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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2007 > September > 26
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Evergreen memories, brown turf
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With another home game approaching Saturday (the last until Troy comes for homecoming in November), I got to thinking about how gameday has changed for me over the years. I’ve been a season ticket holder (sitting in the same seats!) since 1975, and I was in the student section during college, but before that I used to have different ways of getting in (including once when a cop my Dad knew let us in free at the main gate).
That freebie was a one-time thing, though. When my son and I were leaving the most recent home game, I pointed out the spot near the North end of the bridge that used to be the gate where cheap “high school” tickets to the games were sold early on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Those tickets put you in the old end-zone bleachers but were only a dollar, as I recall.
However, after Vince Dooley put the football program on the rise, the high school tickets weren’t always available for sold-out big games. I needed a more sure way of getting inside the stadium, and as a junior high school student, the cost of a full ticket (about five or six bucks by then, I think) was more than my allowance could swing. I was kinda young for the crowd that sat by the railroad tracks back then, and the view from Sanford Bridge left a lot to be desired.
But my Dad was friends with the man who was in charge of distribution of souvenir programs at UGA games, and so I got on the list of kids (all boys at that time, I believe) who peddled the programs at home games.
It was a sweet deal. You actually got PAID to go to Georgia football games! Well, really, you got in free and you earned 10 cents for every program you sold (the price was a dollar, which was twice was the programs had sold for the previous season). Technically, after you’d finished selling for the day (only a few die-hards continued after kickoff), you were supposed to sit on the grassy hill on the North side. But many of us preferred to try and find an empty seat somewhere in the stands, and it usually wasn’t too hard. I managed to see some games from the 40- or 50-yard-line of the lower level that way!
You’d pick up your programs the afternoon before the game at the gate next to Memorial Hall. The programs were bound in cellophane in packets of 25 and you could take as many as you thought you could sell (and wanted to lug around). Generally, I’d take 50 for regular games and 100 for Homecoming or a game against a big rival. (Some sellers took many more than that; you turned back in any you didn’t sell.) The routine was that my Dad would drop me off in the vicinity of the stadium mid-morning Saturday (this is when game time was 2 p.m.) and I’d sell until just before kickoff. I usually managed to sell out, but that wasn’t the main point of the exercise. It was to get in to the games!
By then, the UGA programs were entirely locally produced and seemed to have more interesting articles in them than the ones today that go for six times the price. In earlier years, the programs mostly had featured generic football artwork that probably appeared on hundreds of game programs around the country. But by the mid-1960s, the Georgia programs had nice full-color pictures of UGA players and coaches on the covers, like they do now.
All of which ties in to the new Vintage Georgia Football 2008 Calendar from Asgard Press that I got the other day, featuring a different cover of a vintage UGA football program for every month. I’d been buying the usual UGA calendars (featuring recent players) for years but by accident stumbled across the 2007 Asgard calendar in an Athens bookstore last year. Its eye-catching cover sported the cover of the program from the Sanford Field Stadium (as it was called at the time) dedicatory game with Yale (complete with bulldog mascots for both teams). There also were programs from the 1930s on up to the 1964 game against Kentucky, which had a pretty cheerleader and Uga I on the cover.
The programs come from UGA’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and each month’s 11” x 14” cover is perforated at the top so you can remove it and frame it if you like. This year’s calendar doesn’t have any games quite as notable as the one against Yale, but it does have the program from the 1979 game against LSU that marked the stadium’s 50th anniversary (and incorporated those matching bulldogs from the original cover). Other games include Texas in 1957, Stetson in 1934, Clemson in 1945, Boston College in 1951 plus regular SEC opponents and the program cover from the 1929 game against Tech. A new addition this year is a notation of the date and place of each game (one from Jacksonville is included) and the final score of the game that day.
Alison Trimble of Asgard tells me the 2008 calendars are available in several Athens area stores, including the University Bookstore on campus. You also can buy them or get more information at www.vintagedawgs.com.
TURF ALERT: I was disturbed to read the Athens Banner-Herald report earlier this week that, in keeping with a strict watering ban that went into effect Sept. 17 in Athens, UGA groundskeepers no longer will water campus lawns and athletic fields, including the one at Sanford Stadium. North Campus already is hurting from all the tailgating that’s moved up there in the past couple of years, and barring enough rain, Sanford groundskeeper Paul “Waldo” Terrell said the stadium’s green turf could start to fade by this Saturday’s game. By the next game in November it could be a brown, torn-up mess. Not only will it look bad, Terrell told the ABH, its playability will be affected. The field’s base is sand, and without water the sand gets dry and loose. So turf could start coming out in chunks as it’s played on and compromising players’ footing. If the field gets torn up too badly, the entire turf may have to be replaced by next season, which could cost about $100,000. I’m all for UGA showing solidarity with the Athens community, but that seems a mighty expensive proposition. Surely someone in President Michael Adams’ office can get a waiver from the watering ban to prevent having to replace the entire field!
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