Parishioners were already deep into their church service on this cold, damp fall morning in Lake Keowee Village. The nearby parking lot was filled with German badges and luxury utility vehicles, which one may expect in a gated, country club community disguised as a Pleasantville town.
Paul Weir turned his 1964 International Harvester Travelall down the road that leads to the chapel, a road lined with tightly-packed craftsman homes.
Plenty of cars and pickups can drive down the road in anonymity. In Weir’s Travelall, we may as well have been passing by the chapel blasting Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” through a bullhorn. The 345-cubic-inch V8 announces its presence with authority through straight pipes wherever Weir goes.
George Lombard earned a World Series ring last week, reaching the pinnacle of his chosen sport as first base coach of the Dodgers.
Watching the 45-year-old Atlanta native throughout the postseason, as he gathered various protective gear from hitters who had reached first and whispered instructions through his mask into their ears, sparked thoughts of what might have been if Lombard had taken the path so many expected.
Bulldog fans of a certain age know the story already, but for those who don’t: the Dodgers’ first base coach and former journeyman MLB outfielder was supposed to be the running back who resurrected Georgia football.
In the fall of 1993, George Lombard was one of the country’s top recruits, a Parade All-American who was the unquestioned star of a Lovett School team that had gone 11-3 the previous year. Entering Lovett’s season opener against Woodward Academy, coach Bill Railey shared with the Atlanta Constitution his rather straightforward game plan: “Keep running George at them until he breaks one.”
In recent years, sports social media has seen a growth in the number of professional women who manage the brand voices for collegiate and professional teams. Beyond The Trestle reached out to several women who lead social media work for various programs, franchises and institutions, to get their take on the industry, its challenges and opportunities, and the difficulties that come with simply putting the phone down. These transcriptions were pieced together through a mixture of phone interviews, email threads and Twitter exchanges with some portions lightly edited for grammar or style.
Jen Blackwell Galas, University of Georgia: I came to (this career) by chance. I needed to find an internship because my scholarship was going to end, and I didn’t want to pay for an additional year of school. Found a loophole in my scholarship where it would pay for my summer classes as a full semester.
Katie Gillen, Atlanta United: I got my start in sports freshman year at the University of Florida with GatorVision and the PBS Station WUFT-TV in Gainesville. I am fortunate that I was given opportunities to volunteer from the beginning as there is much to learn and the need to network is huge in our world.
Maddie Heaps, San Diego State University: I started out in the industry officially in college, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley acting as a media relations student assistant in the athletics department. I had a love of sports from a young age — it started as a way to get attention from my dad while my sister, eight years older than me, was going through bigger life events than I was. Watching baseball or Sunday night football was our main method of bonding as I was growing up.
Our latest conversation is with Matt Brown, the driving force behind the Extra Points newsletter and a longtime writer at SB Nation. Extra Points is a newsletter that focuses on the forces that shape college athletics beyond the field, such as media rights, trends in higher education and more, and it operates in partnership with The Intercollegiate. This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
BTT: One of the things that I hear a lot of writers say is there was some point when they were growing up where they realized ‘hey, I can do this, and I think I can be pretty good at this thing.’ Did you have a moment like that?
MB: This was a running joke in my family, ever since I was a little kid, that this would eventually be the career I would end up in. I remember when I was playing Little League, so I must have been nine — so I’m a nine-year-old, 60-pound second baseman — and I’m getting yelled at by my mom in the stands and by my coaches because I’m sitting there in the infield and everybody else is doing “hey batter, batter!’ and I’m doing Howard Cosell and play-by-play, like loud.
I grew up in rural Ohio where there weren’t really a ton of opportunities to get into this, and even though sportswriting and sports journalism and the behind-the-scenes stories were a passion, coming into college I didn’t really feel like that was a career you could actually do. So, I have this really weird, unique pathway to journalism. I went into school thinking I was going to work in politics.
A century later, the details are a bit murky. But one thing we can say with relative certainty is that in the third inning of a game at Comiskey Park on September 26, 1920, Joe Jackson went all out to make a catch on the dead run, robbing a Detroit Tigers batter of extra bases.
In I.E. Sanborn’s Chicago Tribune account, Jackson stole a hit from Ty Cobb. According to Harry Bullion in the Detroit Free Press, the play was a “phenomenal running catch that killed a certain triple” for Bobby Veach, who batted behind Cobb in the Detroit order.
Either way, there was little doubt that the pride of Greenville, South Carolina still had it, at the plate and in the field. At age 33, he was in the midst of his best season since joining the White Sox five years earlier. He would end up among the American League’s top five in nearly every offensive category, including his .382 batting average, 218 hits, 20 triples, 12 home runs and 121 RBIs.
Though the White Sox still had four games left to play after that 8-1 win over the Tigers, the teams’ matchup the following day would finalize all of those remarkable stats. For on Monday, September 27, 1920 — though he couldn’t have imagined it at the time — Shoeless Joe Jackson would play his final major league baseball game.
NASCAR kicks off its Playoffs Sunday evening in South Carolina, wrapping up an abbreviated race week at the famed Darlington Raceway unlike the Pee Dee has seen in the track’s 70-year history.
While up to 8,000 race fans have been approved to attend the Southern 500, there will be tens of thousands of other seats that will remain unfilled this weekend.
This Southern 500 marks the first year I haven’t seen a NASCAR race at Darlington since 1992. I doubt they’ll notice my absence. On the other hand, this marks the first real race week at Darlington without “Mr. Raceway” around. That would be Harold King, my great uncle, who died in March at the age of 96.
Uncle Harold had a career at Dixie Cup, helped launch the funeral service that put him in the ground, and served on both the Darlington City and County Councils.
Nearly 16 years later, D.J. Shockley doesn’t mince any words about that particular game.
Despite this reporter’s best efforts to soft-pedal the questions around the 2004 Georgia-Georgia Tech game, it really is hard to dance around how he played. Shockley, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from his own brutal assessment of how he performed that chilly November afternoon.
He used words like “terrible” and “awful” and then “terrible” again.
“I was terrible in that game, man, just say it,” said the former Georgia quarterback with a laugh. “You’re trying to be so nice, but it’s OK to say I was terrible.”
Fair enough, but there were several contributing factors at work. That day, the temperature at kickoff in Sanford Stadium was 46 degrees with a supposed slight chance of rain. Well, there was nothing slight about the elements that day.
The rain came down steadily throughout the game, including a few brief periods of sheets of water cascading across the field. The temperature dipped as well, mixing with the frigid rain to make for miserable conditions more suitable for a January in Sussex than a fall Saturday in Athens.
The Marlin Marvel? The Mighty Midget? The Texas Terror?
The man who bumfozzled the Auburnites? The youngster who could run barefooted on greased grass and not be at all handicapped? The runningest gent who ever floated across the cross marks?
Yeah, that’s The Rabbit — Irby Rice Curry by birth, 1st Lt. Irby Rice Curry in death.
Irby “Rabbit” Curry
A hundred years ago, there would have been no need for an explanation. Folks from Texas to Virginia and beyond knew all about Rabbit Curry, the peppery little gridiron star who died a hero in the skies over France.
They revered The Rabbit back then, only a few years removed from his glory days at Vanderbilt, and his name would take on the sheen of legend. That lore was built and maintained by the men best positioned to do that kind of thing in those days: the sportswriters.
Scribes like Zipp Newman of the Birmingham News, James Stahlman and later Ralph McGill and Fred Russell at the old Nashville Banner, and above all the incomparable Blinkey Horn of The Tennessean, made Rabbit Curry a household name as a player and ensured future generations knew his story for decades to come.
You have to remember that throughout the 24 years and six days of Irby Rice Curry’s short life, from August 4, 1894 through August 10, 1918, it was the writers who created characters, who shaped public personas. With no other medium to compete against, they conjured the most florid descriptions their typewriters would allow, day after day and year after year. And boy did they spill some ink over Rabbit Curry.
So why don’t we step aside and let them tell you the story …
I’ve been struggling over the last few months. Even if I am lucky to fall asleep quickly, I often find myself staring at the ceiling at 4 a.m. There is plenty to think about these days.
Perhaps the Groundhog Day effect of COVID-19 has me more anxious than usual. Maybe it’s the stories in the news that beat me into a feelings coma day after day. Maybe I shouldn’t have started a business during a pandemic.
But there is a question — it’s almost a realization at this point — that haunts me more often than it should, especially in those moments when my eyes are shut but my mind is wide open.
He comes close, tumbling over and landing on his side within 10 yards of the ultimate goal. For more than 50 yards, he’s run roughshod through defenders, eluding flat-footed linebackers and stiff-arming undersized safeties.
And then, well, he just seems to fall down, finally wobbling after a desperate, last-gasp lunge by a defender. If you just glance at it quickly, it almost seems to be a calculated decision on his part, designed to let the defense know that less than one minute later, you’re gonna have to do this all over again.
