AJC > Sports > Blog > Archives > 2007 > December > 11
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
My friend, George Morris
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I beg your indulgence this morning.
I don’t want to talk about the BCS and whether or not there should be a playoff in college football.
I don’t want to talk about the coaching carousel, the agents, and the millions of dollars these people are chasing.
I don’t want to talk about any of the things that fans think are wrong with college football. We can do that another time.
Today I want to talk about my friend, George Morris.
It is a sign of our times, and a sad one I might add, that the first six pages of this morning’s sports section were consumed with news about a man whose selfishness and arrogance embarrassed and humiliated his family and university. That same man has all but destroyed the professional organization that once laid the entire world before his feet.
Our culture, and the media that feeds it, is consumed with the wealthy and the famous, especially when their shortcomings can be put on full public display. We just love it when the rich and talented crash and burn. They get the ink in the obsessive culture that all of us have played a role in creating.
That’s why you should know about George Morris, a man who spent his life giving back to the game and the people that he loved.
A man who was one of the greatest ambassadors in the history of Georgia Tech and who did everything in his power to further the legacy of its great coach, Bobby Dodd.
A member of the College Football Hall of Fame who never thought that football was supposed to make him rich. It just made him happy.
A man with an infinite ability to collect friends and admirers.
George Morris was a football official for 30 years, a pretty impressive run. His last game as an official was a famous one, the Alabama-Auburn game of Dec, 2, 1989, the first time Alabama had ever played at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Not a bad way to go out.
Every year George would return to the College Football Hall of Fame dinner in New York, where he was inducted in 1981. He loved being around his fellow Hall of Famers. Every year in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, the spotlight would hit Morris, he would stand in his tuxedo, wave to the crowd and smile the largest of smiles. The emcee of the banquet would say “a 1981 inductee from Georgia Tech, the great George Morris.” It never got old.
And well after the banquet George could be found in one of the lounges of the Waldorf-Astoria, holding court with people of all ages. I have been in the audience. It was great stuff.
Here is the point. George Morris was a man who spent his life after his football playing days trying to give something back. He loved Georgia Tech and wanted to do whatever he could to help the Institute. He loved Bobby Dodd, which is why he devoted so much of his time as president of the Bobby Dodd Foundation. He loved his family, his community, and his friends.
The game of football in general, and Georgia Tech in particular, had given George Morris a better life. Because of that, he felt an obligation to give something back and spent his life doing it.
George had a heart as big as a Mack truck. But on Monday the call came that his big old heart had stop beating. He was so much larger than life that it just never occurred to some of us that he was mortal like the rest of us.
George Morris was a man. He was a man’s man.
And there are too damned few of them left.
