The girl-childs were flocking there. From places like Vidalia and Augusta and Montgomery and Birmingham and Ty Ty and Albany (the Georgian pronunciation is “All-Benny”) in the south, to Ringgold and Dalton (from whence would later come Maria Maples and Deborah Norville) to the north. They would wear those sundresses and you couldn’t move in the place on Friday’s.
“This is living,” Hudspeth would say, above the noise of the mating horde.
It was. There basically had been only one woman in my life since I was thirteen. Paula. But she was gone. And, once I had adjusted to bachelor life, this Harrison’s on Peachtree was a veritable gold mine. I would have found it, of course, if Ron Hudspeth hadn’t come to work at the Atlanta Journal, but his divorce gave me a regular running mate.
Running bars alone—even great ones like Harrison’s—has its drawbacks, especially if approaching strange women is difficult, as it most certainly was to me, especially before I’d got a few VOs and water inside me. There will always be that fear of rejection in most men. It is called the Buzz-Off-Creep Theory.
She’s beautiful. She’s alone. But what if I walk over there, say something clever like, “How long have you been in Atlanta?” “What’s your sign?” or the ever popular opener, “Do you think wrestling’s fake?” and she replies, “Buzz off, creep?”
A friend of mine once said it even better.
“It’s not the walk over to talk to a girl or to ask her to dance that’s so bad. It’s the walk back when she says no that gets you.”
But Hudspeth wasn’t afraid. He would fire, and if rejected, would go on undaunted to his next target. What made it easy for me was when he would join two ladies at a table. As soon as I figured he had broken the ice, I would walk over and introduce myself. I had to take second choice, of course, but the taking of an occasional cull in a city like Atlanta was often quite rewarding.
There was something else Ron and I shared. We both had the same ideas about what should be in a sports section.
Sportswriting was changing all over the country in those days. Sportswriters suddenly weren’t all team men anymore. What writers wouldn’t think of writing twenty years earlier was exactly what the new breed wanted to write.
Of course, the new breed showed signs of its immaturity. I was sitting between two sports writers following a Georgia-Florida football game in Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl.
One of the writers was a kid like me, who wanted to write The Truth, with some poetry tossed in.
The other was from the old school. He’d been there a thousand autumn Saturdays before, and he wanted to finish his report and get to the bar.
It was a classic confrontation of the new and the old breed of sportswriting.
The old writer already had two pages of his story typed. The kid hadn’t even completed a first paragraph yet. He would put a sheet of paper in his typewriter, hit a few bars, and then draw the paper out of the typewriter and throw it, with obvious disgust, to the floor.
After this went on for a good 20 minutes and discarded paper was all over the press box floor, the veteran looked over at the frustrated youngster and asked one of the great questions in the history of journalism: “Hey, kid. What don’t you just write what happened?”
Writers once covered up for athletes. But no more. Writers once never asked the tough questions of coaches and managers and athletes. Now, you asked them. You confronted them.
During Watergate, we would say, “If Woodward and Bernstein can bring down a president, why can’t we stand up in front of a football coach and ask him why he kicked a field goal on fourth and inches?” The rest of the paper used to call us the “Toy Shop.” But suddenly, there were issues that were real. Desegregation of southern collegiate teams was one.
Bear Bryant’s Alabama team played Southern Cal and had been thrashed by the power running of Sam Cunningham, who was black. Bryant, the story went, saw the light, and began actively recruiting black athletes, who had once either gone to all-black schools or had been recruited on the West Coast or in the Midwest.
This joke must have been told a thousand times:
“The Bear’s on the practice field the first day of fall workouts, and a black kid comes up to him and asks if he can try out for the team. The Bear thinks the whole thing might be a hoot. The white kids will surely kill the kid. But they give the ball to the black kid, and he breaks eight tackles and speeds down the sideline for a touchdown.
“Look at that Indian go!” says the Bear.
There’s a true story they tell about something called the Sky Writers. In the late sixties, the Southeastern Conference office in Birmingham came up with the idea of chartering a plane that would carry sportswriters from all over the South to the various SEC football camps, just prior to the opening of the season.
The Sky Writers were in Oxford, Mississippi, interviewing Johnny Vaught, head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels. A few blacks had already broken the SEC color barrier by that time. Vaught was asked, “Are you going to begin to recruit blacks at Ole Miss?”
Vaught bristled and answered, “As long as I am head coach at the University of Mississippi, never!”
Reporters dashed for their typewriters. But John Logue of the Journal just sat there.
“You aren’t going to write what Vaught said?” he was asked.
“That’s news?” Logue asked back. “What am I going to write: ‘For the fiftieth straight year, Ole Miss is not going to recruit black athletes’?”
When I became executive sports editor at the Journal Frank Hyland and Ron Hudspeth were my point men. Hyland left the Hawks for a time to work the Falcons. He was sitting in a booth in a restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, where the Falcons held preseason practice, one evening with two other writers and the Falcons head coach, Norman Van Brocklin. I mentioned earlier Van Brocklin had little or no use for sports writers, all of whom he thought were communists.
Hyland was sitting across the table from Van Brocklin. They both had a few drinks, and then Van Brocklin, known as the Dutchman, looks over at Frank and says, “Hyland, you’re a whore writer.”
Frank recalled, “I wasn’t sure what a whore writer was, but I figured it wasn’t a compliment. So I said to Van Brocklin, ‘I may be a whore writer, but you’re a loser.’
“Van Brocklin turned redder than he already was and said, ‘I’m not a loser.’
“I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Check your record.’ “
At that point, Van Brocklin reached across the table, grabbed Hyland by the tie, and pulled it.
“I was choking,” said Hyland.
Van Brocklin then pulled Frank across the table. Nobody landed a serious blow, but Frank’s tie was ruined, his sports jacket got ripped, and he didn’t get to sit and enjoy the prime rib he had ordered before the scuffle broke out.
Frank called me at home and told me what had happened.
“Write it,” I said.
“I will,” he replies. “As soon as they send the prime rib I ordered up to my room.”
Later, Frank covered the Braves for me. One night in the clubhouse, he asked Hank Aaron a question Aaron didn’t appreciate. The future all-time home-run leader happened to be eating from a can of strawberries at the time, and he threw the strawberries in Frank’s face.
“It’s not everybody,” said Frank, “who gets into it with two Hall of Famers in one career.”
“What did you think when Bad Henry threw the strawberries in your face?” I asked Frank.
“I had this strange thought that they were pretty good strawberries,” he answered.
Hudspeth also covered the Braves and the Falcons. He ripped them both furiously for their continuing shortcomings.
He once asked Van Brocklin a tough question, and the Dutchman took off his coat and said, “Let’s stack some furniture,” meaning, “Get the furniture out of the way, I’m going to mash this commie’s face in.”
Hudspeth managed to avoid fisticuffs with the Dutchman, who, as all Atlanta Falcons coaches finall
y do, got fired. Van Brocklin retired to his farm in Social Circle, Georgia, fifty miles east of Atlanta. After the firing, Ron managed to get an interview with the Dutchman’s wife, who had a memorable quote:
“Can my husband be happy on the farm?” Mrs. Van Brocklin asked back. “Let me put it this way—pecan trees don’t drop touchdown passes.”
There were a couple of other new guys on the staff in addition to Arey, Vesilind, and Hudspeth. Jim Hunter came in from South Carolina and took over auto racing and some college coverage. Minter also decided Hunter could fill in on the Hawks, occasionally.
On Hunter’s first day at the paper, Minter told Hyland to take the new guy to the Hawks practice and introduce him to the players and Coach Richie Guerin.
On the way to practice, Hyland asked Hunter, “Do you like beer?”
They never made it to practice, and Hunter was supposed to do a feature on the Hawks the next morning.
No problem. While Hunter was at South Carolina, he had covered a Clemson basketball player who had been a late draft pick for the Hawks. Hunter, upon arriving in the office the next morning, decided to write a story on the kid from Clemson, using material he already had.
But a problem arose on deadline. On a routine call to the Hawks office, Hyland found out that the kid from Clemson was going to get cut that morning. It would be obvious to Minter that his crack basketball writers had not spent much time with the team the day before.
So Hyland called Coach Guerin and pleaded with him to keep the young player on the roster one more day, so that the paper wouldn’t have egg on its face, and Hyland and Hunter wouldn’t have Minter on their ass.
Guerin agreed. Hunter and Hyland were saved.
Hunter had almost as many contacts in auto racing as Bill Robinson. He also had a history of tarrying in the post-race grape and driving off in pace cars.
The most memorable piece he did on auto racing was from the Darlington Motor Speedway in Darlington, South Carolina. Two guys had driven a camper into the infield with three prostitutes in the back. Right there in the broad daylight of Sunday, Hunter reported that the line from the back of that camper was longer than the line to the ladies’ restroom. The infield got so drunk and rowdy before the race was over, police finally built a makeshift jail on the premises to detain those arrested. It was hastily put together, with some strategically placed cement blocks for a foundation, and plywood walls.
The jail had been up about ten minutes and was already bulging at the seams with good ol’ boys charged with drunkenness, fighting, solicitation of prostitution, public indecency, and starting a fire without a permit, when the inmates pushed down a wall and a mass escape took place to the ringing cheers of spectators who were all but ignoring the race.
Minter had hired another guy, named Ron Sanders, to work the desk and do an occasional high school story. Hyland and I often disagreed as to which lead was the all-time worst—Norman’s “somewhat marred” or Ron Sanders’s lead on a high school baseball game involving Atlanta’s Bass High. Bass had played Grady, and Grady had won in a rout.
Sander’s lead:
When spring comes, it’s natural for a boy’s thoughts to turn to the ol’ fishing hole. So Grady got itself a string loaded with Bass Friday afternoon, winning 9–0 and doing just what came naturally.
“Norman’s lead didn’t have a single cliché,” Frank would argue. “An all-time worst lead must have clichés, contain simplistic allusions, and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. At least Norman had some realization that the thrill of victory can be tempered by death.”
Good argument, but I still go with Norman.
Ron Sanders lasted about three months before it was suggested he find a new profession. Minter called me one day from his office at the Constitution several years later and asked me to come see something. He had a letter from Ron Sanders, who, sure enough had found a new profession—the ministry.
In his letter, Ron told Minter he had found the Lord and wanted to make all his previous wrongs right again. He said that when he left the paper, he took with him a dozen new grease pencils, two new reporter’s notebooks, and a copy of the Official Baseball Guide for 1957. He sent Minter a check for five dollars for the pencils and notebook and returned the 1957 Official Guide.
The staff had a name for me, their twenty-three-year-old Grand Imperial Llama Potentate Executive Sports Editor. They called me “Lieutenant Fuzz,” after the boyish bungling lieutenant of the Beetle Bailey cartoon strip. I always figured it was Frank who came up with the name. But I couldn’t blame him or the staff. They had all served under Jim Minter—George Patton—and now they had me.
As it turned out, I did have some trouble being Frank Hyland’s roommate/boss. It wasn’t serious trouble. It was just that after I got the job, I became a little more aware of the necessity that I be basically awake in the office in the morning. It would go like this:
We would finish the paper at one or so in the afternoon and all hit Underground Atlanta. Frank, Hudspeth, Hunter, Simmons, Priit, Dr. Whitley, and me. We would start at the Bucket Shop, a sort of Harrison’s Beneath the Streets, and we would talk shop, women, and the death of kings. We would, of course, get blitzed. The evening would normally reach its crescendo when Frank would go out onto the streets of Underground Atlanta to do his Charlie Chaplin walk among the tourists.
Frank could walk just the way Chaplin walked. From somewhere, he would also come up with a hat of some sort and an umbrella that he would carry under his arm. He would walk his walk and doff his hat to the ladies, and he was a riot. But as the hour would get later, I would mention to my roommate, Frank, “You’ve got to be in the office at seven. Let’s go home.”
Frank was not a man to give up the night easily. “You go ahead,” he would say. “I’ll be in at seven.”
I would get up at five-thirty and shower. I’d call in to Frank in his bedroom at six. “Frank,” I’d say, “it’s six. You’ve got an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” he would answer.
Seven, no Frank. Seven-thirty, no Frank. Eight, maybe Frank. One morning, Frank hit the office at eight-fifteen, after about an hour’s sleep, and dozed off on the rim. The executive editor, Bill Fields, happened to walk by my desk and ask, “Is Frank Hyland asleep at the rim?”
“He got here at four-thirty and stripped the wire,” I lied. “He’ll be okay.”
I could have dealt with Frank being late occasionally if he had not done something I could never understand.
I would leave him, sound asleep, at six-fifteen. He would be late to the office and, after the first edition was in, I would call him to my desk and give him hell about it.
“I ran out of gas,” Frank would say.
“Frank,” I would say. “What are you, crazy? I left you in bed at six-fifteen. I left you in the Underground at one this morning. I know why you were late. I’m your goddamned roommate. You were late because you just didn’t get your ass up.”
I finally made the smart move—I resigned as Frank’s roommate and got myself another apartment. It was better after that. When Frank said, “There was a wreck on the interstate,” at least there was about a one-in-a-thousand shot that was why he was late.
Regardless, Frank was still the best all-around talent who ever worked for me. He could do it all. Report. Write. Edit. Lay out the paper. Write wonderful headlines and photo captions. His best headline came one morning when he sat on the rim quite ill and quite green.
Peahead Walker was a character of the southern sports scene. He coached football in North Carolina and had a million jokes and stories. Peahead was probably the most sought-after sports speaker in the South in the late sixties. But Peahead died. The Constitution carried the obit in the morning paper. The headline had said something like, “COLORFUL PEAHEAD WALKER DIES.”
We had a Peahead obit, too. We had coded headlines at the Journal. I had ordered what was known as a K-3 on the Peahead story. A K-3 was one line of 36-point type, three columns wide, with an 18
-point “kicker” above it.
You’ve seen kickers on headlines before. They look something like this:
Tasted Good (Kicker)
“MAN BITES DOG” (Headline)
Everybody on the rim took a shot at the Peahead headline, but none satisfied me. “It needs to say something about Peahead knowing a lot of jokes and stories,” I said.
Frank opened his eyes and said, “Give the damn thing to me.”
He wrote:
He’s Dead
“HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE ABOUT PEAHEAD?”
No way I could run it, but it sure went down in my Headline Hall of Fame.
Frank could take four wire stories about the same thing, pick out the best of them all, and compose one on his own typewriter that would sing. And he could do it on deadline with that Camel sticking out of his mouth and his head probably hurting more than any of the rest of us could realize.
He loved newspapers. And he loved the game of newspapers. He was the guy you wanted in your foxhole with you. You’re five minutes before deadline and the wire offers a bulletin: Casey Stengel has died. You wanted Frank with you. He could be stubborn and sarcastic and immovable, but if I had one man to hire to work beside me in the fine art of getting a newspaper out, it would be Frank K. Hyland.
It was different with Hudspeth and me. I was his boss, but we still managed to run the streets together and maintain a fairly professional relationship in the office. And, Lord, the ladies we sported. But how many ideas did we come up with for the section on how many barstools, while the band played “Proud Mary”?
It was during a lull at Harrison’s one night, as a matter of fact, that we devised what I still believe was the first attempt by a sports section to have an editorial page.
It was Hudspeth’s notion that other writers besides Bisher needed an outlet for more commentary. “We’re out there with the teams,” he’d say. “We cover them day-to-day. Bisher comes out once a month. We know where the bodies are hidden.”
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