Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"
Lists were made for trips to the grocery store
I was recently watching a sporting event at Philips Arena...
By Hunt Archbold
I was recently watching a sporting event at Philips Arena from a private suite along with several members of a local bank, including the financial institution’s president. This guy was nice, but obviously imbibing and not really paying attention to the contest. So when he haphazardly and rather brazenly blurted out what the final outcome would be, I quickly responded that I’d take that bet and offered a $10 wager. I later tipped my newly acquired Alexander Hamilton to Felipé, a friendly cook at Mr. C’s who takes time out from his own schedule to make some seriously tasty homemade soup, which he brings to work so that I can keep my weight down during these months when the Stone Compound’s outdoor pool is closed.
The point is that bank presidents really, really don’t like giving out money. Especially from their own wallet and when they know neither it nor any interest are coming back. Also, after I finally pried the 10-spot from Bombastic Billy Banker, I handed him my card, where upon looking at it he laughingly exclaimed, “I didn’t even know your paper had sports.”
Needless to say, I’m not switching banks anytime soon. But his comments are more than fine, because even if no one reads this paper’s sports articles, I’d still enjoy (for the most part) researching, crafting and writing said stories. Such as the one on the preceding pages about whether Atlanta is good sports city. This isn’t the first time I’ve been a sports writer in a metro area that was considered to be the worst sports city in the country. The first came in the mid ’90s, when Montgomery, Ala., was singled out as the worst of the worst. And for a variety of reasons I agreed, which made it pretty depressing, considering not only was I part of the problem as a beat writer/columnist at the Montgomery Advertiser, I was being paid peanuts to be such.
But ultimately, I did in a very small way help bring about change. Along with my friend and then co-worker Derrick Moss, now the sports editor of the Gaston Gazette in North Carolina, I began writing stories about how it was unjust that a city of Montgomery’s size didn’t have a minor league baseball team. It certainly wasn’t us who hatched the idea, but we were two of the few in the local media who began to champion the cause of minor league baseball in Alabama’s capital city.
The mayor at the time, ultra-conservative Republican Emory Folmar, was a small but bullish and power-hungry political figure who was adamantly against minor league baseball. I had several testy conversations with the mayor, mostly when he made threatening calls from his office, over this issue, as well as his opposition to the now NHRA-sanctioned Montgomery Motorsports Park. Ultimately, his 22-year tenure as mayor ended when he lost a 1999 reelection bid due in part to his opposition to minor league baseball. Today, the two-time defending Southern League champion Montgomery Biscuits are set to begin their fifth season this spring. They have helped provide a much-needed economic boom to the downtown area, and the Biscuits are one of the highest-selling brands in minor league baseball.
No longer is Montgomery the worst sports city in America. And it’s not Atlanta either. Last year, the Sporting News ranked the ATL as the country’s 14th best sports city, just behind Anaheim and directly ahead of Miami. Yet when I look at lists like these, I often wonder why a city’s history and its citizens’ sporting contributions aren’t considered for rating purposes, too. History does matter. This week, Wednesday to be specific, will mark the 116th anniversary of when Georgia met Alabama Mechanical and Military College (although even then some folks were referring to it as Auburn) at Piedmont Park in the first meeting of what is now known as the Deep South’s oldest rivalry. Right here in Midtown, not even 30 years removed since Gen. Tecumseh Sherman ordered the burning of the city, a crowd of 3,000 showed up to see Auburn win 10-0 and to witness the beginning of a city’s love of football.
The iconic college football coach John Heisman spent the better part of the 20th century’s first two decades building Georgia Tech into a national powerhouse. He was also an innovator of the game during his time in Atlanta. He developed one of the first shifts, had guards pull to lead an end run, and had the center toss the ball back, instead of rolling or kicking it. He was also a proponent of the legalization of the forward pass. Another legendary Tech coach, Bobby Dodd, is recognized for inventing the “belly series’’ as altogether the Jackets won national titles in four different decades last century.
I could go on and on about football, and truth be known I really have no space to properly comment on how rich Atlanta’s sporting history is. But it did happen here. This is where the almost god-like Bobby Jones, maybe the single most important golfer of all time, learned to play the game. He’s buried here, too, at Oakland Cemetery. Bryan “Bitsy’’ Grant was one of America’s great champion tennis players of the 1930s. And he gets a nod here for escorting Olivia de Havilland to the Atlanta premier of “Gone with the Wind.”
For the better part of the first six decades last century, the Atlanta Crackers were the dominant minor league baseball team in the South, so much so that they were known as the “Yankees of the Minors.” At times they shared their Ponce de Leon Park with the Black Crackers, a part of Atlanta’s significant black athletic heritage. Tiger Flowers, also known as “the Georgia Deacon,” was the first black after the inflammatory Jack Johnson to hold a boxing championship (middleweight) and helped reform the image of black prizefighters, prefiguring the great Joe Louis.
How about David T. Howard High graduates Mildred McDaniel (1956 Olympic high jump gold medalist) and NBA great Walt “Clyde” Frazier? Columbia High’s Gwen Torrence was a sprinter who won three Olympic golds, a silver and a bronze. Edwin Moses won 122 consecutive 400-meter hurdle races, and he began his training at local area high schools as a student at Morehouse College. All Larry Nelson did was win three golf majors! And what about the great moments? I’ll just toss April 8, 1974 out there and pick it up another time. Oh wait, I forgot about Muhammad Ali’s comeback fight against Jerry Quarry at Municipal Auditorium.
Happy times...and I really don’t know where to begin with Ralph McGill. SP