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

by Lewis Grizzard

  Brother Sims, the Baptist preacher, brought us a lovely message Sunday morning at the worship hour concerning the coveting of thy neighbor’s ass.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult a proposition talking the paper’s editor into carrying the results of our games.

  “You get ’em to us by Tuesday,” he said, “and we’ll have ’em in the paper on Thursday.”

  I had my very first sportswriting job. And the very first week, I ran into my very first journalism ethics problem. In Moreland’s opener, I happened to no-hit Macedonia Baptist in a 14-0 rout in which Dudley Stamps hit three home runs.

  We hosted the opening tilt (“tilt” being one of the first sportswriting clichés I ever learned). For some reason, “tilt” can be used as a replacement for “game,” “contest,” or “showdown.” At the field behind the Moreland school, which had no fences, Dudley hit three shots into the patch of kudzu in deep left, and by the time they found the balls, he was already back on the bench pulling on a bottle of Birley’s orange drink.

  I had results of other league games phoned in to me, but there wasn’t much there in the Arnco-Sargent vs. Corinth, well, tilt. They had to end the game after four innings, with Corinth ahead, 11–7, when various cows from a pasture that bordered the ballfield broke through a barbed-wire fence and into the outfield, which they left unfit for further play.

  In the Grantville-Mills Chapel engagement (I was learning more clichés by the moment), the only thing that happened that was the slightest bit interesting was that a stray dog had wandered onto the field, chased down a ball that got through the Grantville defense, and tried to run away with it. The dog was finally caught by the Grantville shortstop, who would become the league’s fastest man and most prolific scorer, but by that time, the dog had gnawed several of the stitches off.

  Since that was the only ball anybody had, they had to finish the game with it, and by the end of the sixth inning, it resembled a rotten peach more than a baseball. The game ended in a 8–8 tie, and Jake Bradbury, who owned the dog, was told to keep it penned during future games.

  Clearly, my no-hitter was the big news, but should the lead of my first sports story feature my own exploits?

  Later, I would learn journalism ethics were nebulous, to say the least, so I followed my developing nose for news and went with the following:

  Brilliant Moreland right-hander Lewis Grizzard, in his first start in organized baseball, baffled the visiting Macedonia Baptist nine Saturday afternoon with a no-hitter. Dudley Stamps, in a lesser role, had three home runs in the 14-0 romp.

  Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie also took the weekly Times-Herald. When they brought it home at Thursday noon, I opened it even before the Constitution. Besides, the Cracker game had been on television the night before, so I’d seen little Ernie Oravetz lead the Chattanooga Lookouts to an easy 9–4 victory.

  I will never forget gazing upon my name appearing in a newspaper for the first time. In fact, my name appeared in the newspaper for the first time three times.

  The headline read:

  “MORELAND’S LEWIS GRIZZARD

  NO-HITS MACEDONIA 14 – 0”

  Then came my byline:

  By LEWIS GRIZZARD.

  Then came the lead of my story, “Brilliant Moreland right-hander Lewis Grizzard . . .”

  I had also mentioned my heroic exploits to the lady who wrote the column about who had iced tea and watermelon with whom, in hopes she might also make mention of my no-hit game. But she said she ran out of space because there was so much to tell about the Women’s Bible class taking a trip to an all-night gospel singing in Grantville that featured LeRoy Abernathy and Shorty Bradford (known as “the Happy Two”), as well as the Sunshine Boys, the Blackman Brothers Quartet, and a little blind girl who sang “Just as I Am.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that lineup.

  Despite that, I still broke into organized baseball and sportswriting in a big way, and I would wonder afterward if there was a possibility I might play for the Crackers when I grew up and also cover the games and get paid by the Constitution.

  My dream of pitching professionally, however, came to an abrupt end my senior year in high school. They bused those of us out in the county to Newnan High School.

  It was my final game as a Newnan High baseball player. We were playing mighty Griffin. We led 3–2 in the bottom of the sixth when I faced the Griffin catcher, who, with two outs and the bases loaded, looked about twenty-five years old.

  I had whiffed the Griffin catcher in two previous plate appearances with slow curveballs. Now I worked the count to two balls, two strikes. My coach called time and came to the mound.

  “Grizzard,” he said, “don’t throw this guy another one of those slow curveballs. He’s seen too many of them already.”

  What did he know? The slow curve was my out pitch. The slow curve to me was what a piano had been to Mozart, a rifle to Davey Crockett, a tank to George Patton.

  The Griffin catcher dug in, and I delivered that tantalizing dipsydo of mine.

  Are you familiar with the term “hanging curveball”? Mine not only hung, it actually stopped directly over the plate and waited for the Griffin catcher to hit it.

  After the game, which we had lost 6–3, I asked my left fielder, “Did you have any chance to catch that ball the Griffin catcher hit?”

  He said, “No, but I did manage to get a brief glance at it as it was leaving the planet.”

  So, no offers of a professional contract or a college baseball scholarship were forthcoming, but I still had my dream of being a sportswriter. At least you didn’t sweat as much up in the press box as you did down on the field actually playing the game.

  My journalism career stalled for a time after I got too old to play ball for the Baptists and report on my heroics on the mound for Moreland.

  I was quite frustrated by this, especially during my first two years in high school where they tried to teach me such things as algebra.

  Why should I have to take algebra? I asked myself. How on earth will I ever use it as a sportswriter? Did Red Smith have to go study algebra? I should be taking courses on wordsmithing and how to turn in an expense account after a road trip to Little Rock.

  They tried to teach me biology, too, but I resisted. When it came time to dissect a dead frog, I refused on the basis that I might throw up during the procedure and that since I had no interest whatsoever in becoming a doctor, a veterinarian, or frogologist, I should be allowed to go to the library and read some Victor Hugo.

  I was lying about reading Victor Hugo, in case you couldn’t tell. What I really wanted to do, since it was September, was to go get the Constitution they kept in the library and read the sports papers to brush up on my clichés.

  My biology teacher thought about my proposal for a second and then issued the command, “Cut.”

  As I made my initial incision into Mr. Dead Frog, fighting back the gag reflex, the thought occurred to me, How does the school get its hands on all these croaked croakers? There was probably no place you can order them from, or was there? I made myself a mental note to check the phone book when I got home to see if there was somebody in the business of selling dead frogs to schools for tenth-graders to mutilate.

  What if there was no such place? Then how did the school get their frogs? Does the biology teacher call up the chemistry teacher and one of the assistant football coaches late in the summer and say, “Hey, guys, it’s almost time for school, how about helping me go out and get some frogs?” Then do they go out to a pond somewhere, sneak up on a bunch of frogs, catch them, and put them in a sack? And if they do that, how do they kill them? Or do they put them into jars of formaldehyde while they’re still alive?

  Just then, my biology teacher walked behind and asked, “How’s it going?”

  “I’m on my way to the stomach right now,” I answered. “By the way, how did you get your hands on all these dead frogs?”

  The question obviously made my biology teacher
uncomfortable. He stammered around with an answer for a couple of seconds and then said, “Keep cutting.”

  Hmmmmm. So, there was something fishy (we also had to cut up a perch one day) going on here after all.

  There were two things I noticed about myself at that point.

  One, I obviously was a budding animal-rights activist and, two, I just as obviously had what every newspaperperson should have—the proverbial “nose for news.”

  I also discovered something else about my nose. It didn’t like smelling formaldehyde and dead frogs. Before I finished my dissection, I did have to be excused while I went to the boys’ room and threw up. I also swore to myself I’d never eat frog legs, which brought up another question: What do they do with the rest of the frog when they take off his legs for frying?

  I was a deep thinker as a young man.

  Anyway, algebra, biology, chemistry, geometry, and such were quite unappealing to me during my formative years. I did like some history, especially the part about George Washington slipping out his window at night during rainstorms in order to rendezvous with one of his slave girls and subsequently catching a cold and dying.

  You didn’t know about that? It was in all the papers.

  That was when I realized something else about myself: I really like famous people being involved in scandals, which is an explanation of why I thought the Rob Lowe thing was the best story to come out of the 1988 Democratic Convention.

  I did pay a great deal of attention in English class, however. I was learning my craft there. I probably—no, I was—the best diagramer of sentences in the history of Newnan High School. I didn’t care how long or how complex the sentence, if it could be diagramed, I could diagram it in a matter of seconds.

  I originally thought this rare ability might get me some girls, but it didn’t.

  I was fascinated by grammar. I thrilled at the term “antecedent.” I was Mr. Appositive. And how could anybody be interested in delving into the innards of a dead frog when there were onomatopoeia, hyperbole, similies, and metaphors to be studied?

  And English literature. I dived deeply into the satirical writings of H. H. Munro (the biting “Saki”). And Thurber’s visit to the bank. And “Quoth the raven” and “Me and my Anabelle Lee.” I even enjoyed Shakespeare and wondered what he would have written if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. (I probably ought to take a stab at his lead, but to be quite honest, I have forgotten most of what I knew about Shakespeare, and since he was English, he wouldn’t have known very much about baseball in the first place. Plus, if he happened to be working for the sports section of The New York Times, they’d probably have him off somewhere covering a yacht race anyway.)

  I read Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Frost and Sandburg. They weren’t that bad to be as old as they were. I also discovered the humor of such writers as S. J. Perelman and Henry Wodehouse. O. Henry was a newspaperman, I learned, and “The Ransom of Red Chief” was my favorite of his works. He played a major role formulating my own style as a columnist. Poor O. Henry had to come up with all those stories on a daily basis. That’s a lot to make up, but I decided if O. Henry could do it, so could I. That’s where I got the inspiration to, when I became a columnist, make up a lot of stuff and never let facts get in the way of a good column.

  There were several of my high school teachers who influenced me and inspired me. One of them wasn’t my biology teacher, of course. I have no idea whatever happened to him, but I hope he was eventually arrested for doing something like trying to dissect his neighbor’s cat.

  Richard Smith, an English teacher, should be mentioned first. The man loved words and writing as much as I did. One day in the tenth grade, I asked him why my talent with diagraming sentences with such speed and accuracy wasn’t getting me any girls. He answered, “I don’t know.”

  This also helped me later in life, because, if you work for a newspaper, people think you know more than they do and they’re always asking you questions like, “Why the hell didn’t Rob Lowe look at the girl’s driver’s license before he started videotaping her lesbian sex acts?”

  I was able to answer, “I don’t know,” and not feel guilty about it. Actually, however, I do have an answer to that question, but it didn’t come to me until I’d been asked it a hundred times.

  The answer comes from a scene in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack Nicholson, playing the part of a mental patient who had more common sense than his doctor, was being interviewed by a psychiatrist, who brings up the fact Nicholson’s character had an arrest record that included having sex with an underage female.

  Nicholson’s excuse for committing such an act was something like, “Doc, when you’re this close to [a part of the female anatomy], you don’t go asking for no driver’s license.”

  Richard Smith did more for me than what I just mentioned, of course. He knew of my interest in writing, and one day I asked him another question:

  “Do you think when I grow up I can make a living writing?”

  He answered, “A meager one, perhaps, but it beats selling shoes, which is what Norman [the Monk] Montgomery is going to wind up doing.”

  The Monk was stupid. In fact, he was the only member of my senior class not to graduate on time, which brings up another of my teachers who impressed me, the late Miss Maryella Camp, who taught senior English.

  Miss Maryella was an elderly lady. She was quite southern and called everybody “shugars.” She also could recite The Canterbury Tales in the original auld English, and brought the Bard alive for me in her classes. Come to think of it, I probably should have asked Miss Maryella, such an expert on Shakespeare, what his lead might have been if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. She might have had some idea that I could have used on the previous page where I, instead, copped out.

  What Miss Maryella did for me that was most important, however, was to teach me that the best way to deal with stupidity is by the use of humor.

  Miss Maryella’s best line had to do with the Monk, as a matter of fact. She was also senior-class sponsor and called us all together as graduation neared.

  “Shugahs,” she began, “only one member of the class is not going to be able to graduate—Norman Montgomery.” At this point, the Monk uttered a “god-dammit” under his breath, only the Monk was so stupid he uttered under his breath the way most people screamed, and Miss Maryella heard him. She immediately replied, “Don’t blame Him, shugah, He’s not the one who failed Senior English.”

  It would also be a terrible oversight if I didn’t mention Mrs. Sarah Jane Skinner here. I mentioned the fact my career as a journalism practitioner stalled for a time. I picked it up again in the eleventh grade, however. It was eleventh-graders who produced the school newspaper, Tiger Tracks, which ran every Thursday as a part of the Newnan Times-Herald.

  If an eleventh-grader wanted to have something to do with the school newspaper, all he or she had to do was go see Mrs. Skinner, who taught a class in journalism and was, quite naturally, the school newspaper’s sponsor.

  The first day I was in the eleventh grade, I went to Mrs. Skinner and said if she didn’t let me be sports editor of Tiger Tracks, I was going to write a book one day about my newspaper career, and in the part where I told about how I got started, I was going to write about her as a cruel person who didn’t know a well-written obituary from a dissected dead frog.

  That didn’t seem to get her attention, so I told her if I didn’t get the job as sports editor, I was going to kill myself and leave a note saying she was responsible.

  She sent me to the principal’s office for being disrespectful to a member of the faculty, but she did give me the job of sports editor. As a result, please notice I am a man of my word and mention her here in favorable terms.

  Mrs. Skinner was (and still is, I might add, sticking with favorable) a dark, attractive lady whom students called “Gypsy Woman�
� behind her back. There was always some discussion as to who was the better looking, Mrs. Skinner or Miss Fleming, the algebra teacher.

  I always held out for Mrs. Skinner, on the basis of anybody who would teach algebra for a living would eventually grow old and ugly. I don’t know if Miss Fleming grew old and ugly, and I’m sorry to have to mention her in such a light, but she should have known better than to send me to the board to work out algebra formulas in front of the entire class when my interest in her subject was too small to be represented by any mathematical term.

  I didn’t last very long as sports editor of Tiger Tracks. Newnan High had a terrible football team my junior year. (I didn’t play because I weighed only 130 pounds at the time and was afraid of the Monk, who played linebacker.) In my first column ever, I questioned the ability of the head coach and suggested he get out of coaching and be made assistant biology teacher.

  Realizing the controversy this might lead to, I wrote a phony column that brought Mrs. Skinner’s approval. Then I suggested that I be the one to take all the Tiger Tracks copy down to the Times Herald. She agreed and, when I got to the Times Herald, I exchanged columns.

  When the column appeared, the football coach threatened to make me do blocking drills against the Monk. (It would have been an even more severe punishment if he made me attempt to have an intelligent conversation with him.) Mrs. Skinner was aghast at what I had done, and the principal, Mr. Evans, said if I ever, ever got near Tiger Tracks again, he would personally flog me with a piece of the cafeteria’s Wednesday “mystery meat” (I always figured it was horse or dog).

  Controversial Tiger Tracks sports editor Lewis Grizzard was relieved of that position today after a column critizing the Newnan High head football coach.

  Said principal A. P. Evans, “Never in my thirty-five years in education have I run across a student with such obvious disdain for authority. His column was filled with lies and hateful innuendos, and he has brought harm to our head coach and shame upon himself and the school.”