I’m happy to say that I started writing this sentence during halftime of a college football game, the Pitt Panthers against the West Virginia Mountaineers, the blue and gold against the blue and gold. Well basically Pitt’s royal blue and gold and West Virginia’s blue and old gold.
The schools are 75 miles apart, the miners and the steel mill workers, at least when those jobs existed. They don’t like each other, hence the term Backyard Brawl. If they play, you can throw out the record book, except on September 1, both records are 0-0.
I saw Pitt win in a thriller and then stayed up past midnight to watch the end of Penn State and Purdue. I didn’t care about the teams but about the game and that love started early.
When I was a kid, there was a school game on Saturday afternoon. Now I switch between at least four on a Saturday afternoon.
When I was a kid, I used to go out in the backyard and listen to Larry Munson mention Georgia games on my transistor radio. Georgia fans adored Munson, but on his best day, he wasn’t Keith Jackson.
On Sundays, I played touch football with my cousins at my grandma and grandpa’s house, while our mommies sat inside and complained about various things out of their control.
We played in the side yard with the house and the barbed wire fence as a sideline. Going outside the borders usually drew blood.
My cousin Larry, who ran with the grace of a two-hour-old giraffe, was the first I knew with a football injury. Larry was running with the ball when a neighbor boy jumped on his back and drove him to the ground. Larry couldn’t put weight on his leg and my Uncle Gartrell took him to the emergency room. He was out for the season, but Uncle Gartrell, who had to pay the hospital bill to repair Larry’s torn cartilage, said he was out for life. A few weeks later, Larry played quarterback with a hip-to-ankle cast. We made up a new rule that made sense – don’t tackle Larry.
A garden was the only place I ever played football. Maybe I could have played in high school because not only was I small, I was slow, an ideal combination for board games. Larry often beat me at chess, bad knee and stuff.
At Crescent High School, I never missed a home game watching my two best friends; Jerry Hayes was the center and Steve Alexander was the quarterback. They had one good season in their four years, their last season, but Crescent could never beat Abbeville.
I missed a lot of football when I was in Vietnam, but when I got home, a friend Rudy Gray was working at the Anderson Independent as a weekend sports journalist. He called me on a Saturday and asked if I would like to go to a competition with him to take pictures. I wouldn’t get paid, but he wouldn’t leave the press box and go out on the field to take pictures.
He gave me a Pentax camera with a 200mm lens, the first telephoto lens I’d ever held. I had no idea what I was doing, but on September 30, 1972, I shot my first college game at Sanford Stadium no less. I thought it was strange. I was told that journalists had to be open-minded, but the press room was filled with men who would jump up and yell ‘Go Dawgs’, like the homer Munson. On the sidelines, Georgia’s official state photographer barked at the first downs.
Georgia head coach Vince Dooley defeated the state of North Carolina 28-22 in what was Lou Holtz’s third game at the helm.
I had published a four-column photo—in those days newspaper pages were eight-column broadsheets—of Georgia quarterback Andy Johnson throwing a pass over the hands of a leaping Wolf Pack lineman. I wish I’d kept that photo, but I didn’t realize it was the first of thousands.
Who knew I would be flattened on the sidelines at three levels: high school, college and pro.
At a TL Hanna game in Anderson, SC, a running back slipped down the wet sideline and took my legs out from under me. I plunged into a puddle and greatly amused James “Radio” Kennedy, arguably the most famous high school soccer coach in history.
I was lucky enough to see some great players, Joe Montana as he led one of his famous fourth quarter drives to beat Clemson, freshman Tony Dorsett’s first game in Georgia, William “Refrigerator” Perry and Herschel Walker and many . The loudest place was Clemson and the racket kicked in as the team ran down the hill. They measure sound in decibels, but in Death Valley it’s pounds per square inch. The ventilators made your bones and vital organs vibrate.
Between Georgia’s hedges, I knelt in the end zone and got shots of Herschel hovering over the line.
Georgia fans liked to say, “Give Herschel the ball,” as some sort of mantra that would cure everything: a losing season, a recession, head lice, and gout. He wasn’t Herschel Walker or Walker: he was Herschel, a single name pronounced with the affection a favorite cousin harbored.
Many Southerners were proud to say they didn’t see a person’s color and they certainly didn’t with Herschel until 1983 when he skipped his final season and left for the backfield of Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals.
Suddenly, those unbiased people brushed off some slander and liberally used them to refer to Herschel’s running to get the money in God-forsaken New Jersey. The numbers on the Georgia scoreboard were more important to them than the numbers on Herschel’s bank balance.
But for many, all is forgiven as he is running for the US Senate again this time. And in this run, he has about as many people hoping to fail as he wants him to succeed. That’s politics to you.
I loved being on the sidelines, but it had to be a job and difficult too. It’s Saturday night opening weekend and I’ve seen parts of 12 games in three days without breaking a sweat or taking a hit. I don’t think I’ve shot a college game since the Orange Bowl, when Clemson beat Nebraska for the first of three national championships. so far.
Looking back, I wouldn’t change much. I’m especially glad that there were no video games in the 1960s.
They still have no game with a bunch of cousins in a yard.
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