To begin with, my opinion on this subject doesn’t matter.
I’m not a donor to the UGA Athletic Department, much less a big one. I have no
ambition to, nor delusion that I could, influence the decisions made by the
movers and shakers who call the shots in an athletic department with an annual
budget of $99,850,000, some $24M (yes, that’s million) of which was allocated
to the football program for the last fiscal year. I am, however, a lifelong fan
of Georgia Bulldog athletics, especially football. I started attending
University of Georgia football games when I was around five years old. My Dad
was a UGA prof and he bought season tickets for himself, my Mom and me. I have
pleasant memories of the smell of cigar smoke in the autumn air and the bright
colors of certain uniforms, our red jerseys and silver helmets, Kentucky’s blue
and white and a game against the Citadel where Georgia pretty much ran them off
the field. I’m a pretty good web searcher but it took a few minutes to look up
the specifics. The game took place November 22, 1958 and Georgia won 76-0. I
vaguely remember the great Fran Tarkenton playing when Wallace Butts was the
coach. Fran, a successful businessman and former NFL quarterback who played in
several Super Bowls (but never managed to win any) recently called for Coach
Richt to be fired for failing to win the big ones.
I clearly recall Johnny Griffeth’s years as head coach. They
were not memorable years from the standpoint of winning. At some point Mom
stopped going to games and later, Dad did, too. But, I never stopped, even
later on when I was a high school hippie who would rather play guitar in a band
than worry about grades. We still had two season tickets for a number of years,
I can’t say how many. Back in those days you could go to all the basketball and
baseball games on the same season tickets. Talk about being an old timer.
I do remember being excited that Georgia AD Joel Eaves had hired
an up-and-coming young coach from his old school, Auburn. I saw Vince Dooley
for the first time at a 1964 UGA basketball game with my best friend, Ben
Anderson. I attended those, too, at “The Barn,” decrepit old Woodruff Hall
located down around Stegeman Hall, I believe. Neither one of those venerable
buildings is around any more, of course, replaced long ago by newer and more
beautiful ones.
We also went to baseball games, played right next door to
our elementary school, David C. Barrow. Ben and I went over after school and
sold Cokes to the few people in the stands. It seemed like a bit of a racket,
getting paid to go to a ball game. When Coach Dooley arrived, the football team
improved right away, although it took a while for Georgia to gain real respectability
like Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas and Notre Dame always had. But they were my
Dawgs, win or lose.
A favorite memory along the way is listening to the
Georgia-Miami game at night on WSB radio when our Larry Rakestraw outdueled
their much more illustrious George Mira in an aerial shootout. But there were
lots of other great moments. I must certainly mention being at Sanford Stadium
to witness the immortal flea-flicker, Moore to Hodgson to Taylor, that set up a
2-point conversion to beat Bear Bryant and Alabama in 1965. I mean, we actually
beat Bama straight up! Ah, yes.
My first trip ever to New Orleans was to see Georgia get
humiliated by Pitt in the 1977 Sugar Bowl. Pitt ended up national champs that
year (the last time for them, by the way), with a team featuring quarterback
Matt Cavanaugh and Heisman Trophy-winning running back Anthony Dorsett as well
as an outstanding defensive unit. Georgia gave the ball away 6 times- our guy
went 3-22 with 4 interceptions! No wonder Vince hated to throw passes. My best
friend from college and I went down to Bourbon Street to console ourselves and
spotted Mr. Dorsett signing autographs in a floor length fur coat. Fortunately,
Coach Dooley didn’t get fired afterwards, as he would have been today, long
before making it 24 years as head coach.
I was in grad school in West Virginia when Georgia finally
won his first and our last national football championship, the only one during
the Dooley era. Having Herschel Walker running the ball helped immensely in
reaching this high point. The friend I went to the Sugar Bowl with later named
his dog Herschel and his first daughter Lindsay, as in “Run, Lindsay, run!” I
got to see that play on TV, watching with a grad school pal who had attended
UF, haha! I even got to see Herschel live-and-in-person once while I was on
internship in Jackson, MS. Another intern who was in the UGA psychology
doctoral program and I decided to drive up to Oxford for the 1981 Ole Miss
game. The god-like Herschel ran 41 times for 265 yards that day. Go Dawgs!
I won’t revisit all the intervening years except to mention
that living away from Athens, I occasionally managed to see a game when I was
visiting my parents in Athens. And I was always glad when there was a night
game; because, anywhere in the Southeast, I could listen to the Voice of the
Bulldogs, Larry Munson, doing the play-by-play in his unforgettable and
inimitable doomsday style. “Get the picture… Dawgs moving from left to right…
the clock is ticking down on Georgia’s hopes… We need a miracle now… Dawgs win!
Dawgs win… See the Sugar falling from the sky…We just stepped on their face
with a hobnail boot and broke their nose!” I would listen to Larry for day
games, too, when WSB was in range, turning the sound down on the TV if the game
was being carried. This was back before cable- now every game, no matter how
insignificant, is televised. Munson grew old calling the Dawgs’ games and had
to retire at age 85 following the brilliant 2007 season.
After Dooley retired from coaching following the 1988 season
to become AD, things never fell into place for any length of time. His most
successful successor through the 2000 season was Mark Richt’s immediate
predecessor, Jim Donnan, who won two-thirds of his games including 4 straight
bowls but couldn’t beat Tech or win the SEC. There may have been other reasons-
Donnan was later indicted for allegedly running a Ponzi scheme although he was
acquitted at trial. Dooley finally hired a winner in not quite 41-year old Mark
Richt, offensive coordinator under the ultrasuccessful Bobby Bowden at Florida
State University.
Coach Richt, or CMR as he came to be known, brought success
quickly. In his second year, we defeated Arkansas to take the SEC championship,
beat Mark’s old boss Bowden and the Seminoles in the Sugar Bowl, and finished
13-1 with a #3 ranking. During the Richt years, I was able to see a few games
against LSU in Baton Rouge where I’ve lived since 1982 and others when I was
home in Athens. One was that devastating loss at Tiger Stadium where Georgia came
into town favored over an LSU squad coached by Nick Saban (whom LSU fans
sometimes refer to wistfully as Nick Satan). My youngest daughter, who later
graduated from UGA, shared the heartbreak with me that day.
Our quarterback that day was David Greene, the first of a
series of outstanding passers (later ones including D. J. Shockley, Matthew
Stafford and Aaron Murray) who led the Dawgs to SEC Championship games, major
bowls and final rankings as high as #2 in 2007, the year of the black jerseys
and the infamous endzone celebration against Florida. That one resulted in a
big win over Tim Tebow and hostile officiating against us for the next couple
of years, as well as the undying hatred of Urban Meyer. Oh, well. My oldest
daughter was my date to the Sugar Bowl that year where we enjoyed the
dismantling of previously undefeated Hawaii. In retrospect, that was the apex
of the Richt era as, unfortunately, the loaded 2008 unit underperformed and two
offensive stars. Stafford and Knowshon Moreno, left early as first round NFL
draft choices.
This was the start of a negative trend Richt’s teams never
quite broke out of. Things were up and down from there with the most recent
trend (19 wins the past two years pending a bowl game but no SEC East
championships and a losing record against ranked teams) resulting in CMR being
unceremoniously fired this morning, the day after we soundly beat our in-state
arch-rival, Georgia Tech once more. As the Bulldog’s head coach, CMR was widely
respected for being a gracious person and authentic Christian man who ran a
clean program and sent numerous players on to successful NFL careers. Many
ex-players have expressed gratitude for his influence and dismay at his firing
and many fans were surprised, given four straight wins at the end to bring the
Dawgs to 9-3.
But when the current AD made Richt fly commercial on a
cross-continental surprise visit to the next prospective star quarterback
commitment after that painful loss to the hated Gators, it should have been
obvious what was coming. I have to think the coach got the message. I mean, can
you imagine an AD telling that to Nick Saban or even Les Miles (who almost got
fired yesterday, too)? I strongly recommend the next Bulldog coach get it in
writing that all visits to prospects will be by private jet.
But big time football is a business. We all get that. In
truth, CMR underperformed given the talent he recruited from the rich annual
crop homegrown in the state of Georgia and studs we picked up elsewhere. A
tipped pass at the end of the 2011 SEC Championship game probably kept him from
getting that big crystal football every big time program covets and CRM never
won. Failure to win the SEC East in three more tries drove the nails into the
coffin.
So, we, the Bulldog Nation, move on and try to land the
dream coach who will take us to the next level, all the way to the top of the
pile. And keep repeating the process at least every 3 years or so. I recently
expressed scorn to some Georgia ‘fans’ on fellow Barrow alumnus Bill King’s
most excellent Junkyard Blawg, people who admitted openly they had “pulled for
the opposition” this year in hopes we would lose enough games to get Richt
fired. What kind of fan are you to want the other team to win? I asked. You can
fire a coach with a very high winning percentage, I added, just ask Philip
Fulmer. Turned out I was right, so there.
I had the thought this morning Les Miles and Vince Dooley
might have made calls of condolence when the news broke. They certainly know
how it feels to be viewed as yesterday’s news. In any case, I will still pull
for the Dawgs to win no matter whom they sign up as the next head coach and no
matter what his record is at game time.
But my enthusiasm is suffering right now and I wonder if it
will ever recover fully. Personally, I would have given Coach Richt another
year with strict expectations made known to all; and, even if it was somehow
necessary to do what was done today, I believe the change could have been made
in a manner that showed considerably more respect for a person who served the
university and the Bulldog Nation admirably for the past 15 years.
OK, to be honest, true confession, I decided several years
back I would not live or die depending on how the Dawgs come out on Saturdays
in the Fall. I love to win and hate to lose but it’s really not all that
important in the big picture, is it? To me, an old guy now, it’s more about
enjoying the game, savoring the competition where young men in crisp red and
black channel their aggression into a contact sport rather than fighting a
rival gang on the street or engaging in other acts of violence and frustration,
where kids get opportunities they would not otherwise have to shine and maybe
even get a college education at a fine academic institution, where my Dad
taught and I graduated prior to moving on in life. To me, it’s more about
striving to achieve excellence with the guidance of a moral compass, about the
community of Bulldog fans who appreciate the memories I alluded to here, it’s
about an Athens tradition I grew up with, one that cuts across races and social
niches, one that a lot of my old hippie friends don’t necessarily relate to but
I do.
Enough, then. Good luck, Coach Richt, and thanks for making
our football program one I was proud to support, win or lose. I for one will
miss you. And, I don’t feel badly for you because I know you’ll be fine. But,
today, I do feel badly for my school and my team.
