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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2006 > January > 19
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Where else but in Athens?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As the recruiting season enters the final stages, the UGA coaching staff no doubt has already made the case for the school’s facilities and playing opportunities in Coach Mark Richt’s championship-winning program. And, hopefully, they’ve also sold them on the education they can get at a public university whose academic standing continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
For many recruits, that may be enough. Those elite players capable of playing on Sundays after college probably are primarily concerned with how quickly they can start and whether the program will properly fine-tune and showcase their abilities. Others want to know their chances of playing time, and whether they can leave Georgia with a degree that will set them up for making a decent living after football.
The town in which a school is located might not be uppermost in a lot of recruits’ minds in picking where to play college ball — otherwise you wouldn’t see many kids considering spending three, four, five or even six years (with redshirts) in the desolate environs of places like Auburn, Ala., or Clemson, S.C.!
But for those savvy kids who realize there should be a lot more to their lives during college than just football, the Dawgs coaching staff hopefully is using the Athens Experience as a seal-the-deal selling point. And I’m not talking about the crowded downtown bar scene — though that’s no doubt an attraction (and one that, unfortunately, has proved too attractive for a few Dawgs over the years).
I’m talking more the kinds of things that lead so many UGA students, athletes or not, to wind up never leaving Athens, or trying their best to make their way back to it.
Besides being a beautiful, historic setting for a major university and having the best-looking women in the SEC, the Classic City is small enough to be easy to get around in (except on game days, when football players won’t be driving anyway), and yet is second only to Atlanta in this region when it comes to entertainment and cultural offerings. National magazines have named it one of the best places in the nation to go to school, in no small part because of its internationally known music scene — it gave birth to the B-52’s and still is home to acts like R.E.M., Widespread Panic and Drive-By Truckers. (And Atlanta, with its glittering offerings, is only a little over an hour away.)
The local politics can be maddening, but Athens has big-city sophistication combined with small-town charm. It’s a regional business and shopping hub and yet is mere minutes from rolling farmland, recreational lakes and gorgeous forests. (Heck, just a few blocks from the university is a beautiful hiking trail in parkland that used to be Fred Birchmore’s woods when I spent many a happy afternoon roaming there as a kid.)
And where else but in Athens’ Five Points can you enjoy the ridiculously cheap old-fashioned soda fountain treats dished up by Hal and the gang at Hodgson’s Pharmacy (where the UGA cheerleaders pay a good-luck visit to Coach Mike’s Corner before every home game), while next door rising-star chef Hugh Acheson is serving up his New Southern cuisine at Five & Ten, a restaurant so good that “metro” Atlanta claims it as one of its own!
And all this in a town that attracts some of the world’s best cyclists each year for a race through the streets of downtown, which also plays host to music, art and human rights festivals.
I like the way retired UGA history prof Emory Thomas, a nationally renowned Civil War scholar, summed up Athens recently in the local paper when he was talking about his time living on Hill Street:
“I could stand on my front porch and next door was Bill Berry, the drummer with R.E.M.; catty-corner across the street was Dean Rusk, the former secretary of state; and another neighbor was Velena Vego, the booking agent with the 40 Watt Club. I could see Vic Chesnutt’s house, the folk singer and composer, and I could see the apartment of Bill McFeely, who won a Pulitzer prize for a biography on Ulysses S. Grant.”
“If you can do all that,” Thomas said, “the place can’t be all bad.”
On the contrary, sounds like a great place to go to school — and play college football!
