Decatur High football reunion recalls different time

It was a time of obsessive segregation, where not only Decatur and all opponents were white, but Decatur High itself had separate buildings for boys and girls. Back then the city closed shop on Friday nights, except for a clothier named Ted Levy, who gave the star of the game a free sweater.

“I had mine for years,” Reed said. “Made of wool, but it wore like iron.”

Decatur went 25-0 in 1949-50, but that was merely the golden harvest of an extremely fertile period. From 1943-53 the Bulldogs went 103-11-6 and never lost more than three games in a season. No one can explain what was in the city’s water back then to reap such a luxurious crop.

About 15 players on those 1949-50 teams would earn college football scholarships, including 10 who played at Georgia Tech. Yet Decatur High in the 1940s had only about 300 students, and all football players lived within two or three miles of the school, an increasingly quaint notion in contemporary prep sports.

“I can’t explain it,” said David Redford, starting quarterback both seasons. “But Decatur did have a great tradition way before we got there, going back to [the 1920s]. You knew brothers, uncles and fathers who played for Decatur. When I was in grammar school, I couldn’t wait to grow up and get to high school to help them win nine or 10 games.”

The school’s predominant personality was head coach Charlie Waller, barely 30 years old in 1950. He went 44-3-1 in four seasons before moving on as an assistant at, in order, Auburn, Texas, Clemson, and the AFL’s San Diego Chargers. He finished with George Allen and the Washington Redskins, who lost to undefeated Miami in the 1973 Super Bowl.

“He was the kind of guy,” Redford said, “if you won by 20 or 30 points, he’d have you believing you were plain lucky, and that next week, unless some divine miracle intervened, you were likely to get killed.”

The 1949 team went 13-0 and in an interview a half century later Waller (who died last year) recalled “we were behind in four of those games at halftime, and behind in the fourth quarter in three of them.”

Indeed Decatur trailed Tifton 19-7 entering the fourth quarter of the championship game before roaring back for a 21-19 victory. “What I remember,” Reed said, “is that Tifton’s star player was a middle guard named [Bobby] ‘Swamp Water’ Griffin, who ate centers and guards like me alive. They say he ran around the South Georgia swamps barefooted fighting snakes and alligators.”

By 1950 the Decatur team must have had Swamp Water fever, for they dominated nearly everyone on their schedule while going 12-0. Except in a 7-6 win over Rome, every victory was by double figures, including a 26-12 conquest of Lanier High in Macon in the state championship.

The star player both years was halfback/linebacker Larry Morris. If today’s surviving Decatur players have foggy interpretations of individual games, each has palpable, living, breathing recollections of “The Brahma Bull.”

“He was incredible,” said Morris’ son, Shan Morris, himself a three-year starter at Auburn in the late 1980s. “I’ve seen pictures from his high school and college days, and by comparison, the other players look anorexic. He was a genetic freak.”

Larry Morris would star for four years at Tech, including the 1952 national championship season, before playing 12 years in the NFL. With the Chicago Bears in 1963 he was the NFL championship game’s MVP with an interception and two sacks of Y.A. Tittle.

Today Morris lives at the Presbyterian Village in Austell, where he gets around-the-clock care for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a severe brain disorder that probably stems from his long playing career. “He first started showing symptoms in 1988,” Shan Morris said. “He drove to Decatur to meet with some of his high school buddies, and then he got lost coming home.”

Kay Morris, Larry’s wife of 53 years, says her husband can no longer speak or walk. “We’re not sure what he knows or who he knows,” she said. “We think he knows his family, that we are his people.

“I know this,” she said. “He loved Decatur, and he loved those days. I’ll make sure to tell him the guys are getting together Friday night.”