Kemp difficult to classify in history’s file cabinet

Now comes the tricky part.

The Jan Kemp folder is thick with tales of boat-rocking, windmill-tilting and an almost symbiotic relationship with turmoil. So, where do we file it now that she has died?

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Jan Kemp sued the University of Georgia for firing her for blowing the whistle on the preferential treatment given to athletes.

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History demands a label for the woman who turned Georgia football on its decidedly square head in the 1980s.

To the late humorist Lewis Grizzard, she was “Jugular Jan,” so called because it seemed she went for the throat in a successful federal suit against his beloved Bulldogs program. Others saw her as “Jan of Arc,” as the headline of an Atlanta Magazine story read in 1991.

Or yet another view: “Everyone knew Mom as the Jan Kemp,” said her daughter, Margie, 24. “To me and (brother) Will, she was just Mom.” She was the woman who taught them to write, to think and, in the words of her son, to “do things for the right reason.”

As a remedial English teacher in the long-since phased-out developmental studies program at the University of Georgia, Kemp worked with numerous Bulldogs athletes. She began to criticize the department when asked to persuade two other professors to change grades for Georgia jocks. She continued to speak out in-house against preferential treatment for athletes and was fired in 1982.

A long legal battle ended in federal court in Atlanta in 1986 with Kemp winning a wrongful termination suit and a $2.5 million judgment (later reduced to $1.08 million).

Testimony during the trial painted a picture of an athlete-friendly environment in which some woefully unprepared players, a few barely literate, who were kept afloat academically by a corrupt program.

In the aftermath, university President Fred Davison resigned. Two other administrators were reassigned. The university raised standards for athletes. Nationwide, the NCAA instituted more difficult qualifying standards — including a minimum 700 SAT score — in 1986.

Even decades later, on the news of her death 10 days ago, Kemp was the inspiration for a lively game of opinion pong.

From behind the anonymity of the Internet, bloggers reacting to Kemp’s death on AJC.com touched every extreme.

From the heartless: “It took the Bulldogs 20 years to win another SEC Championship after Kemp’s meddling. Good riddance.”

To the glowing: “Jan Kemp was a good person who did the right thing when it was the hardest to do. That’s true integrity.”

On the whole, her children have been pleased with the reactions following their mother’s death, holding tightly to the belief that history will treat her kindly. “I think it will be good to her. It’s a no-brainer,” said Kemp’s son. “Mom did what was right, and that’s all there is to it.”

History has its hands full, though, with this one. Kemp’s was a complex life, which she made plain enough herself by the first sentence of an unfinished autobiography. Typed on those now-yellowed pages was a contemplation of the first of her two suicide attempts:

“It was about 2 a.m. on August 3, 1982, and I was eagerly anticipating the release my death would bring.” (Kemp went on to describe trying to stab herself that night. She also detailed a later attempt by drug overdose).

But by the end of Chapter I, Kemp had emerged from the depression that settled on her after being fired by Georgia. And she was ready for a fight.

So, then, do we place Kemp under “M” for martyr?

That anyone would take on Georgia football in the early 1980s was remarkable. Those were the salad days of Vince Dooley’s Dogs — a national championship and three straight SEC titles won on the prodigious thighs of Herschel Walker.

“She had the courage of her convictions, almost in a crazy way,” said Hue Henry, the Athens attorney who represented Kemp. “A lot of people said she was crazy. They still say it. Thinking back on the things she did, normal people just don’t do that.

“Sometimes you need to have people who are a little crazy.”

At 6-foot-3, with a radiant kind of intelligence, Kemp was a ready-made lightning rod. She was vilified by fans who held her responsible for embarrassing the university and for leading to higher academic standards that they regarded as a severe competitive disadvantage. Larry Munson, the legendary radio voice of Georgia football, never would refer to Kemp by name. She forever was only “that woman.”

But if Kemp flinched, no one ever saw it. She stayed in Athens. Reinstated after the trial, she worked at UGA until 1989, and afterward as a teacher at various other smaller area colleges and high schools. Her children still live there, son Will a junior at Georgia majoring in cognitive science.

“She was OK here. Maybe I’m isolated, but I think in Athens, we get it,” Henry said. “The academic community was solidly in Jan Kemp’s corner. Now, I wouldn’t have gone to Valdosta with her.”

Some would put the Kemp file under “H” for hero. After all, People magazine declared her a “hero for the ’80s.”

To this day, Dooley, who coached until 1988 and was Georgia’s athletic director until 2004, maintains that the problems at UGA were overblown. But he does admit that Kemp was an engine for change.

“It was a very difficult time, to say the least,” Dooley said last week, “because there was one accusation after another. While the greatest majority of those were without foundation, some were valid. After a long, trying period, our attitude was we would take advantage of the opportunity to make the program better.”

“If anything, she did us a favor,” said Dick Bestwick, the former assistant athletic director brought in to improve the academic progress of Georgia athletes shortly after the Kemp verdict. “She crystallized the situation, effectively making sure we were doing things the right way and we were getting the support to make that happen.”

Kemp herself realized that her actions weren’t going to magically sanitize college sports. That would require a much bigger mop than she could hold.

In a 2006 interview with Mike Fulford, who just completed a doctoral dissertation on the Kemp case, she stated a rather dark view on the subject.

“I don’t think it’s ever clean because there’s too much money behind it and too many athletes who are throwing their lives away on it when they could be down the road doing something else,” she told him

Or, do we file this story under “R” for rabble-rouser? For Kemp was a whistle-blower who liked the shrill sound of the whistle.

“A lot of the articles now describe Mom as shy,” said her son, Will. “Margie and I didn’t know that Mom. I don’t know that she loved the attention — but maybe she did.”

Her willingness to carry the fight also played out in her private life, notably in a divorce and heated battle for custody of her children. For 348 days ending in 1992, she sat in a Cobb County jail rather than pay a court-ordered $1,400 for her ex-husband’s attorneys’ fees.

Fulford can’t prove it, but the student of the Kemp case theorizes that the stress of the Georgia trial fed other stresses like a stream feeds a river. And that turbulent river eventually would contribute to her development of Alzheimer’s disease at such a relatively young age.

“That was very tough on Mom,” son Will said. “She was so proud of her intelligence, she had a tough time admitting (the scope of Alzheimer’s) to herself.”

Her last fight finished, Kemp was buried in the family plot in Griffin a week ago. There is no epitaph on the headstone. “We haven’t picked that out yet,” her son said. Some lives are not so easily summed up.