It was a relatively short flight of an hour and 45 minutes home from Austin for the Georgia football team last Saturday night. With a competent police escort on the ground and a tailwind pushing the Delta jet that brought the victors to Ben Epps field, it was a night owl flight that touched down only a couple hours before twilight.
I walked into my house at 4:20 a.m., beleaguered and physically spent, but all that was trumped by reverberating euphoria. Classic victories stimulate adrenalin flow – even for geezers – and you can’t wait for Sunday morning’s SportsCenter and the replays that make you want to sing your favorite fight song, “Glory, Glory.”
In another day, a lesser technological era, daybreak’s morning papers would have had flowing tributes and photo spreads that would have warmed the cockles of alumni hearts.
How is it that in this day and age, when everything is instant, from coffee to a drone disrupting a terrorist’s trip to a hideout, we can’t get the sports columnists printed take on a signature triumph until two days later?
Athens was very quiet and sound asleep when the Bulldogs scrambled to their quarters with the ultimate satisfaction of a well-done job. The thunder of applause will be delayed until the Florida game in Jacksonville. With the team, it was back to work on Monday. Unfinished business remains. The preparation always cuts edge with the coach, the intelligent man in charge, and will be accompanied by reminders that pitfalls await the mentally unprepared on football Saturdays.
Soon, a note from Claude Felton read, “Might be the best regular season victory I can recall.” That caused me to ramble. My first flashback connected me with 1965, when Georgia defeated Michigan at Ann Arbor, 15-7.
As the advance representative managing team travel arrangements for the Bulldogs, I arrived in Ann Arbor, where Michigan was the defending Rose Bowl champion. The attitude was, “Who is this high school we are playing this week?”
“What conference do you guys play in?” asked the man behind the desk at our team hotel in Ypsilanti, 12 miles away. “How big is your stadium?” was the next question, as he smirked, knowing that not many stadiums could match the Wolverines’ 105,000 seats, even in the Big Ten.
It was obvious that Michigan partisans considered Georgia to be in the “Little Leagues.” When the game was over, however, it was a different story.
When the Michigan game of almost six decades is recalled, one exciting sidebar is that there has never been a more lavish reception for a victorious team returning to Athens. Folks back home in the Classic City had listened to Ed Thilenius call the game, which was over by 5 p.m. Ann Arbor is in the Eastern Time zone, and the Bulldogs flew two Southern Airways Martin 404s, stopping in Memphis, as I recall, for refueling.
We probably reached Athens around 11 p.m. The planes banked to land from the east; we could see headlights in bumper-to-bumper traffic from the airport to downtown Athens. In the history of UGA football, there has never been a more lavish reception for a returning team.
Considering all factors, the erudite Mr. Felton is probably right about the results last weekend in Austin: sterling victory against the No.1 team in the country before a record crowd of 105,215 and a move to a No. 2 ranking in the polls.
It had to be a head-turning victory in 1927 when UGA defeated Yale in New Haven, 14-10. Beating Texas 10-9 in the Cotton Bowl in 1984 remains a memorable victory for the Dawgs, as did edging Notre Dame at South Bend 20-19 in 2017.
The good news for the fans is that with an open date on the schedule, there will be two weeks to enjoy the celebratory highlights of the last game. It was Georgia’s best-played game since Clemson and should mollify most doubters.
Fortunately for Georgia, the Bulldogs have a coach who started de-focusing on the Texas victory as soon as he turned in for the night. That is no small thing in his business.