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Thursday, March 8, 2007
Total recall of SEC tourney gaffes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
This will be my 18th SEC tournament, and when I think back on them I mostly think about Dale Brown.
I think about the time he went after Carlus Groves (after the Tennessee player had gone after Shaquille O’Neal) and we in the media expected Daddy Dale to pull a Woody Hayes and resign on the spot. Being Daddy Dale, he didn’t. Being Daddy Dale, he came out swinging (orally) and railed against the league for not protecting the frail Shaq. (Who would turn pro a month later.)
I think about the other time the subject of retirement arose, or seemed to arise, regarding Daddy Dale. It was in 1996 in New Orleans. LSU had had another lousy season — most of Brown’s years there were fruitful, but not at the close of his tenure — and he, in a standard-issue opening statement after another Round 1 loss, said something to the effect that “this brings to an end” another chapter in his life.
I looked at Curry Kirkpatrick of ESPN, who was sitting next to me, and said, “Did he just retire?” And Curry said, “I think so.”
Being Daddy Dale, he went on for another five minutes before taking his first question. I asked it. I said, “Excuse me, but did you just retire?”
He said: “Who are you?” I told him. “What paper are you with?” I told him that, too. “You obviously know nothing about me.” Well, we’d known one another for 15 years — I’d once done a 120-inch feature on him — and were such avid conversationalists that he’d call my house in the middle of the summer just to ask questions like, “Do you know anybody who’d be willing to cover the Olympics for a Yugoslav paper?”
And then Daddy Dale swore he hadn’t retired, that retirement was the furthest thing from his mind, that only an ignorant fool would have interpreted his remarks thusly. And then he saw Curry sitting alongside me and said, “Hey, there’s Curry Kirkpatrick.”
And Curry said: “Dale, I thought you were gone, too.”
Postscript: Brown announced his (actual) retirement midway through the next season. The last time I saw Daddy Dale was at the 2004 Final Four in San Antonio, and he handed me a book of his inspirational stories. “Good reading for when you’re in the bathroom,” he said.
And Claude Felton, the Georgia publicist who was serving as the moderator that night in the Superdome, never lets a month go by without asking me, “Who are you? What paper are you with?”
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