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Dawgs on top

It was pure luck that I happened to be in Athens, Georgia, on Nov. 8, 1980. I was on the debate team in high school and there happened to be a tournament on the University of Georgia campus that weekend. We had finished our rounds for the day and were waiting for our scores in an auditorium in the journalism/psychology building. A group in the back was crowded around a radio. Georgia was playing Florida that day. Georgia was undefeated but Florida was winning late in the fourth quarter.

I was enough of a fan to wonder what was going on but not enough of a fan to go back and listen. Somebody passed word from the back that the game was just about over. Georgia was pinned on its own 7-yard line with just a minute left.

Then there was a noise from the back of the room. A collective whooooOOOOOOAAAAAAAA from everybody crowded around the radio, like a dozen sirens going off at once. I could hear the voice of legendary Georgia announcer Larry Munson cutting through the noise, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying.

This is what he was saying.

I have watched the play many times since — more than any other single play in my lifetime, I’m sure. But at the time all I knew was the sound of those teenagers screaming. And then, all of a sudden, another wall of sound outside.

We walked out and saw chaos — UGA students running up and down the streets, hanging out of car windows, climbing trees, hugging one another, making out, rolling on the ground like Pentecostals.

I knew at that moment where I was going to college.

I had followed Georgia football since I was a child, but I didn’t LOVE Georgia football until that moment. All I wanted was something that could connect me with that much joy.

Georgia went on to win the national title that season, three days before my 17th birthday. I figured they’d win one every few years from there on out.

*****

Monday night, with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, I started preparing a concession speech. Something I might put on Twitter and text to my Alabama friends. Georgia’s quarterback, Stetson Bennett, had tried to throw the ball as he was being sacked deep in Georgia’s end of the field. The ball bounced toward the sideline and an Alabama defender, thinking it was an incomplete pass, scooped it up as an afterthought as he jogged out of bounds. But then the referees took another look and decided it was a fumble, and the Alabama player was still in bounds when he grabbed it. Alabama scored a touchdown a few plays later. And the best Georgia team there has ever been was losing to Alabama again.

Sometimes, I thought, you just have to accept that even though you might be good, someone else is always going to be better. Georgia had lost to Alabama seven times in a row. Two of those had been absolute gut punches, games that make you think there must be an alternate universe where things go the other way and your team gets to hold the trophy. I saw a stat on ESPN this morning: Since that 1980 title, Georgia has the ninth-best record in major college football. The eight teams ahead of them had won at least one national title since then. So had the eight teams right behind them. We had our own little island of broken dreams.

And here we were again, same old scene in the same old movie, the one where we always drown at the end.

Except then Georgia went right down the field, four plays, 75 yards, touchdown. We were up by one.

And then we stuffed them on defense and scored another touchdown. We were up by eight.

Now Alabama had to hurry. Their quarterback, Bryce Young, the Heisman Trophy winner, lofted a ball down the left sideline. There was about a minute left, just like in that Florida game all those years ago.

And just like in that Florida game, a Georgia player caught the ball.

*****

I just finished Jason Mott’s National Book Award-winning novel HELL OF A BOOK. One of the many things it’s about is how we gravitate to just about any diversion to keep from really thinking hard about the terrible things going on in the world. I’m not sure it’s a judgment as much as an observation. If you soak yourself in tragedy all day long, you become a tragedy. All of us need a release valve of some kind. Something to care about where the stakes aren’t quite so real. For me that’s been sports.

But here’s the thing about it. If you decide to care about a team — if you decide to care about anything, really — you agree to take the weight of the bad times. Georgia football has brought me a lot of joy over the years. But to have all those great teams for 40 years and never win — that’s a lot of weight. It accumulates. It makes you wonder if you can ever shed it.

I like to couch the words, to talk about “sports love” instead of just love, because I’m a little embarrassed to care so much about a game. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more it feels like the caring is what matters. Don’t love a game to the exclusion of the rest of your life. Love it as part of your life. But let yourself love it. Let the game teach you, if you need to be taught, how much it matters to care.

I care more about my family and my friends than I do about any team or any game. But last night, a minute left in the game, Bryce Young’s pass in the air, I cared a whole lot about where that ball landed. Georgia defensive back Kelee Ringo intercepted the pass at his own 21. I jumped out of my chair and scared the hell out of the cat.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart, on the sideline, yelled at Ringo to fall down so Georgia could run out the clock. But Ringo didn’t hear or didn’t listen. He took off.

One of the great gifts sports gives you, if you’re lucky, is that moment when you know a play has won the game even as the play is still happening. Time compresses and expands and you can see yourself hours from now, still calling and texting your friends, staying up until 3 in the morning talking about this play that is right now still going on, Ringo still churning down the sideline, and then you can see yourself years later, calling up that play to watch it again when you need a little jolt of joy, the same way you did that other play from 41 years ago, the play you first heard secondhand on the radio, in the town with the team that would bring you to this moment.

The weight fell off as he ran. And when he reached the end zone it was gone.

— TT

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News

2022, more or less

Some goals of mine for the new year.

More analog, less digital

More posting, less tweeting

More outdoors, less indoors

More reading, less scrolling

More connection, less isolation

More doing, less watching

More friends, less followers (yeah, it should be “fewer,” just roll with it)

More empathy, less judgment

More scheduling, less scrambling

More openness, less stubbornness

That’s 10. Enough for now. I’ll probably come back and add some during the year. I’d love to hear yours. Happy 2022, y’all.

— TT

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News

Henry Aaron, the greatest

Henry Aaron died today. Most of us fans knew him as Hank, but he preferred Henry, and so Henry it is.

I guess we should take care of the baseball part first. My dear friend Joe Posnanski did an incredible series, soon to be a book, on the 100 greatest baseball players of all time. Joe ranked Aaron no. 4, behind Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. Joe loves baseball more than anyone else I know, and understands far more about baseball than I ever will. But he got Henry Aaron three places too low.

The most monumental achievement in baseball history was when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The second most monumental achievement in baseball history was when Henry Aaron — despite the hate mail, the death threats, the pressure of a changing South and a changing country — chased down Babe Ruth, and caught him, and surpassed him to become the home run king.

Robinson is more important to history, but not by much. And Aaron had a greater career, by a lot.

Aaron summed himself up as a player perfectly: If you could go to just one baseball game, maybe you’d want to see somebody more flashy, but over a three-game series, he’s the one you’d notice. As odd as this sounds, he hit 755 home runs without really trying to — he just hit the ball hard, over and over, and that’s how many left the park. He hit at least 24 home runs every season from when he was 21 years old to when he was 39.

You can reduce a hitter’s job to two things: Get on base and drive in runs. Aaron is the all-time leader in both total bases and runs batted in. No one else who has ever played baseball was so good for so long.

That’s why he is the greatest of all time. But why he is MY greatest of all time goes beyond the stat sheets. It’s about growing up. It’s about the South. And it’s about heroes.

***

The first baseball game I remember watching was August 1, 1970. I was six. It was the Saturday afternoon NBC game of the week between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves. I watched it at the JM Fields department store in Brunswick, Georgia, my hometown. My mom and dad planted me in the TV department while they shopped. They knew I wasn’t going anywhere with the game on. I know the date because I was able to look it up many years later on the Internet, which has the details of every Major League game every played. This game was easy to find because of the score: Pirates 20, Braves 10.

That day Aaron batted third and played right field for the Braves. He went 3-for-4 with two homers and five runs batted in. It was a fantastic day but not nearly enough. It was rarely enough back then. The Braves were mostly terrible when I was growing up — they didn’t make the playoffs a single time in the ’70s. They had occasional lightning strikes: a Rookie of the Year catcher named Earl Williams, a one-year wonder of a pitcher named Buzz Capra. But most seasons, there were just two reasons to follow the Braves. One was the ageless knuckleballer Phil Niekro. The other was the relentless Henry Aaron.

Well, there was also a third reason, at least for me: The Braves were the team of the South.

When Aaron started his Major League career, the Braves were in Milwaukee. He was on a team that won the World Series there, beating the Yankees in 1957. Back then, the South didn’t have a team in any major pro sport. When the Braves announced that they were moving from Milwaukee to Atlanta for the 1966 season, Aaron at first said he wouldn’t go. He had very good reasons.

In 1966, every football team in the Southeastern Conference was all-white. In 1966, George Wallace was governor of Alabama. In 1966, civil-rights activist James Meredith started a trek across Mississippi called the March Against Fear. On the second day of the march, a white man shot him.

This is the South that Henry Aaron arrived in when the Braves came to Atlanta.

He had grown up in that South, in Mobile, loving baseball so much that he skipped school to play, so good at the game that he was a star even before he found out he had been batting cross-handed for years. But when he started playing, the big leagues were all-white, too. When Aaron was 13, Jackie Robinson changed that for good. The next spring, Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers came to Mobile for an exhibition game. Aaron went to hear Robinson speak. He set a goal for himself: He would make it to the majors before Robinson retired, so they would be in the big leagues together.

Robinson played until 1956. Aaron’s rookie year was 1954.

By then, Aaron had already played as a minor-leaguer in Jacksonville. The white fans of the South Atlantic League heckled him from the stands. Aaron remembered how Robinson had handled the hate, and he handled it, too. Still, he worried about what it would be like in Atlanta. He had a wife and kids by the time the Braves decided to move. Black leaders in Atlanta met with him, wrote him letters, told him how much he would mean as a symbol of progress.

Not everyone in the South was ready for Henry Aaron. But by the time he got there, he was ready for the South. In that first year in Atlanta, he led the league with 44 homers and 127 runs bated in.

He kept playing on those terrible teams, and kept stacking homers — 39 homers, 29, 44, 38, 47, 34, 40. By the end of the 1973 season, he had 713 — one from tying Babe Ruth’s record. By then, most of the country was rooting for him. Even much of the South. But the ones who weren’t were vocal and vicious. They wrote him letters calling him all the names you would imagine, demanding that he quit, threatening his family, wishing he would die of sickle cell anemia. Baseball was America’s biggest sport then, and Ruth’s record was its most sacred milestone, and those racists did not want a black man to break it. Aaron had a bodyguard. He spent lonely sleepless nights on the road.

The hate mail came in all through the winter before the Braves opened the 1974 season in Cincinnati.

In the first game, in his first at-bat, on his first swing, Aaron tied Ruth’s record.

Four nights later, in the Braves’ first home game, he broke it.

Two white boys, 17 years old, ran onto the field after the ball cleared the fence. They caught up with Aaron as he rounded second and ran with him almost all the way to third. Aaron was kind when he spoke of those two kids over the years. He even reunited with them a couple of times. They seem to have had the best intentions. But I’ve always wondered what Aaron really thought in that moment. Two white people coming out of nowhere in the heart of the South, where so many people like him had been ambushed and beaten and killed. In the stands, Aaron’s bodyguard thought about reaching for his pistol.

If it had been 1966, maybe that moment would have landed differently. But it was 1974, and while the South was not cured, it was starting to change, in part because of Henry Aaron.

Aaron lowered his head down and kept going. The white kids peeled away. He finished his journey and touched home.

***

I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had heroes. I admire lots of people, and love lots of people, but I think I’ve spent too much time trying to understand people at ground level to put anyone on a pedestal. The closest people I’ll ever have to heroes are my mom and dad.

They clawed their way from the cotton fields of south Georgia into enough of a middle-class life that my dad could buy a used bass boat and my mom could trade in one old VW Bug for another. One of the reasons they worked so hard over the years is so I wouldn’t have to. But another reason, I think, is that they believed in the value of doing something day after day and doing it well.

Today, on the day Henry Aaron died, I was thinking about the time my dad and I built a car port. The posts were old railroad ties, maybe 10 feet long and 100 pounds. I was probably 17 then, playing basketball every day, about as strong as I’d ever be in my life. My dad was in his mid-60s. I could not for the life of me tote one of those railroad ties across the yard. I’d pick one up, it would get unbalanced, I’d drop it and cuss to myself and dig splinters out of my forearms.

My dad would walk over and swing it up on his shoulder and stroll across the yard like he was going to get the paper.

Now, when I think about that, I think about Henry Aaron at the plate.

It was hard to criticize Aaron when it came to baseball. But some people used to nitpick that he never seemed to hustle. His hat never flew off like Willie Mays, he never plowed into the bases headfirst like Pete Rose, he never screwed himself into the ground swinging like Mickey Mantle.

What they didn’t understand was the thing I didn’t understand about my dad until much later: It takes so much effort to look effortless. It takes so much concentration to make something hard look casual. And it takes so many years of greatness to create something that doesn’t look like greatness. That type of greatness comes to feel ordinary, because we get so used to it.

Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record with one swing. But he became the best baseball player ever, and a black superstar in the South, and my favorite athlete of all time, because of all those other moments over all those other years that got him there. He swung and he swung until his swing was so nice and easy, it was almost a surprise when you looked up and the ball had cleared the fence.

–TT

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Journalism News

Three years on the mic

Three years ago this week, WFAE put out the first episode of my podcast, SouthBound. The first guest was Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, a civil-rights hero who integrated Clemson and almost beat Jesse Helms. We met at the station’s little studio uptown, which was walking distance from Harvey’s house.

He sat down and looked over at me and said: “So what have you gotten yourself into?”

I wasn’t sure. At all.

I’ve never had a career plan, except to do some kind of journalism and keep drawing paychecks. I definitely did not plan to make a living as a podcast host. Those of you who’ve heard me know that I have this rough scratchy voice, the result of surgery from throat cancer almost 30 years ago. It is not a voice for radio, and especially not the fleece blanket of a voice you often hear on NPR.

But I got lucky. A guy named Joe O’Connor came to Charlotte in 2015 to run WFAE. When he got to town, he asked for the names of some journalists he should get to know. Somebody mentioned me. So off and on, over the next couple of years, we’d have coffee or lunch. And at some point I mentioned that I had this idea about doing a podcast.

Every time I do a long magazine story, I do dozens of interviews — sometimes hours of conversations with the same person. You can’t put all that in a story, so I always have to pull the little strands of gold that fit best into whatever I’m writing. Sometimes I end up using almost nothing from what was an amazing conversation. I often wish we could just publish the transcript somewhere.

A good talk show has that feel to it. At its best it’s two people just talking — talking with a purpose, maybe, but with room to meander a bit and tell a story or two. And it can work even better in podcast form, where the show doesn’t have to be a certain length.

Beyond that, my idea was simple: talk to interesting Southerners and find out how the South influences who they are and what they do.

Joe talked it over with Ju-Don Marshall, who runs the WFAE newsroom, and Greg Collard, the main news editor. They agreed to let me give it a try.

Three years and 77 episodes later, here we are.

I’ve talked to Dale Earnhardt Jr. about being a father and to Vivian Howard about getting her kids out of the TV glare. I told fashion icon Andre Leon Talley that his robe reminded me of Ric Flair. (He didn’t know Flair but had heard of Andre the Giant.) These past few months, I’ve focused on talking to black Southerners about this year of racial reckoning — everyone from comedian Roy Wood Jr. to author Eddie Glaude to astronaut Charles Bolden.

And with the help of the incredible staff at WFAE — especially Joni Deutsch, our podcast guru — we’ve kept going through the pandemic. Once every couple of weeks I put on my headphones and start up Zoom and spend an hour with a fascinating human being. It’s a privilege to get to do this for a living.

It’s a lot to ask of a listener, to sit down for 30 or 40 minutes (sometimes more) to pay attention to a couple of people talking. It runs counter to the jump-cut way we live most of our lives now. I think that’s good. We need more conversations, more voices, more smart people taking the time to finish a thought. I hope one or two of our conversations on SouthBound have meant something to you. They’ve all meant a lot to me.

— TT

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News

How to chill today

It’s likely that we won’t have a definitive winner in the presidential race at the end of the day. Things will definitely get weird and might get scary. That mix of excitement and dread rolling around in my gut isn’t going away on its own. As always, I’m writing this as much for me as I am for you.

Many, many good reporters are on the case — including at the place where I work — but let me gently suggest that you don’t spend all day refreshing your feed. Nobody will know anything that matters until after supper Eastern time.

So here are a few ways to chill on this Election Day.

Look out somebody else’s window.

Listen to music that makes you feel good.

Get out in the fresh air.

Find something that makes you laugh.

Make something beautiful.

Remember how small we are in this big world.

— TT

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News

The reverse bucket list

I’ve been reading a little bit about work/life balance lately, because who knows what work is going to look like once ALL THIS is over, and mainly because I’ve always had trouble drawing lines between what I do for a living and my “real” life. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’m writing this at 11:30 at night, everybody else asleep in the house, Kraftwerk on my headphones. I don’t think my mom and dad did it this way.

Anyway. One of the stories I read is a piece by Arthur Brooks from The Atlantic on how most people peak in their careers much younger than they think (gulp). There’s a lot of good stuff in there about what our work means to us, and what it should mean to us, and at one point Brooks wanders off to India to talk to a guru. It always fills my heart to read a magazine with a big travel budget.

But the thing Brooks wrote that struck me most was this:

What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend who wrote something that got criticized on Twitter, which is not exactly narrowing it down, because everything gets criticized on Twitter. I told her I’ve been thinking about dumping Twitter, or at least cutting back to the bare minimum — not just because of the meanness and snark, but because it’s rewiring the way I think. When writing columns was the main way I made a living, I used to walk around in the world and see everything in a column-sized box. Now, everything I process, my brain turns into a tweet. That can’t be good.

Plus, Wright Thompson has a point.

My point is, there’s a lot I need to chip away — a reverse bucket list — to make my life closer to what I want it to be. Reducing my Twitter use is one of the many things on that list. Or, at the very least, curating my social media better to filter out some of the trash.

Maybe my reverse bucket list is more like one of those dumpsters people rent when they clean out a house. There’s a lot to get rid of.

— TT