GREENE COUNTY
Noted sportswriter and college football TV personality Tony Barnhart presented his new book, The 19 of Greene: Football, Friendship, and Change in the Fall of 1970 to a packed house on Dec. 5 as the final “Meet the Author” guest of the year for the Georgia Writers Museum (GWM).
Greene said the book was inspired by an old photo he found in 2019 within an envelope marked by his mother: “Do Not Throw Away!”
It depicted the 1970 Greene County football team that Barnhart played on as a senior with newly integrated teammates from his Greene County High School home and Floyd T. Corry High, just a couple of miles away where Greensboro’s Black students went to school.
The photo now appears on his new book’s cover.
Barnhart freely admits he had little awareness of the significance of what was occurring back then. He said he simply wanted to play football and win.
Seeing that team photo again, though, triggered something in him, he admitted. It got him thinking and wondering about what the experience was all about for his barrier-breaking teammates – both Black and white – so Barnhart said he turned to team quarterback Charles Turner, among the few old teammates he’d remained in touch with over the decades, just to see what Turner thought about the idea for a book.
“He was all for it. I think he was more excited about it than me,” Barnhart said not long after Turner introduced him to the GWM crowd. “So, we made plans to get in touch with as many of our team as we could.”
Barnhart also knew that as the starting Black quarterback on a team that previously had a white quarterback, it was vitally important to properly tell Turner’s, and the rest of his Black teammates’ stories, too.
“To go through that and how he handled it with such grace, such great leadership, and the guys just naturally followed,” Barnhart recalled. “For me, the lessons that I learned or stuff that as a teenager you don’t think about, it never occurred to me that my Black classmates had to, for this thing to work, they had to give up their school, they had to give up graduating from their school. And I talked to some of my classmates who were not football players and they said, ‘Yeah, at first I was resentful that I had to do that.’ But it worked out well. Overall, the people were nice to each other, and it had a happy ending, but I know it was a struggle for them going through it.”
Remarkably, including himself, Barnhart found 16 of the 19 Greene teammates were still alive, though scattered as far away as California, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Regardless, he said he eventually managed to meet and speak with each of them for the book, an experience he called “tremendous fun” and “very beneficial.”
“The benefit is when we sort of reflect on our lives, we have our memories, but to methodically go through all these guys and talk to them all and talk to the teachers and talk to the coaches from back then, that brought back so many more memories,” Barnhart explained.
“I mean, not a lot of people get to go through that kind of examination of their life. It makes you relive things and reexamine things that you had forgotten about or hadn’t noticed, but once you get the triggers and everything, you can start going, ‘Oh yeah …’ You start putting so many more memory puzzles together, things that you didn’t even know were there. So yeah, it was a great, different experience.”
However, after he got started, Covid hit in 2020 and Barnhart said what he thought could be completed within a year or so turned out to be a three-year project before finally being published this October.
The 19 of Greene represents Barnhart’s sixth book, though it differs significantly from his previous works, which he called “just sports books,” biographies of famous college football figures like Vince Dooley and Larry Munson.
This time, after being referred by Charles Davis, dean of UGA’s journalism school, he was working with UGA Press and the academic editing process, which it turned out he preferred.
“It’s a different experience for academic publishing. They’re rigorous. They look at, ‘Hey, if we taught this in a classroom, would it hold up?’ And they made sure I got to work with some great editors,” Barnhart said. “They’re not bashful at all saying, ‘Well, I don’t like this, and I don’t like that.’ So, yeah, a lot more work, but it made for a much better book.”
Plus, the delays forced by the Covid pandemic and the involved editing process ultimately contributed to a much stronger ending for the book, Barnhart said.
He explained that during the wait both he and Turner had been named to the Greene County Tiger’s Ring of Honor, established just last summer to recognize alumni who excelled in both academics and athletics while in school at Greene County.
It made for a perfect, tidy ending that never could have come without the pandemic’s delay. Regardless, Barnhart said he just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right group of guys to make a little local history. However, he stressed it was entirely coincidental.
“When people say, did you guys know that you were making history when you were making it? No, we didn’t have a clue. We wanted to play football, we wanted to win. It was only later in life,” Barnhart explained. “One of the guys says it’s later in life when you look back on it that you learn lessons from things like that. Well, this was one of those times.”