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

BEFORE HE MOVED upstairs as managing editor of the Constitution, Jim Minter had hired some new faces to replace some of the old ones. Bill Clark got his overtime pay and was gone. Teague Jackson took a job in golf. Bill Robinson had a misunderstanding with the paper, and he was gone. Wilt Browning gave up the baseball beat and went to work as public-relations director of the Atlanta Falcons, the unchallenged worst franchise in the National Football League. Doing PR for the Falcons was a little like doing PR for the Italian Army during World War II.

Newspaper people were different (euphemism for “weird”) from other people I had known in my brief twenty-three years. They just kept falling into my life from someplace in Celestial Central Casting where they create characters whose flaws and frailties and specialties make them almost immediately unforgettable.

—Norman Arey. He had been a boy wonder in the department-store business in North Carolina. In his early twenties, he was already some sort of retailing genius. But he wasn’t happy doing that. He wanted to be a sportswriter. He had a wife, a family, and a more-than-comfortable living, but he chucked it all and got a job on the sports staff of a suburban Atlanta daily, the Marietta Daily Journal, covering local high school sports.

Not satisfied there, either, he began to call and write Minter at the Journal about a job with us. As a matter of fact, Norman either wrote or called Jim every day for six months.

When the openings came, Minter needed another helper with the high school teams, so he hired Norman. I don’t know for certain, but I think Minter hired him just so he wouldn’t have to deal with Norman’s calls and letters anymore.

Norman couldn’t write a lick. But he was a determined sort (as evidenced by his never-ending effort to obtain a job on the Journal sports staff). And he wanted to learn.

Norman’s first assignment for the Journal was to cover a Friday night high school football game between two local schools, Chamblee and Druid Hills. I took him aside Friday morning and tried to give him some guidelines.

“Norman,” I said, “you are writing for an afternoon paper. By the time people get their Journals Saturday afternoon, most of them who care will already know who won the game you are covering. The Constitution and radio and television will have had it.

“So what you have to do is find an angle to the game. You have to talk to the coaches and get some color. It’s not enough just to report what happened for an afternoon newspaper.”

He nodded as if he understood. And he did in a way. And in any other situation, he might not have written what I still consider to be the worst lead (opening paragraph) of a sports story I ever read.

Here’s what happened to poor Norman. Chamblee scored the winning touchdown on the last play of the game. However, the Chamblee head coach, just as the runner crossed the goal line, collapsed on the sideline. He was rushed to a hospital and then pronounced dead on arrival from a heart attack.

I will never forget coming into the office to do the Sunday edition, picking up the Saturday afternoon section, and reading following:

Chamblee’s exciting come-from-behind 21–14 victory over rival Druid Hills Saturday was somewhat marred by the death of its coach.

Norman was an excellent piano player. He played classical, he played jazz, but what he did best was play Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer.

Norman not only sounded like Jerry Lee when he played and sang “Great Balls of Fire,” he could also put in all the Killer’s antics, such as playing the piano with his feet and kicking his stool away when he got on a roll.

Norman’s wife was Peg. They had met at the University of Georgia, where Norman had transferred from the University of North Carolina.

Norman and Peg were the Fred and Ginger, the Marge and Gower Champion, of the Journal sports department. They could dance. Their specialty was the Belly Roll, which came straight out of the fifties from North Carolina. Norman and Peg doing the Belly Roll in the living room of their house was a sight to behold. It was no Lambada, to be sure, but a fairly sexy dance for the time.

Norman quickly picked up the nickname “Crazy Norman.” He never did learn to write, but he did develop into one of the great information-gatherers it’s been my pleasure to work alongside. Norman could, in fact, get the facts.

The Friday before a Georgia-Georgia Tech football game, we got a tip that Eddie McAshan, the Tech quarterback and the first black football player at the school, had had a falling out with the head coach and had been suspended from the team. He wouldn’t be accompanying his teammates on a Friday bus ride to Athens from the Saturday game.

Both Friday home-delivered editions of the Journal were already gone, but we still had the street-sales blue-streak edition. This was front-page sort of news.

I dispatched Norman to the Tech campus and told him to do whatever was necessary, but to find out if McAshan was not making the trip and, if he wasn’t, why.

There were forty minutes before deadline. When Norman arrived at Tech, the coaches and players were boarding the buses to Athens. Norman asked the head coach, Bill Fulcher, where McAshan was.

Fulcher wouldn’t comment. Norman asked some of the players. They were afraid to comment. When Fulcher had seated himself in the front of one of the buses, Norman went inside, closed the door, and wouldn’t let the head coach out or the driver in until somebody told him about McAshan. Norman got his story.

Norman Arey did something else that changed my life dramatically. There were several of us at the Journal who played golf. Teague would get us on the local private courses for free.

I had come from a golf-deprived background. There was no Moreland Country Club. I had picked up the game in college, but I was never very good at it.

I was twenty-two when I quit golf. I was playing in a foursome with Teague and Hyland and Tom McCollister on the seventeenth hole at the historic East Lake Country Club in Atlanta, where the immortal Bobby Jones had learned the game. On the seventeenth, I hooked my tee shot in the water. I calmly put my driver back in my bag, announced I would never play golf again, and left the course.

Later, when Norman had joined the staff, he asked me one day, “Does anybody on the staff play tennis?”

I certainly didn’t. I was assistant sports editor of a large newspaper, and I had no idea how you kept score in tennis. There had been no tennis courts in Moreland, either.

Norman asked around and found no other tennis players on the staff. Mr. Persistence finally said to me, “I need somebody to play tennis with. I’ll show you how.”

I weighed 135 pounds when I graduated from high school. But because I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of country food my wife prepared for me, and got no physical exercise whatsoever anymore, I had bloomed to 200. I sort of enjoyed being overweight. I’d been skinny all my life. Suddenly, though, I had this big fat face and was up to 42 in the waist. I distinctly remember my mother had to take up my baseball pants my senior year in high school. They were 28 inches in the waist and were too big for me.

I agreed to meet Norman at the DeKalb Tennis Center in Atlanta. I had bought a pair of tennis shoes, a tennis shirt, and some tennis shorts, 42 inches in the waist. I borrowed a racquet.

I played tennis every day for the next sixteen years. I lost forty pounds in less than a year. I went from 42 tennis shorts to 34s. I looked better. I felt better.

It took me about three months to be able to beat Norman. Then, when I beat him one day at last, he never beat me again. Ever. I think he has always secretly hated me for that. I became a fair player. I even won a club tournament or two, and one wonderful year had my name in the rankings book with my partner as the number-13-ranked thirty-five-and-older doubles team in Georgia.

I had to give up the game when I was thirty-nine and awakened one morning to find I could no longer brush my teeth with my right hand because of the pain in my elbow and shoulder, put there by the fact I had played tennis every day for sixteen years. I went back to golf.

Norman basically became inactive as a player after I beat him a couple of hundred straight times. But the late sixties and the early seventies were tennis’s boom time, and Norman became the first tennis writer in Atlanta Journal history. He did a splendid job.

He started a national ranking service for collegiate tennis teams, and later quit the paper to go to work for Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis tour. There will be more on Norman and me and professional tennis tournaments later.

One other thing. Norman suggested he and I quit smoking at a staff New Year’s Eve party. It was our eighth or ninth day of nonpuffing. I called Norman at home. Peg answered the phone. Norman wasn’t there.

“We were sitting in the living room last night,” she said. “Me and Norman and the kids and the dog.” The dog was a large black poodle named Buffy. “Suddenly, Norman got off the couch, stood up on the coffee table, looked toward the sky, and announced to us all, in a very loud voice, ‘God wants me to smoke!’ Then he went down to the convenience store, bought a carton of cigarettes, and sat up all night smoking.”

If God wanted Norman to smoke, it occurred to me, He certainly wanted me to smoke, too. I went to the nearest store, bought myself a carton, and smoked until I was too sleepy to light another cigarette.

What I finally did about Norman’s writing was not allow him to write. I simply would send him out on assignment to gather information. He would then give me that information in the form of a memo, and I would have Hyland or another veteran put the information in the form of an article. Nothing wrong with that. Give me somebody who can bring back the information, and I can always find five other people to put it in the English language. Norman’s best work came in the form of a diary he convinced a high school football player in the Atlanta area to keep while he was being recruited by various colleges. After recruiting season was over, Norman took the diary, brought it to the office, and we published it.

One anecdote from that diary I’ll never forget. The kid had an idea that maybe he would like to be a doctor someday. When he visited Duke, recruiters took him over to the Duke hospital, where doctors allowed him to put on a doctor’s outfit and sit in on a hysterectomy. That cured the kid’s desire to be a doctor. He went to Georgia and majored in journalism instead.

—Priit Vesiland: Minter also hired him away from the Marietta Journal, and gave him Robinson’s old job as outdoor editor. Priit was a handsome young blond fellow who once wrote a story on the outdoor page questioning whether the killing of animals should be considered as a sport.

“Just what I need,” said Minter. “An outdoor editor who is antihunting.”

Priit was born in Estonia. His father, a college professor, had got his family out of Estonia and into the United States when the Soviets moved in after World War II. Priit was an intelligent, sensitive individual. He had a pretty wife. He expressed ideas and thoughts I’d never heard before. His arguments against racial injustice were a long way from Clark and Hyland discussing Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain.

Every day that I spent in the composing room, the more I became anti-union. Perhaps they had once served a purpose in the country, but the union I had to deal with was, more than anything else, a giant, arrogant pain in the butt that killed incentive and was stubbornly single-minded.

Priit had crossed a picket line when there had been a strike at the Marietta Daily Journal. In retaliation, union workers there went so far as to call Priit’s wife, telling her of a nonexistent affair her husband was supposed to be having with another woman at the newspaper. They also sliced the tires of his car. They even threatened his life.

When Priit left and came to the Journal he thought the harassment was over. Not so. Union members in our composing room heard from their brothers and sisters in Marietta, and thus were determined to make Priit’s life miserable.

He had to make up the outdoor pages twice a week. The minute he walked into the composing room, the badgering would start.

Priit would deny it. But it wouldn’t matter. The type for his page would still be all over the floor, and he would have to wait until it was set again.

They sliced Priit’s tires at the Journal, too. They made his life miserable. But he still turned out quality work. He wrote a story about the death of an outstanding show horse that was a brilliant piece of writing.

We went fishing once together up on Lake Alatoona, north of Atlanta. We caught a long string of crappie, went back to his house, cleaned them, cooked them, and ate them. Priit told me then he was planning to leave the paper.

Priit left. He wound up as a photographer with the National Geographic. I used to get postcards from him from all over the world.

The new technology eventually killed off the composing-room union. A user-friendly computer could do what a user-unfriendly printer could do, and do it better. Me, I miss glue pots and the sound of manual typewriters in a newspaper office. But I still think of computers as Priit’s revenge.

—Ron Hudspeth: Minter got him out of the West Palm Beach bureau of the Miami Herald. He hadn’t been on the staff for two weeks when I needed to find him on a Sunday to give him an assignment that had come up unexpectedly. I called his house. His wife answered the phone. I asked for Ron. His wife said he wasn’t there. I asked if she knew when he would be in. She said she didn’t. I asked if she would she give him a message. She said she couldn’t. “Ron doesn’t live here anymore,” she told me.

Atlanta became the singles mecca in the South in the early seventies. Hyland and I were both divorced and often sought neon, but nobody ever took to it like Hudspeth, the boy from Bell Glade, Florida, on the outskirts of the Everglades.

We came to give him a nickname, too. We called him “the Butterfly.” In a bar, he was everywhere. Frank liked to prop on the bar and argue sports. Not Hudspeth. He fired on everything that moved. Oh, those warm spring Friday nights at Harrison’s on Peachtree, the singles bar that became an Atlanta legend.

The girl-childs were flocking there. From places like Vidalia and Augusta and Montgomery and Birmingham and Ty Ty and Albany (the Georgian pronunciation is “All-Benny”) in the south, to Ringgold and Dalton (from whence would later come Maria Maples and Deborah Norville) to the north. They would wear those sundresses and you couldn’t move in the place on Friday’s.

It was. There basically had been only one woman in my life since I was thirteen. Paula. But she was gone. And, once I had adjusted to bachelor life, this Harrison’s on Peachtree was a veritable gold mine. I would have found it, of course, if Ron Hudspeth hadn’t come to work at the Atlanta Journal, but his divorce gave me a regular running mate.

Running bars alone—even great ones like Harrison’s—has its drawbacks, especially if approaching strange women is difficult, as it most certainly was to me, especially before I’d got a few VOs and water inside me. There will always be that fear of rejection in most men. It is called the Buzz-Off-Creep Theory.

She’s beautiful. She’s alone. But what if I walk over there, say something clever like, “How long have you been in Atlanta?” “What’s your sign?” or the ever popular opener, “Do you think wrestling’s fake?” and she replies, “Buzz off, creep?”

“It’s not the walk over to talk to a girl or to ask her to dance that’s so bad. It’s the walk back when she says no that gets you.”

But Hudspeth wasn’t afraid. He would fire, and if rejected, would go on undaunted to his next target. What made it easy for me was when he would join two ladies at a table. As soon as I figured he had broken the ice, I would walk over and introduce myself. I had to take second choice, of course, but the taking of an occasional cull in a city like Atlanta was often quite rewarding.

There was something else Ron and I shared. We both had the same ideas about what should be in a sports section.

Sportswriting was changing all over the country in those days. Sportswriters suddenly weren’t all team men anymore. What writers wouldn’t think of writing twenty years earlier was exactly what the new breed wanted to write.

Of course, the new breed showed signs of its immaturity. I was sitting between two sports writers following a Georgia-Florida football game in Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl.

One of the writers was a kid like me, who wanted to write The Truth, with some poetry tossed in.

The other was from the old school. He’d been there a thousand autumn Saturdays before, and he wanted to finish his report and get to the bar.

The old writer already had two pages of his story typed. The kid hadn’t even completed a first paragraph yet. He would put a sheet of paper in his typewriter, hit a few bars, and then draw the paper out of the typewriter and throw it, with obvious disgust, to the floor.

After this went on for a good 20 minutes and discarded paper was all over the press box floor, the veteran looked over at the frustrated youngster and asked one of the great questions in the history of journalism: “Hey, kid. What don’t you just write what happened?”

Writers once covered up for athletes. But no more. Writers once never asked the tough questions of coaches and managers and athletes. Now, you asked them. You confronted them.

During Watergate, we would say, “If Woodward and Bernstein can bring down a president, why can’t we stand up in front of a football coach and ask him why he kicked a field goal on fourth and inches?” The rest of the paper used to call us the “Toy Shop.” But suddenly, there were issues that were real. Desegregation of southern collegiate teams was one.

Bear Bryant’s Alabama team played Southern Cal and had been thrashed by the power running of Sam Cunningham, who was black. Bryant, the story went, saw the light, and began actively recruiting black athletes, who had once either gone to all-black schools or had been recruited on the West Coast or in the Midwest.

“The Bear’s on the practice field the first day of fall workouts, and a black kid comes up to him and asks if he can try out for the team. The Bear thinks the whole thing might be a hoot. The white kids will surely kill the kid. But they give the ball to the black kid, and he breaks eight tackles and speeds down the sideline for a touchdown.

There’s a true story they tell about something called the Sky Writers. In the late sixties, the Southeastern Conference office in Birmingham came up with the idea of chartering a plane that would carry sportswriters from all over the South to the various SEC football camps, just prior to the opening of the season.

The Sky Writers were in Oxford, Mississippi, interviewing Johnny Vaught, head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels. A few blacks had already broken the SEC color barrier by that time. Vaught was asked, “Are you going to begin to recruit blacks at Ole Miss?”

Vaught bristled and answered, “As long as I am head coach at the University of Mississippi, never!”

Reporters dashed for their typewriters. But John Logue of the Journal just sat there.

“That’s news?” Logue asked back. “What am I going to write: ‘For the fiftieth straight year, Ole Miss is not going to recruit black athletes’?”

When I became executive sports editor at the Journal Frank Hyland and Ron Hudspeth were my point men. Hyland left the Hawks for a time to work the Falcons. He was sitting in a booth in a restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, where the Falcons held preseason practice, one evening with two other writers and the Falcons head coach, Norman Van Brocklin. I mentioned earlier Van Brocklin had little or no use for sports writers, all of whom he thought were communists.

Hyland was sitting across the table from Van Brocklin. They both had a few drinks, and then Van Brocklin, known as the Dutchman, looks over at Frank and says, “Hyland, you’re a whore writer.”

Frank recalled, “I wasn’t sure what a whore writer was, but I figured it wasn’t a compliment. So I said to Van Brocklin, ‘I may be a whore writer, but you’re a loser.’

“Van Brocklin turned redder than he already was and said, ‘I’m not a loser.’

At that point, Van Brocklin reached across the table, grabbed Hyland by the tie, and pulled it.

Van Brocklin then pulled Frank across the table. Nobody landed a serious blow, but Frank’s tie was ruined, his sports jacket got ripped, and he didn’t get to sit and enjoy the prime rib he had ordered before the scuffle broke out.

“I will,” he replies. “As soon as they send the prime rib I ordered up to my room.”

Later, Frank covered the Braves for me. One night in the clubhouse, he asked Hank Aaron a question Aaron didn’t appreciate. The future all-time home-run leader happened to be eating from a can of strawberries at the time, and he threw the strawberries in Frank’s face.

“It’s not everybody,” said Frank, “who gets into it with two Hall of Famers in one career.”

“What did you think when Bad Henry threw the strawberries in your face?” I asked Frank.

“I had this strange thought that they were pretty good strawberries,” he answered.

Hudspeth also covered the Braves and the Falcons. He ripped them both furiously for their continuing shortcomings.

He once asked Van Brocklin a tough question, and the Dutchman took off his coat and said, “Let’s stack some furniture,” meaning, “Get the furniture out of the way, I’m going to mash this commie’s face in.”

Hudspeth managed to avoid fisticuffs with the Dutchman, who, as all Atlanta Falcons coaches finally do, got fired. Van Brocklin retired to his farm in Social Circle, Georgia, fifty miles east of Atlanta. After the firing, Ron managed to get an interview with the Dutchman’s wife, who had a memorable quote:

“Can my husband be happy on the farm?” Mrs. Van Brocklin asked back. “Let me put it this way—pecan trees don’t drop touchdown passes.”

There were a couple of other new guys on the staff in addition to Arey, Vesilind, and Hudspeth. Jim Hunter came in from South Carolina and took over auto racing and some college coverage. Minter also decided Hunter could fill in on the Hawks, occasionally.

On Hunter’s first day at the paper, Minter told Hyland to take the new guy to the Hawks practice and introduce him to the players and Coach Richie Guerin.

They never made it to practice, and Hunter was supposed to do a feature on the Hawks the next morning.

No problem. While Hunter was at South Carolina, he had covered a Clemson basketball player who had been a late draft pick for the Hawks. Hunter, upon arriving in the office the next morning, decided to write a story on the kid from Clemson, using material he already had.

But a problem arose on deadline. On a routine call to the Hawks office, Hyland found out that the kid from Clemson was going to get cut that morning. It would be obvious to Minter that his crack basketball writers had not spent much time with the team the day before.

So Hyland called Coach Guerin and pleaded with him to keep the young player on the roster one more day, so that the paper wouldn’t have egg on its face, and Hyland and Hunter wouldn’t have Minter on their ass.

Hunter had almost as many contacts in auto racing as Bill Robinson. He also had a history of tarrying in the post-race grape and driving off in pace cars.

The most memorable piece he did on auto racing was from the Darlington Motor Speedway in Darlington, South Carolina. Two guys had driven a camper into the infield with three prostitutes in the back. Right there in the broad daylight of Sunday, Hunter reported that the line from the back of that camper was longer than the line to the ladies’ restroom. The infield got so drunk and rowdy before the race was over, police finally built a makeshift jail on the premises to detain those arrested. It was hastily put together, with some strategically placed cement blocks for a foundation, and plywood walls.

The jail had been up about ten minutes and was already bulging at the seams with good ol’ boys charged with drunkenness, fighting, solicitation of prostitution, public indecency, and starting a fire without a permit, when the inmates pushed down a wall and a mass escape took place to the ringing cheers of spectators who were all but ignoring the race.

Minter had hired another guy, named Ron Sanders, to work the desk and do an occasional high school story. Hyland and I often disagreed as to which lead was the all-time worst—Norman’s “somewhat marred” or Ron Sanders’s lead on a high school baseball game involving Atlanta’s Bass High. Bass had played Grady, and Grady had won in a rout.

When spring comes, it’s natural for a boy’s thoughts to turn to the ol’ fishing hole. So Grady got itself a string loaded with Bass Friday afternoon, winning 9–0 and doing just what came naturally.

“Norman’s lead didn’t have a single cliché,” Frank would argue. “An all-time worst lead must have clichés, contain simplistic allusions, and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. At least Norman had some realization that the thrill of victory can be tempered by death.”

Ron Sanders lasted about three months before it was suggested he find a new profession. Minter called me one day from his office at the Constitution several years later and asked me to come see something. He had a letter from Ron Sanders, who, sure enough had found a new profession—the ministry.

In his letter, Ron told Minter he had found the Lord and wanted to make all his previous wrongs right again. He said that when he left the paper, he took with him a dozen new grease pencils, two new reporter’s notebooks, and a copy of the Official Baseball Guide for 1957. He sent Minter a check for five dollars for the pencils and notebook and returned the 1957 Official Guide.

The staff had a name for me, their twenty-three-year-old Grand Imperial Llama Potentate Executive Sports Editor. They called me “Lieutenant Fuzz,” after the boyish bungling lieutenant of the Beetle Bailey cartoon strip. I always figured it was Frank who came up with the name. But I couldn’t blame him or the staff. They had all served under Jim Minter—George Patton—and now they had me.

As it turned out, I did have some trouble being Frank Hyland’s roommate/boss. It wasn’t serious trouble. It was just that after I got the job, I became a little more aware of the necessity that I be basically awake in the office in the morning. It would go like this:

We would finish the paper at one or so in the afternoon and all hit Underground Atlanta. Frank, Hudspeth, Hunter, Simmons, Priit, Dr. Whitley, and me. We would start at the Bucket Shop, a sort of Harrison’s Beneath the Streets, and we would talk shop, women, and the death of kings. We would, of course, get blitzed. The evening would normally reach its crescendo when Frank would go out onto the streets of Underground Atlanta to do his Charlie Chaplin walk among the tourists.

Frank could walk just the way Chaplin walked. From somewhere, he would also come up with a hat of some sort and an umbrella that he would carry under his arm. He would walk his walk and doff his hat to the ladies, and he was a riot. But as the hour would get later, I would mention to my roommate, Frank, “You’ve got to be in the office at seven. Let’s go home.”

Frank was not a man to give up the night easily. “You go ahead,” he would say. “I’ll be in at seven.”

I would get up at five-thirty and shower. I’d call in to Frank in his bedroom at six. “Frank,” I’d say, “it’s six. You’ve got an hour.”

Seven, no Frank. Seven-thirty, no Frank. Eight, maybe Frank. One morning, Frank hit the office at eight-fifteen, after about an hour’s sleep, and dozed off on the rim. The executive editor, Bill Fields, happened to walk by my desk and ask, “Is Frank Hyland asleep at the rim?”

“He got here at four-thirty and stripped the wire,” I lied. “He’ll be okay.”

I could have dealt with Frank being late occasionally if he had not done something I could never understand.

I would leave him, sound asleep, at six-fifteen. He would be late to the office and, after the first edition was in, I would call him to my desk and give him hell about it.

“Frank,” I would say. “What are you, crazy? I left you in bed at six-fifteen. I left you in the Underground at one this morning. I know why you were late. I’m your goddamned roommate. You were late because you just didn’t get your ass up.”

I finally made the smart move—I resigned as Frank’s roommate and got myself another apartment. It was better after that. When Frank said, “There was a wreck on the interstate,” at least there was about a one-in-a-thousand shot that was why he was late.

Regardless, Frank was still the best all-around talent who ever worked for me. He could do it all. Report. Write. Edit. Lay out the paper. Write wonderful headlines and photo captions. His best headline came one morning when he sat on the rim quite ill and quite green.

Peahead Walker was a character of the southern sports scene. He coached football in North Carolina and had a million jokes and stories. Peahead was probably the most sought-after sports speaker in the South in the late sixties. But Peahead died. The Constitution carried the obit in the morning paper. The headline had said something like, “COLORFUL PEAHEAD WALKER DIES.”

We had a Peahead obit, too. We had coded headlines at the Journal. I had ordered what was known as a K-3 on the Peahead story. A K-3 was one line of 36-point type, three columns wide, with an 18-point “kicker” above it.

Everybody on the rim took a shot at the Peahead headline, but none satisfied me. “It needs to say something about Peahead knowing a lot of jokes and stories,” I said.

Frank could take four wire stories about the same thing, pick out the best of them all, and compose one on his own typewriter that would sing. And he could do it on deadline with that Camel sticking out of his mouth and his head probably hurting more than any of the rest of us could realize.

He loved newspapers. And he loved the game of newspapers. He was the guy you wanted in your foxhole with you. You’re five minutes before deadline and the wire offers a bulletin: Casey Stengel has died. You wanted Frank with you. He could be stubborn and sarcastic and immovable, but if I had one man to hire to work beside me in the fine art of getting a newspaper out, it would be Frank K. Hyland.

It was different with Hudspeth and me. I was his boss, but we still managed to run the streets together and maintain a fairly professional relationship in the office. And, Lord, the ladies we sported. But how many ideas did we come up with for the section on how many barstools, while the band played “Proud Mary”?

It was during a lull at Harrison’s one night, as a matter of fact, that we devised what I still believe was the first attempt by a sports section to have an editorial page.

It was Hudspeth’s notion that other writers besides Bisher needed an outlet for more commentary. “We’re out there with the teams,” he’d say. “We cover them day-to-day. Bisher comes out once a month. We know where the bodies are hidden.”

With Hudspeth’s help (while the band played “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and other songs from the early seventies I came to hate), we came up with my page 2 concept.

I didn’t ask anybody if I could do it. I didn’t consult with the managing editor, and I certainly didn’t consult with Bisher, who I figured would be steadfastly against any infringement on his bailiwick.

First, I went to advertising layout and asked if they could arrange the ads five days a week so I could get a five-column hole at the top. That was for what I called “Perspective.” It would be a piece of staff opinion. Sports Illustrated now runs “Point After” on the last page in its weekly magazine. Ron Fimrite remembers Billy Martin, etc., etc. I had the idea first.

Under “Perspective,” I wanted room for something I could call “People in Sports”—a compendium to be gleaned from the wires and other sports sections. Under that, I wanted “Reaction”—letters from readers.

I even came up with a complete new headline style for page 2. Kickers that appeared on top of headlines were always set in a smaller-size type than the main head. I turned that around. I came up with something we called “bullet head.” The page would look like this:

Page 2 took off immediately. Hyland and Hudspeth both wrote “Perspectives.” They raised hell.

The letters poured in. The only real problem I had with the page was horses would occasionally show up in “People in Sports.” Somebody on the desk would be chosen to compile “People” each morning. I wanted humor. I wanted So-and-so’s third baseman’s wife was picked up for shoplifting; some college football coach had been fired for having sex with a cheerleader; Howard Cosell had been attacked on the streets of Cleveland by irate Browns’ fans, angry at some innocuous statement he had made on Monday Night Football.

I got some of that, but at least twice a week I would look at “People in Sports” and there would be an item about a racehorse. I finally issued a memorandum to the staff that read:

For the last time: If it has more than two legs, it has no business in People in Sports.

It took Bisher about a week to realize what had happened. Furman and I weren’t getting along anyway. I always wondered if the reason he had seen fit to give me the executive sports editor job was that he figured a kid like me would be easy to run over and he could get back to the complete control he had of the sports department before Minter. But I was determined he wasn’t going to push me around. He was my idol at the typewriter. He was my enemy when it came to how the paper looked and what appeared in it.

There was Bisher’s early morning call. Furman would get up, read the Constitution, and then get mad. He would see something they had before us. (It didn’t matter to him that the story had broken at seven o’clock in the evening, on the Constitution’s time.) It might be something as small as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes All-American College LaCrosse team, but if it made the morning paper first, it would make Bisher mad. So after he read the Constitution, he would call me. No matter how busy I was trying to supervise our first edition, I had to stop and deal with the Bisher call.

“Good God, Grizzard!” he would begin. “The Constitution broke the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Ail-American LaCrosse team. Were we asleep at the switch again?” It was always that “again” that got me.

I would try to explain. We would argue. I would slam the phone down. Bisher would call his travel agent and make plans to fly to London to cover Wimbledon. For Christmas one year, my future second wife gave me a dartboard with Bisher’s photograph in the bull’s-eye.

I tried to get a lot of feature material on the sports front. We did some off-the-wall things about an ex-Falcon turned bank robber, a hockey team in Macon, Georgia, of all places, called the Macon Whoopees, and a Rattlesnake Roundup in Whigman, Georgia. Meanwhile, Bisher would come into the office around eleven, see the first edition, find a story about some guy who had a lifetime batting average of .233 and played second base for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late twenties, and he would scream to the heavens.

“We’re not running a magazine here, Grizzard! This is a newspaper. A newspaper. The obit we ran on [whozits with the .233 lifetime average] was a terrible error in news judgment.”

Bisher once went somewhere exotic like Morocco, where he rode the Royal Moroccan train and played golf at the Royal Moroccan golf course with the Royal Moroccan king or some such thing. He was gone about three weeks. When he returned, he went back over all the sports sections he missed with his red grease pencil. He circled everything he didn’t like. He didn’t like a lot more than he liked.

“Grizzard,” he said, “we just aren’t playing the little stuff big enough.”

“But, Furman,” I said, “if we play the little stuff big, then we won’t have any little stuff anymore.”

Bisher thought a minute and then said, “You’re the goddamned executive sports editor, you figure it out.”

So, soon after page 2’s debut, I heard the call from Bisher’s office. “Grizzard,” he said, “got a minute?”

I walked in. I never took a seat when I went into Bisher’s little office. I felt a bit safer standing up for some reason.

“Well,” he said, “I thought this was just a onetime thing. Do you mean to say, we’re going to have this on page two every day?”

The general manager of the paper himself had come down one day to tell me he thought page 2 was a great addition to the section. The managing editor liked it. The pro teams were raising hell about it. The readers loved it. I was prepared to go to the wall with Bisher about it. But Bisher didn’t order it out of the paper. He simply said, “One thing to remember. If nobody’s got anything to say, leave it at that. Don’t force opinion and commentary.”

I would cut “Perspective” to three times a week eventually. Bisher was right. As a matter of fact, he turned out to be right about a lot more things than I gave him credit for at the time. It had to do with age and his perspective.

We did spend too much time on features and not enough on details, such as making certain all the attendance lines were at the bottom of each day’s baseball box scores, seeing to it the rosters for the annual Blue-Gray all-star football game in Montgomery, Alabama, were in the paper, and not failing to realize that just because, at our tender ages, we’d never heard of a dearly departed Pittsburgh batting star, a lot of people older than us had—and would like to know if he had died. Bisher cared. He wanted the sports section he represented, or that represented him, to be without reproach.

I want to say it again: Bisher was right. As much as I fought him, cursed him, and hated to get that morning call, the old man knew his newspapers. When Earl Mann, who had owned my beloved Crackers during my boyhood days, died in 1990, the Atlanta papers didn’t do much with it. I was outraged. A brilliant Bisher column (he’s still at it at seventy-two) made me feel better.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution moved out of 10 Forsyth Street in 1972 and into a new six-story building around the corner on Marietta Street. Underground Atlanta, beset by crime, closed. Amtrak took over the nation’s passenger trains. The Union was torn down, and what was left of the Georgian was quietly put to sleep. The winos and hobos had to go somewhere else.

The sports department in the new building sat at one end of the newsroom. A waist-high partition was all that separated us from the gatherers of real news from the real world. It was the dawn of the new technology era for newspapers.

They took away our manual typewriters and gave us electric. Hot type was on the way out. Soon the Linotype machines would vanish, and type would be set by some magical, computerized method.

The power that was the composing-room union was dying. The newsroom, with the help of the new technology, was getting more control of the production process. Soon it wouldn’t matter if the printers went out on strike. They couldn’t close the paper down anymore. Push a button here and push a button there, and voilà, a newspaper.

I didn’t like many of the changes. I missed the old building. We had carpet on the floor at 72 Marietta Street. Frank had to find an ashtray to dispose of his Camels. Electric typewriters are too quiet. I missed the jingle and jangle of somebody pecking away at a manual. The phones didn’t buzz anymore. The new ones made a sound that reminded me of the coo of a sick pigeon. You couldn’t say “copy boy” anymore, because now there were girl copy boys, and the new sensitivity made the word “boy” socially unacceptable.

I couldn’t edit with a pencil anymore. I had to use a felt-tipped pen. I had to mark out words carefully in deep black so whatever it was that was setting type now would understand it should skip over those words.

You sat at your electric typewriter, and before you did anything else, you had to type the pound mark (#), followed by the letters PD at the beginning of the margin set.

When you had finished whatever it was you were composing at the electric, it was necessary to type #ET, which signaled Hal it had reached the end of that particular article. Said veteran Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, “Pound PD is going to be the ET of me.”

Professional athletes were forming unions. Hockey had come to Atlanta. Gasoline was short. Nixon was in deep doo-doo. Men were growing sideburns and wearing leisure suits. Lime-green ones. And Babe Ruth’s career home-run record of 714 was being challenged by Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves.

The hype began at the start of the baseball season in 1972. With a good year, Aaron could break Ruth’s record that season. This was big. It was one of the biggest sports stories of all time, and it was happening in my town.

We began the countdown. Each time Aaron hit a home run in ’72, we dropped in a little box on the Braves story that noted what number home run it was and how many more Aaron had to hit to get to Ruth’s 714.

Aaron hit 713 on the last day of the season in 1973. In five more months, spring training would begin, and Aaron would tie and then break the record when the season began in April.

Management wanted a Henry Aaron special section that would come out before the season began. I began work on it in January. I had to plan it and design it. I basically ceased to deal with the day-to-day operation of the department. All my time was put into the special section and planning for the day Aaron would tie the record and the day he would break it.

What had never occurred to me was that racism would get involved in the process. The more we wrote about Aaron’s challenge, the more phone calls we got calling us “nigger lovers.” The callers all wanted to point out that Aaron might, included, break the record, but that he had more at-bats than Ruth.

The composing room was all white, all male. The printers referred to Aaron as “Super Nigger,” as in, “How many stories you doing on Super Nigger today?”

I began to worry that something might happen to Aaron. What if some nut decided to save the white race’s pride and kill him? I ordered an obit written and filed away just in case.

I was determined to make the Aaron special the best piece of newspaper work I had ever done. I ordered stories on his boyhood days in Mobile. I spent hours on the phone tracking down family photos. I dispatched a writer to Mobile to do a piece on the old neighborhood.

Baseball experts said the secret to Aaron’s hitting was his powerful wrists. The writer in Mobile uncovered the fact he had worked in an ice house as a youngster and had to lift heavy blocks of ice. Thus, the powerful wrists.

I ordered a listing of each of the 713 home runs Aaron had hit in the major leagues. I wanted the date of each homer, and who threw the home-run pitch for the opposing team. I could have filled encyclopedias with the amount of information I had compiled on No. 44. I even had Hyland ghostwrite a piece by Aaron himself. The strawberry incident had long since been forgotten.

I got my layout. It was filled with ads. I had been promised copious space. I didn’t get it. There wasn’t room for even half the material I had gathered. I had to shrink marvelous photographs to make them fit in the space I had been given. I was prepared to give them a Cadillac, but management was willing to settle for a Nash.

But there was still The Record. The Braves opened the season in Cincinnati and sure enough, Aaron tied Ruth’s record on opening day. Then the Braves came home to play the Dodgers. The problem I faced was that I had to have everything in place for each game, in case it was the one that gave us number 715. What if Aaron didn’t hit it for weeks? I would still have to be ready each night, just in case.

A few weeks earlier, I had hired Chuck Perry, my old assistant at the Daily News in Athens. Chuck had become executive editor of the Daily News and Banner-Herald, but I’d convinced him he needed to try it in the Big Time. Chuck would be my assistant. His first day at work was the day the Braves were to play the Dodgers in their home opener. He came in at seven that morning. We got the edition out, went to lunch around one, and then came back to work on planning for the next day, in case Aaron hit 715.

I had every conceivable angle to the story covered. I even had a staffer go into a men’s room each time Aaron came to bat so that if he did hit the homer, Norman could do a sidebar on some unfortunate soul who was standing at the urinal at the moment history was made.

Chuck and I were in the press box in Atlanta Fulton County Stadium at six, a couple of hours before the first pitch. Aaron came to bat in the bottom of the first inning before fifty thousand. Al Downing was pitching for the Dodgers. Aaron hit it out to left. Chuck and I split back to the office.

We worked all night. The writers came in and typed their stories. We went through hundreds of photographs trying to find the ones that best told the story.

A huge spring thunderstorm hit about two in the morning. The lights went out a couple of times. Around three-thirty, the storm ended. The cleanup people were in the newsroom. The only noise was that of their vacuum cleaners working on the carpet. I was sitting at the copy desk, editing and laying out the pages. Suddenly, I heard a noise. I jumped. Chuck jumped. It sounded like an elephant.

I’m serious here. It sounded like an elephant. Aaron breaks the record, a frightening thunderstorm had hit, and now it’s four in the morning and we hear an elephant.

It turned out to be Mike McKenzie, a new staffer I had hired to cover the Hawks. He had finished his sidebar. We thought he had gone home. But he had walked down to the men’s room first, and when he came out, he decided to do his elephant impression.

Our support staff came in at seven. But Chuck and I stayed until the first edition came up and we could see the results of our efforts. We wanted to hold them in our hands. The best story came from a men’s restroom. The poor guy standing at the urinal had figured there was no way Aaron would hit the homer his first time at bat.

We left the office at eleven in the morning. Chuck’s first day at work had lasted twenty-eight hours.

“What makes us want to work this hard?” Chuck looked up from his country ham and grits and asked me.

Hudspeth met a girl. He met her in the elevator at the newspaper. She worked for the company that supplied our vending machines. He got on the elevator to go down for coffee, and she was on her way there, too. Hudspeth got a date with her. All those nights on the streets, and he meets a girl on an elevator at the newspaper.

She clipped the Butterfly’s wings. All of a sudden, my running mate had been taken away.

That had a lot to do with why I got married for the second time. I was struck down at the newspaper, too.

I was sitting at my desk in the sports department. Tons of kids came in all the time. The tour guide would say, “This is the newsroom. Those are typewriters. There are the editors. There are the reporters. . . .”

So I’m sitting at my desk one day, and I hear a female voice say, “And that is the executive sports editor, Mr. Grizzard.” Only the voice didn’t pronounce my name as I pronounced it. The voice said “Griz-erd,” as in “lizard”; not “Griz-zard” as in “yard” and “lard.”

I looked up. She was gorgeous. Maybe cute is a better description. She was short. She had those eyes. Big, wide eyes. She was smiling as she spoke to the kids on the tour. Great smile. Big and wide like her eyes.

Her accent was decidedly southern. It had a peculiar lilt. Syrupy, but not too syrupy. It was a small-town accent. Small-town accents were disappearing in the South. Small-town people were moving to the cities, and suddenly everybody was sounding like Nelson Nowhere on the television news.

The girl disappeared down the steps with the kids toward the composing room. Maybe the Reverend would have a vision for them.

I called the public-relations department, which handled the tours for the kids. I asked the name of the girl. It was Kay.

I gave it an hour or two, then walked down to the fourth floor to PR. Kay was sitting at her desk.

“It’s Gri-zard,” I said. Then followed it with, “Want to have dinner with me tonight?”

We went to dinner. We went to her apartment afterward, and she took out her guitar and sang songs to me.

It was over after that. She was from the low country of South Carolina. That was the accent.

She’d gone to college, but it hadn’t worked out. There was a boy, and they were going to get married, but that hadn’t worked out, either. She thought about becoming a flight attendant. A family friend had a connection at the Atlanta papers, and that’s how she had got the tour-guide job. She’d keep it until she could get on with an airline.

Six months later, on a warm April afternoon in 1973,1 looked at Big Eyes and she looked at me, and I just got caught up enough in that tender moment to blurt out, “Why don’t we get married?”

I didn’t think I’d ever find anything to top her, even in Harrison’s. She could sing, and she was good to hold and fine to have, so I said what I said, and she said, “Let’s do it.”

I called my stepbrother, Ludlow Porch, because I knew he wouldn’t tell me I was crazy, and I needed somebody to take care of some details.

“I like Waylon Jennings, too,” Ludlow said, “but it’s no reason for me to marry him.”

When he finally decided I was sober and determined, he asked what he could do to help. I said, “I want to have the wedding at your house, because there’s not room for me and her and the preacher in either of our apartments. I also need you to get your wife to arrange for a cake and do some decorating, and I need you to find me a preacher. But be careful. The preacher who married me and my first wife quit the pulpit and went into the used-car business six months later. I blame him for a lot of our problems.”

“And one other thing,” I said. “I want to ride the train to Fort Lauderdale for our honeymoon. Trains are romantic.”

“No. We’ll have to drive to Savannah to catch it. It comes through about two in the morning.”

“Let me see if I have this straight,” Ludlow said. “You want to get married for the second time, even though you were a complete failure as a husband on your first attempt, and you want to do it as quickly as possible, which I assume is as soon as you can get a license and your blood tests.

“Then, you want my lovely wife to obtain a cake and decorate the house, and then you want me to find a man of the cloth who has no intentions of going into the used-car game, and then you want me to reserve you two tickets on a train that you’ll have to drive four hours after the wedding to catch at two o’clock in the morning. Is all that correct?”

Two evenings later, I stood with my bride-to-be in Ludlow’s house. He was my best man. His wife was maid of honor. Ludlow’s six kids just sort of hung out and watched.

And the preacher. Do you remember crooked Indian agents in the old “B” westerns? That’s what this guy looked like. He’d sell a Comanche a used car with a bad transmission in a heartbeat. He started the wedding by opening a Bible and uttering, “Well, according to this . . .”

It was quite obvious the man, who was wearing a toupee that looked a lot like a dead cat had been glued to the top of his head, was very inexperienced.

“Where did you find this guy?” I whispered to Ludlow as the preacher fumbled through his Bible looking for some verse he’d forgotten to mark.

“Who do you want on two days’ notice?” my stepbrother replied. “Billy Graham?”

The wedding cake was a little dry, but I did think the black crepe paper Ludlow’s wife had hung from the ceiling was a nice touch. “Lincoln’s funeral probably looked a lot like this,” I said to Ludlow.

We arrived at the Amtrak station in Savannah an hour before time. An old black man was sleeping on one of the benches. The only other person inside was the guy behind the ticket window.

“Train’s two hours late,” he said to me before I could say anything to him. “Trouble out of New York.”

She had voiced some hesitancy to spending our honeymoon night—or early morning—on a train, but I mentioned a Clark Gable movie I’d seen once where he was on a train with some actress I can’t remember and they seemed to enjoy it a lot. Besides, I also pointed out what an adventure riding the train would be. I think she muttered, “This is more adventure than I can stand,” when I told her the train was two hours late, but I couldn’t be sure because it was hard to hear her words over the snores of the old black man sleeping on the bench.

I told the ticket agent my name and that my wife and I had a bedroom sleeper compartment booked to Fort Lauderdale.

“Nope,” he said. “Got no reservations for a sleeper under that name. You’ll have to go coach.”

I would have screamed, but the old black man seemed to be sleeping so peacefully, and I didn’t want to alarm my wife any further.

Imagine us starting out in life in coach where people who coughed a lot and carried their belongings in paper sacks would be located, and there would be no way to lie down.

“There obviously is some sort of mistake,” I said to the ticket agent. “I know these reservations were made, and I must advise you also that that woman standing over there and I were just married, and if you don’t come up with bedroom accommodations for us, we are still going to get on the train and go up in coach and perform wild sexual acts on one another, which will get us arrested, I am sure, but it also will disrupt the entire train and be terrible public relations for Amtrak when the story hits the papers.”

Noticing the ticket agent was a frail man, who wheezed and was probably one of the ten people in the world I could frighten with physical violence, I also said, “Not only that, but before I board the train, I am going to come behind this window and kick you and punch you and pull out what is left of your hair and call you and members of your family terrible names. Then I’m going to spread the word over this entire community that you are a bed-wetting, homosexual communist. Do you have that clear?”

The ticket agent began making telephone calls. A few minutes later, he called me back to the window.

“It’s the best I can do, I swear,” he said. “There isn’t any bedroom space available, but I can get a roomette.”

For those unfamiliar with railroad sleeping accommodations, a bedroom will sleep two. A roomette will sleep one. Barely. A roomette is sort of like your closet with an army cot in it. Two small dogs would have trouble carrying out the mating process in a roomette.

Then it hit me. Ludlow. He did this on purpose. He purposely didn’t make us any train reservations because the man has a sick sense of humor and decided to play a very cruel practical joke on two crazy kids in love.

I took the roomette because I had no other choice, then I phoned Ludlow and awakened him and said. “This is really funny.”

“You not making us any train reservations,” I said, my voice bristling with anger. “We’ve wound up with one roomette. One or both of us could get hurt trying to carry out a honeymoon-night function in that small a space.”

“You think that’s funny?” said Ludlow. “Let me tell you what else is funny. Remember the guy with the weird toupee who married you?”

“He was no preacher. He runs the Texaco down the street. I got him to marry you in case you changed your mind about all this during the honeymoon and needed an out.”

I never mentioned that part to my new wife, of course. I was so convinced only death would do us apart, I felt Ludlow’s idea of doing me what he considered a favor was anything of the kind. We were married now, and there would be no turning back.

You can have sex in a roomette on a train hurtling through the Florida night, by the way, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell the chiropractor how I actually injured my back.

We drove back to Atlanta a week later. On a Friday night. Fort Lauderdale had been great. We’d phoned our parents. Her dad sent champagne. But the minute I walked through the door of my apartment, where we had decided to live until we could find something larger, the feeling hit me.

I looked at my wife, and she still had those eyes—but why were there suddenly bars on my windows? And what was she doing with those leg irons? And I wondered if maybe I could say, “Listen, baby, I’m going out for a couple of hours. Okay?”

I could go down to Harrison’s. I’d keep my ring on, honest. I’d sit at the bar and have a drink. Alone. I wouldn’t think of flirting. Of course I wouldn’t. I was married. I’d be back before ten, and we’d make love and then watch an old black-and-white movie and go to sleep, me tight to her back, holding her as we slept.

But I didn’t ask. Instead, I just sort of sat around and tried to ignore the feeling. But the son of a bitch wouldn’t go away.

I tried everything. I even found an apartment in the far suburbs and moved us there, miles from Harrison’s and nights out on Peachtree Street. We made friends with married couples in our complex and had cookouts. We even got a dog.

I’d make margaritas, and we’d sit on the floor and drink them, and she’d sing “People” and “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” and I’d join in on “City of New Orleans,” a song about a train, and we’d laugh about our honeymoon night.

Friday night. Stuck in the ’burbs. Cooking out with the Flournoys, who fought constantly.

I still loved her, but there was some hate for her, too. Why had she agreed to marry somebody like me? It was her fault. If she’d turned me down, I’d never have had to go through all this.

When I finally went crazy, I went hard and crazy. I gave in and went to Harrison’s after work one afternoon. I scored and got home at two in the morning, and she cried because I hadn’t called her. I lied, said I’d got into a poker game and had too many drinks and had simply forgotten to call her and promised I wouldn’t do it again. But I did, two days later. I walked into Harrison’s—with my ring in my coat pocket.

She cried a lot and the Flournoys broke up and our dog turned up pregnant. But at least I had being executive sports editor down. I had the people I wanted, and I went to a meeting of an organization called the Associated Press Sports Editors in New York. A guy from somewhere came up to me and talked about the graphics we were doing in Atlanta, and he said he liked the page 2 concept and wanted to talk more about it, and he said, “I really like what you guys are doing down in Atlanta.”

I felt proud. Despite whatever would happen in my second marriage, I knew one thing would never change. I would never leave the Atlanta Journal sports department. Maybe when Bisher retired, I’d take over the column and give my replacement hell, but I would always be in that place.

Then Durwood McAllister, managing editor of the Journal, asked me to go to lunch with him one day. After he had eaten, he looked at me and said, “You’ve done a great job in sports, but I think you’re ready to move up.”