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Thursday, December 13, 2007
Well-traveled coach anchors at Tech
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
This is the Paul Johnson you don’t know. Mountain boy. Born and bred in the Blue Ridge. Hometown Newland, North Carolina, population 645 in his day, just about the same today.
One traffic light, a drug store, a supermarket, filling station and the Avery County courthouse. “We lived in the middle of town and I walked a block and a half to school,” he said. In his heart, he had his mind set on being a pro athlete. “By the time I was in high school I knew I wasn’t good enough, so after that I aimed at being a coach.”
His inspiration was close at hand, the coach at Avery County High School, an old-timer named Elmer Aldridge. As he looks back on it today, he reckons that Elmer Aldridge had as much to do with what he has become as anybody. He played football for Elmer, walked to and from the practice field to home. After high school, he went on to Western Carolina, across the mountains at Cullowhee.
He never went out for football, and when he tried his hand at basketball, he never made the team. That’s when he got on with the ambition he had set for himself. Coaching. Like Elmer Aldridge.
After college, he went back home to Newland to become Elmer’s assistant at Avery County High, then got a job at Lees-McRae Junior College, and at the same time worked on his master’s at Appalachian State, just a few miles away in Boone. Then he got aboard the carousel and the coaching merry-go-round was on.
By now, the year was 1983, and Erk Russell came calling from Georgia Southern. Johnson was a perfect choice for the Eagles. He didn’t cost much and they didn’t pay a lot. He was Erk’s offensive coordinator, and during one of Georgia Southern’s national championship games, Bob Wagner, about to become head coach at Hawaii, liked Johnson’s offense so much he hired him. From Statesboro to Honolulu … man, was that mountain kid from Avery County moving up in the world.
He spent seven seasons on Oahu, then Navy recruited him to coach the offense, and by this time, the kid whose playing career topped out at Avery County High was moving along. At last count, I came up with three Division I-A head coaches who never played college ball, Charlie Weis at Notre Dame, Mark Mangino at Kansas, and Paul Johnson. There was another, but at the moment, Dennis Franchione is adrift.
Well, the rest of the story is pretty well documented. After one season at Navy, he went back to Georgia Southern, and there won some national championships himself. Now, Navy discovered it couldn’t live without him and called him to save the ship. The devastating blow heard around the seas was delivered by Georgia Tech, oddly enough, when the heartless George O’Leary ran up a score of 70 points on the poor Middies, worst beating in the history of the academy. It was brutal.
Now, a coach has to have courage to walk into one of the academies, where recruiting is severely restrictive, and where the team’s previous two seasons had bottomed out at 1-20 — and that’s not an interstate.
“I knew you could win at Navy. I was going around in circles, to Georgia Southern and back again. I’d done all I could do at Statesboro, and since I’d been there before, I knew something about coaching at the academies,” he said.
He showed up at Annapolis with a show of bravado. “There is no excuse for not playing winning football at the Naval Academy. Recruiting is different. You have to work within the system, but it can be done,” and he proved it. He won the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award, took his Middies to bowl games, and “Anchors Aweigh” rang out across the seas with a new vigor.
That was the highlight of his career. Now he has another. He has the job that Dodd once had. He’s the new coach at Georgia Tech, and he may revive the vigor in “Ramblin’ Wreck.”
“I just wish Coach Eldridge were still alive to see something he played a part in,” he said. “I don’t try to pattern myself after any other coach, I just try to be myself, something I learned from Coach Elmer. That’s all I can do.”
Stand by for further developments. It ain’t going to be dull.
Permalink | Comments (76) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC
Years of baseball history tarnished
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The only run scored on the night the Braves won their only World Series was generated by David Justice, who was named Thursday in the Mitchell Report. There was no implication therein that Justice used steroids or HGH as a Braves player — indeed, Justice maintained to investigators he’d never used a performance-enhancing substance — but it makes you wonder.
Then again, the Braves were undone in Game 5 of the 1993 NLCS by a 10th-inning homer from Lenny Dykstra, also named. They were beaten 1-0 in Game 5 of the 1996 World Series by Andy Pettitte, also named. They were beaten twice in the 1997 NLCS by Kevin Brown, also named. They were beaten in three separate postseasons by Roger Clemens, also named.
What the Mitchell Report tells us is that most every accomplishment in the sport over the past two decades is suspect. Clemens, owner of seven Cy Young awards, is named. Barry Bonds, owner of seven MVP plaques, is named. Troy Glaus, MVP of the 2002 World Series, is named. Eric Gagne, the 2003 National League Cy Young winner, is named. Of the eight American League MVP awards bestowed from 1995 through 2002, five were taken by players named in the report.
The report, it must be said, is more anecdotal than evidentiary. (Clemens has already denied everything.) Few current players deigned to meet with investigators, which tells us something about the priorities of current players. If the intent is to poke holes in Mitchell’s methodology, we’ll be here until pitchers and catchers report. But the Mitchell Report, for all its flaws, carries the undeniable ring of truth. We, meaning all of us, knew what we were seeing these past two decades, and we, meaning all of us, chose to ignore it.
Said Mitchell: “Everyone involved in baseball these past two decades — commissioners, team officials, the players’ association and players — shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era.”
There couldn’t have been a more damning indictment, but the beauty of this report was that it didn’t advocate returning to 1990 and replaying every game or striking down every fishy record. Baseball is where it is: It has marketed a product largely based on cheating, and nothing it can do now will override that chilling reality.
Baseball cannot go backward and affix asterisks to specific achievements of dubious merit because every achievement has been rendered dubious. Do we view the Yankees’ reign the same way knowing that Clemens and Pettitte and Justice and Mike Stanton and Gary Sheffield and Denny Neagle were named in the report’s 409 pages? Do we regard the Braves’ run of 14 division titles as pristine, seeing they’d also employed Justice and Stanton and Sheffield and Neagle?
There’s nothing to be gained from fighting the battles that, through the negligence of baseball and the resistance of the players’ union, went unfought. Clemens won 354 games. Bonds hit 762 homers. The Yankees took four titles in five seasons. Those marks must stand because any attempt to override them would have no beginning and no end.
Steroids changed the sport. The idea is, or at least should be, to change it back. Random testing has had an effect (though no effective urine test exists for HGH). This seems the moment for baseball to offer blanket amnesty and let the days of pharmaceutical excess recede into rancid history. Said Mitchell: “Letting go of the past and looking toward the future is a hard but necessary step.”
But then, two hours later, we saw how this silly sport got into this mess in the first place. The tin-eared commissioner met the media and essentially trashed the concept of amnesty. “Punishment will be determined on a case-by-case basis,” Bud Selig said.
On the day Mitchell advocated moving only forward, Selig sounded as if he means to go backward and pick every nit. He didn’t want to know anything a decade ago, and now, having received the report he belatedly commissioned, he needs to know everything. There’s a word for such a man. That word is “nitwit.”
Permalink | Comments (64) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Falcons have hit rock bottom
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Until this week, I wasn’t prepared to call this the worst Falcons’ season. I kept going back to 1989, when the team went 3-13 and Marion Campbell quit with four games remaining and two players died in car crashes and attendance for the final game was 7,792. But now …
This is the worst.
This is the worst season in the history of professional sports.
This week pushed it to the absolute bottom. (And hey, it’s only Thursday!) On Monday the franchise quarterback appeared in court wearing prison stripes. On Tuesday the coach appeared on TV doing “Whoo, Pig Sooey!” with the Arkansas cheerleaders. You couldn’t make this stuff up. You could barely believe it when you saw it with your own eyes.
Obviously, I was wrong about Michael Vick being a good guy, wrong about Bobby Petrino being a good fit, wrong in the belief that Petrino was actually warming to the NFL. “We need to finish the season and find something to build on,” he said Monday night, and 18 hours later it became known that he wouldn’t be doing either thing.
A lot of people distrusted Petrino from the start. I wasn’t among that number. I’m not going to pretend I knew him well, but I thought I knew a little about his methods and his aspirations. Turns out I knew nothing about anything. He was the first man to the exit. He didn’t even make provisions for his staff, which includes his brother Paul. What kind of guy acts like that?
The Falcons have lined up to take shots at Petrino, and every one of them is justified. He dishonored a team and a profession. I thought he was a real pro, but he was only pro-Petrino. For all the damage Vick did to this organization, Petrino has done just as much.
On Monday it seemed the worst was, finally and mercifully, behind the Falcons. On Tuesday the outbound Petrino didn’t even let the door hit him in the behind. And with that, this officially became the worst season ever.
Permalink | Comments (137) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
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