HARTMAN FLEW ‘BY SEAT OF HIS PANTS’

Bill Hartman signs off for the last time Sunday night.

You won’t see an act like this one again.

In a mercurial profession, defined by turnover, ego and the almighty ratings book, Hartman has spent an entire 35-year television career in the same city, sportscasting with the civility and amusement of a neighbor talking over the fence. And that ain’t so easy, folks.

If ESPN has lit the way for the boo-ya generation of anchors —- louder, brasher, hipper —- Hartman was simply Bill Hartman, hardly flashy, imperturbable and never, ever fired. To have done so for 35 years —- he sat down at WAGA’s set to give his first run-down barely 48 hours after he graduated from Georgia —- is to flaunt TV’s nature.

“That’s unheard of,” said Chuck Dowdle, sports director at WSB, where Hartman finishes out a 13-year run. “And it wouldn’t happen today.”

Now 60 —- his birthday was July 21 —- Hartman says he is getting out because “it seemed like the right time for me. And the business is changing.” But he takes a good chunk of history with him, a bridge to Atlanta’s infancy as a major league city.

He replaced legendary Ed Thilenius at WAGA and hosted (somehow) the international television feed from the IOC’s Atlanta Olympics announcement in Tokyo. He not only broke the story that Vince Dooley wasn’t going to coach at Auburn after all in 1980, but that it would be Ray Goff who replaced him eight years later.

Throughout, it has been hard to find anyone who doesn’t like him.

“You know what? I was in the Golden Ages,” he said. “I’ve been in it 35 years, but 25 of those years, you kind of made it up as you went along. I made the decisions on what we did and how we did it and how much time to spend. Now, it’s consultants and time-restraints.

“You don’t do it from the seat of your pants. Somebody tells you.”

From his living room sofa, Hartman is looking out at his short-term plan: golf at Indian Hills Country Club (his home borders the fifth hole on the Seminole course) and monitoring the family of bluebirds along his fence line. They are already on a fifth set of hatchlings this year. His binoculars sit on the kitchen table.

He is trying to calculate how many high school football games he covered. 400? 500? More?

“One of my great joys in life is to have somebody come up to me and say, ‘You know what? Man, 35 years ago you interviewed me after the Walton game when I scored that touchdown to beat Druid Hills,’ ” Hartman said. “He’s a grown man with his own kids in high school, maybe in college now.”

It came down to the issue of air conditioning.

As a freshman in UGA’s Grady College of Journalism, Hartman had already been a paid correspondent for the Athens Banner-Herald (covering Athens High’s state runner-up team of 1965), as well as the Atlanta Constitution (stringing reports from Bulldog practices). His copy had been worked over by another young Banner-Herald part-timer named Lewis Grizzard.

But as Hartman sat sweltering in the un-air conditioned J-school classroom, he was aware of a new facility being built down Baldwin Street, which included facilities for telecommunications.

“It was air conditioned and had these neat TV cameras,” he said. “I stuck my head in there spring of my freshman year and said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to be an electronic guy.’ “

WAGA shortly thought so too, hiring him while still a senior, putting him on the air two days after his graduation in 1970. It was a special nine-month gig while regular sportscaster Bill Curry —- yes, that Bill Curry —- resumed his career with the Baltimore Colts for what would be their Super Bowl title year.

When Curry came back, Hartman fulfilled an ROTC obligation with a 22-month stint in the U.S. Air Force as a public information officer in Utah.

He spent 1973 as Dan Magill’s lone assistant in the UGA Sports Information office, which included public address duties at Sanford Stadium.

“I learned so many things on how to write from him,” Hartman said. “I mean, thanks to Dan Magill, I know after a comma, you space.”

WAGA re-hired him in January 1974, after dismissing Thilenius, the former Voice of the Dogs. Far from estranging the two, Hartman counted Thilenius as a mentor and later served as a pallbearer at his funeral in 1981.

Hartman spent a career walking a fine line between objectivity and his UGA heritage. His father Bill Sr. was a College Football Hall of Famer at Georgia, as well as UGA’s kicking coach for 24 years. His mother Ruth was Miss UGA in 1937, the year Bill captained the Bulldogs.

While he pleads a strong case for impartiality —- “If that wasn’t the case, I never would have lasted 35 years” —- Hartman said he was rarely able to tap his father as a news source.

“My late mother was my best source at Georgia,” he said, crediting Ruth for tips on both the Dooley-Auburn and Goff stories. “My father wouldn’t tell me anything. My mother would tell me everything.”

Nearly his entire career, Hartman was a weekend anchor, who traditionally was paid less but spent just two late nights at the office. The daily anchor, by contrast, works all five weeknights. This was important to a father of two.

There was one solid whack to his career, and it came in 1980, when he had ascended to sports director at WAGA. A news director named Andy Fisher demoted Hartman, brought in Corey McPherrin for the No. 1 job but then asked Hartman to stay on as No. 2. Hartman was crushed.

“I was pretty upset. I could have gotten on the treadmill, put my resume out there and gone somewhere else,” he said. “But I went back and told Andy I’m going to stick around. I think this worked out better.”

Years later, the same Andy Fisher, after a series of jobs elsewhere, returned to Atlanta but this time at WSB as a general manager. In 1996, he hired Hartman away from WAGA with a substantial raise. (WSB is owned by Cox Enterprises, which also owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

“The Bill you see on the air is truly Bill Hartman,” said Jennifer Rigby, a former WSB executive but now a consultant with the Los Angeles-based SmithGeiger media strategy firm. “He gives himself to the audience and he’s not putting on an act, and he’s not someone different than who he is when you sit down and have a cup of [coffee] with him. He is authentic.”

When he broke in, sportscasters processed, cut and spliced their own film. The sports report might run six minutes long, a highlighted segment in the middle of the 11 o’clock report. Now all editing is packaged digitally, and the nightly segment runs 2:15, crammed into the end of the show, where it often gets preempted by breaking news. The shows are formatted by the consultants.

This is no longer the job they taught down at the new journalism building in the late 1960s. But if that has bothered Hartman, he hopes that some post-retirement consulting work might show station managers a better way.

In the meantime, his 19 handicap needs work —- his office at WSB gave him 10 golf lessons for a going-away gift —- and come the start of the football season, he wants to try watching in a new way.

“I’m going to miss it, but it’s time to be a fan,” he said. “And that’s what I’m going to enjoy and not having to worry. For the first time since 1972, I’m going to be able to watch a college football game without having to deal with it. And I can’t wait.”