This is going to be like at the Oscars where the winner of some minor category gets up and talks for so long the orchestra starts playing that “get the hell off the stage” music. I don’t care. There are so many people to thank.
First off, some teachers: Lillian Williams at Jane Macon Middle School; Brenda Hunt, Wayne Ervin, and James Holt at Brunswick High School; and Conrad Fink at the University of Georgia. All of them showed me a bigger world, and handed me maps to get there.
Next, some editors: James Folker at the Augusta Chronicle; Trisha O’Connor, John Bordsen, John Drescher, Gary Schwab, Cheryl Carpenter, Cindy Montgomery, and Mike Gordon at the Charlotte Observer; Chris Stone at Sports Illustrated; Jena Janovy at ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com; Megan Greenwell, then at Esquire, now at Deadspin; and many others I will regret not mentioning the moment this book comes out. My butt has also been saved a million times over by copyeditors, especially Beryl Adcock and Roger Mikeal at the Observer. Repeat after me from the scripture: Everybody needs an editor.
I want to set aside a paragraph for two special editors. Frank Barrows at the Observer chose me to be the local columnist—the most important thing that ever happened in my career—and stood by me when I almost blew the whole thing. I still look to him for wisdom and guidance. Jay Lovinger at ESPN taught me more just by talking on the phone than any other editor ever has with a pen or a delete key. He’s a guru I’d climb a mountain for.
I dug back through old emails and found my first exchange with my agent, Sloan Harris. It was in 2006. This book is coming out in 2019. Sloan is a patient man. He spent years gently rejecting dozens of my terrible ideas and shaping a few others that were worth a discussion but not quite a book. When we hit on this idea, he waited even longer because I was afraid to write it. Then, when I was finally ready, he sold the thing in what felt like ten seconds. Thank you, sir. I wish we could go to Anderson’s and celebrate this.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler at Simon & Schuster did his most important work as the editor of this book before I wrote a word of it. When Sloan was shopping it around to publishers, Jofie called me to say how much he loved the idea and that he would be thrilled to make the book the best that it could be. By the end of the call, I would’ve bought a time-share in a condo from him. He made the book better every time he touched it and was a joy to work with every step of the way.
There are so many people I’ve never even met at Simon & Schuster who did such great work on this book. Julianna Haubner and Kristen Lemire kept the trains running. Jessica Chin, the copyediting manager, and Marla Jea, the copyeditor, handled literally thousands of changes to the manuscript. Jamie Keenan designed the jacket, Ruth Lee-Mui designed the interior, and Kate Barrett handled corrections in desktop. Nicole Hines is handling the marketing and Maddie Schmitz is doing publicity. Please let me know what gifts y’all want from the Carolinas. We have multiple varieties of barbecue sauce.
A few of many, many friends: Perry Beard from back home in Brunswick; David Duclos, Zane Vanhook, Jon Bauer, Kim Clemons, and Ellen Lord from UGA; Clint Engel, John Prince, and Tim Richardson from Augusta; Ann Helms, Kathi Purvis, Doug Miller, Diane Suchetka, Dan Huntley, Ken Garfield, Jim Walser, and a million others from the Charlotte Observer; my fellow Bad Niemans from the 2008–09 Nieman Fellowship, especially Rosita Boland and Chris Vognar, who gave feedback on an early draft, and curator Bob Giles, who brought us all together; Greg Collard, Ju-Don Marshall, Nick de la Canal, Lisa Worf, Joe O’Connor, and everybody else I’m getting to know at WFAE; and Chris Jones, Mike Schur, Kevin Van Valkenburg, Chuck Culpepper, Michael Kruse, Ben Montgomery, Mike Graff, Tony Rehagen, Thomas Lake, Greg Lacour, Lisa Rab, Gavin Edwards, Lisa Pollak, Jeremy Markovich, Jonathan Abrams, and so many others from out in the writing world. Spouses, too.
Joe Posnanski did it all before me—wrote a column, worked for magazines, blogged, podcasted, wrote books. Most of what I’ve learned about these things, I’ve learned from watching him. We threw a baseball around in his apartment parking lot nearly thirty years ago, two bureau reporters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, wondering if we’d ever make it to our version of the bigs. I think we got there. Thanks for the advice and the friendship and the many, many three-hour lunches.
My family is everything. I couldn’t have made it here without my brother, Ronald Bennett, his wife, Neca, and their children, Gina and Brett; my late sister, Brenda Williams, her husband, Ed, and their children Alison, Alisha, and Jerod; my mother-in-law, Joann Felsing, and her children, Rich and Christie; and all the cousins and uncles and aunts dotting every corner of the South and beyond. Thanks for supporting me even when some of you didn’t quite understand what I do for a living. Sometimes I don’t understand it either.
As I was in the final stretch of writing this book, three of the people who meant the most to me died in a span of five months. I’ll never be able to say enough, here or anywhere, about Virgil Ryals, my best friend; Dick Felsing, my father-in-law; and especially Virginia Tomlinson, my mom, who died in January 2018 after a long illness. I hope you see in these pages how much I loved her. She lived long enough to see an early version of the book. She thought it was good except for the cussing.
I can’t mention my mom without mentioning my dad, L.M. Tomlinson (1915–1990). See you in my dreams, Daddy.
The orchestra has been playing for a while now, the broadcast has cut to commercial, but I’m not leaving until I say this: Marrying Alix Felsing is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, or ever will. You know from reading the book how much I have put her through. She has handled it all with strength and humor and grace. Every day I think I love her to full capacity, but the next day I love her more. It seems impossible. But with Alix, nothing is.