnold.

  “Hey,” says Hyland, thinking of something delicious at this point.

  “Where’d Y. A. Tittle go to college? Texas or LSU?”

  “Texas,” answers Hyland and hangs up the phone.

  Who knows how many bar fights were started that way?

  The assistant sports editor of the Atlanta Journal got one plum a year. He could have his pick of any college-bowl game and go there to cover it. He could also take his wife and get a chance to cheat on his expense account, too, like the beat writers.

  They didn’t pay us much back then, and as the saying went, “If you don’t cheat on your expense account, you’re not cheating anybody but yourself.”

  You could cheat on meals the easiest. You were allowed three a day, and you didn’t have to run in a receipt for any expenditure under twenty-five dollars.

  Let’s say a beat writer was in Manhattan. In Manhattan you had to pay for the bad service. So the beat writer was up late writing his story for the next day’s paper, and then he would hit a bar or two over on the East Side (a lot of Atlanta sportswriters fell in love at Maxwell’s Plum, but I won’t mention any names). So he wouldn’t get up until noon, but he would put down breakfast on his expense account anyway—$13.45. They have to bring in the eggs from Jersey, I suppose.

  He would grab a hot dog on the street for lunch—$17.50 on the expense account. Then, he would ride the team bus out to Shea Stadium, but put down $19.50 for a cab ride. He’d eat the free dinner they gave the writer in the press box, and that was $24.95.

  Beat writers usually drove nicer cars than other members of the staff.

  My first year as assistant sports editor, my wife hated trains so we flew to our bowl game in New Orleans. We stayed at the Monteleone and drank at the Carousel Bar in the lobby that actually moved you around in a circle while you were seated. I was more impressed with that than the Dixieland Bank at Preservation Hall.

  Legend still has it a writer covering one of the early Super Bowls in New Orleans was sitting at the Carousel Bar in the Monteleone and was approached by a hooker who said to him, “Honey, I’ll do anything for $100.

  The writer asked, “Anything?”

  And the hooker confirmed, “Anything.”

  So the writer said, “Okay, go to my room and write a column and a sidebar.”

  Arkansas played Ole Miss in the game. I forgot who won, but I managed to make a couple of hundred extra on the trip. Breakfast is expensive in New Orleans, too.

  My second year, I looked long and hard at the bowl lineup. I didn’t want to go back to New Orleans
. I was leaning toward Pasadena and the Rose Bowl.

  One day, I said to Minter, “I think I’m going to take the Rose Bowl this year.”

  He said, “You’re not going to a bowl game this year.”

  I asked why.

  He said, “I’m going to need you in the office.”

  Nobody ever won an argument with Jim Minter. So I didn’t say anything else. I was hurt. And disappointed. And I pouted for a couple of days.

  Hyland and I were both divorced by then, and we were sharing an apartment. Skip Caray, the voice of the Atlanta Hawks and son of the legendary Harry Caray, now the voice of the Chicago Cubs and mayor of Rush Street, even moved in for a while after he ran away from home.

  I didn’t even get the Naugahyde couch and chair in my divorce. Frank got out with his clothes. We rented enough items of furniture to get by.

  Christmas was near, and we were both depressed. There is something about looking into a refrigerator and seeing only a few cans of beer and a slice or two of American cheese to make you feel lonely and sorry for yourself and make you think that being married certainly had its good points after all. Christmas season makes it even worse. And then I wasn’t even going to get to go out of town on a bowl trip! We did a lot of drinking, me and Frank.

  Minter told me to come to the office New Year’s Day around five. He said we would work on the next afternoon’s edition, a big one with all the bowl coverage, the evening before, and then let another staffer come in the next morning to put together what we had laid out.

  I got to the office at six o’clock. Minter wasn’t there. On my typewriter, there was a folded note. I opened it. I had to read it twice before I believed it.

  It was from Minter. He said he was sorry he couldn’t have told me earlier, but the reason he hadn’t allowed me to go to a bowl game was that, effective that day, he was the new managing editor of the morning Constitution.

  “Somebody needs to be there for the transition,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be off at a bowl game when you would be needed so badly.”

  Minter to the Constitution. DiMaggio to the Red Sox. Halas to the Packers. Truman to the Republicans.