Larry Munson: The voice in my head

The football I caught all the game-winning touchdowns with was made out of vinyl. Each section was a different color, none found in nature. It was from a dime store. It was not regulation. But I'd fire it high into the air -- did I mention I was also a record-setting quarterback? -- and track it down the length of our side yard. Sometimes I would slow down so I'd have to dive for the catch. And as I held the ball in the air to celebrate, I was also the announcer, going crazy over yet another last-second win.

Kids everywhere do this sort of thing. But I was a Georgia boy. So even though the announcer was me, the call was not really mine. The voice in my head was Larry Munson.

Munson died Sunday night at 89. He started calling Georgia Bulldogs football on the radio when I was two years old. On the Sears Roebuck stereo in my childhood bedroom, in the dorm at UGA, driving around Charlotte at night trying to pull in WSB from Atlanta, Larry called out to me.

"HE'S RUNNING OVER PEOPLE..."

"THE STADIUM ROCKS AND SWINGS..."

"MY GOD ALMIGHTY DID YOU SEE WHAT HE DID..."

In TV sports, it's a bonus if the announcer is good, but you don't need it -- the action is there in front of you. On the radio, the voice is everything. He makes you see. "Get the picture," Larry Munson said before every kickoff, and he would tell you which way each team faced and the colors of the uniforms and how hard the wind was blowing and where the shadows fell across the field. He was always worried. Auburn had that big running back and Georgia Tech was hungry to beat us and even Kentucky could pull the upset if we looked too far ahead and dropped a couple on the turf and the penalties, oh, the penalties...

He was a homer -- Georgia was always "we" -- but if he was watching a pile of manure, he never called it chocolate. One miserable night in Starkville, when Georgia was losing to Mississippi State in a lightning storm, Loran Smith -- the Bulldogs' sideline reporter -- checked in to say he was going to call it a night. Munson pondered this and said: "I don't think Loran's calling it a night. I think Loran is going to a graveyard to find a dead man named Jack Daniels."

After a bout with throat cancer 18 years ago, I ended up with a pretty good Larry Munson voice. But every Georgia fan does an impression. Lay down a bed of gravel in the back of your throat, act like right now is the most important moment in human history, and you're off. I remember the campus radio station doing a skit about Munson cooking breakfast: "And the egg CRACKS open and DRIVES into the skillet... FIVE seconds... TEN seconds... needs a block..."

If you follow sports the voices fill your head. Maybe, for you, it's Vin Scully calling the Dodgers. Maybe it's Dick Vitale at Carolina-Duke. For me it's a guy who played piano with Sinatra in Minneapolis, had a fishing show in Nashville, and found his home in a radio booth in Athens, Georgia. He told the stories of the moments I cared about. When he said "we," he wasn't just talking about himself and the team. He was talking about me and all those other listeners. He made me, and them, into us.

I happened to be in Athens on the day of the Georgia-Florida game in 1980. I was on my high-school debate team, and we had been in a tournament, and we gathered in an auditorium on campus waiting for the results. Some kids in the back had a radio and were listening to the game down in Jacksonville. I couldn't hear the words, but I could hear the tone of Larry's voice. Georgia was done. Third-and-forever on their own 8.

And then Larry's voice rose, and I looked over my shoulder and the kids in the back had jumped out of their seats. I know this next part didn't happen, but it's what I remember: The radio was dancing off the floor and the words were flying out of it, like you see in cartoons.

"45, 40 -- RUN, LINDSAY -- 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, LINDSAY SCOTT! LINDSAY SCOTT! LINDSAY SCOTT!"

We ran outside. You could hear hollering from the dorms, and car horns honking, and people just stood there on the sidewalk and screamed. This went on for hours. I was 16, and it was the most spontaneous joy I had ever been a part of. From that moment on I knew where I would be going to college.

It wasn't until later that I heard what Larry said after he got Lindsay Scott into the end zone. For a while, there was nothing on the air but the cheers of the Georgia fans in the Gator Bowl. Then Munson said this.

Well, I can't believe it, 92 yards and Lindsay really got in a footrace. I broke my chair. I came right through a chair, a metal, steel chair with about a five-inch cushion. I broke it. The booth came apart. The stadium, well, the stadium fell down. Now they do have to renovate this thing. They will have to rebuild it now. I, this, this is incredible. I didn't mean to beg Lindsay to run, but I HAD to. 26-21 with a passing attack that wasn't working all DAY, and Lindsay caught it, I think, the 25 or 30 or so, no timeouts left in the game.

You know, this game has always been called the World's Greatest Cocktail Party. Do you know what is going to happen here tonight, and up in St. Simons ... where all those Dawg people have got these condominiums for four days? Man, is there going to be some property destroyed tonight.

26 to 21, DAWGS on top. We were gone. I gave up, you did, too. We were out of it and gone. MIRACLE.

If that impossible, spontaneous poetry ends up being the voice you grow up with, the voice of your team, the voice in your head ... all you can do is accept the gift and count yourself lucky to hear it.

Miracle.

-- Tommy Tomlinson

Georgia-Florida, once more into the breach

Three and eighteen.

Three and freaking eighteen.

If you were born in 1990 and grew up a Georgia fan, you've seen Georgia beat Florida just thrice in your lifetime. You are also old enough to legally drink. Which would be perfectly understandable.

It helps, a little, to have a longer view of history. When I was a student at UGA, we were in the middle of a 15-4 run over the Gators. We beat them on Run, Lindsay, Run. We beat them 44-0. We beat them the week after they had been ranked No. 1 for the first time in their (then-)sorry history.

But all that was a long time ago.

I can't think of another rivalry like this, where one team dominated for so long only to have it totally flip the other way. It's like one of those European tides that recedes all the way to the horizon before coming back to the cliffs.

Georgia seems to have all the advantages this year. Florida is 4-3, has lost three straight and hates its quarterback. Georgia has rebounded from an 0-2 start to win five in a row. Georgia still has a decent shot to win the SEC East (although I'm not sure that's a good thing, because either Alabama or LSU will be waiting). Florida's best-case scenario is the Liberty Bowl.

But: Three and eighteen.

I won't be surprised at all if Florida steamrolls us. I won't be surprised if they win on a fake field goal. I won't be surprised if Isaiah Crowell is running for the winning touchdown and a rogue elk downs him at the 1. When you're three and eighteen, you just brace for the pain.

Having said that... the tide has to come in sometime. Why not now? The cocktails are finally going to taste good on the Georgia side. Dawgs, 27-18.

(If we lose, forget I ever said this.)

-- Tommy T.

No country for old recruits

The interestingly named Xzavier Dickson, a four-star defensive lineman from Griffin, Ga., wants to play at Georgia. Or maybe Alabama. Or possibly Georgia. Or it could be Alabama.

He can't decide.

So today, before tonight's Under Armour All-American game, he plans to flip a coin. Best of five flips wins.

Now you know why college football coaches always look like they need an IV drip of Advil.

And if anybody needs an assistant to handle this sort of situation, may we recommend the also-interestingly-named Anton Chigurh. He already spends a lot of time on the road.

Report from the stands: Georgia-Arkansas

Your humble correspondent ended up with a ticket (thanks to buddies Zane, Michelle and Little Z) to the game on Saturday. As you probably know, it ended up as a gut punch to Georgia fans. Now that I've had a couple days, I can think about it with only mild profanity. So here's a report from Athens.

The scene: Quieter than it used to be. I haven't been to Athens in five years or so, and in that time UGA has banned tailgating next to the stadium and curtailed it on most of North Campus. So the guys who used to park their old school bus on Sanford Drive and put 30 drunk friends on the roof, all singing Hank Jr.'s "Family Tradition," are somewhere else now. Or dead from expired livers.

I'm of two minds about this. I don't miss all the examples of Obnoxious Fan No. 1 (drinks 20 Bud Lights, leers at every girl who walks by, pukes in bushes, passes out before game starts). But for my tastes it could've been about 30 percent more rowdy. Then again, we weren't in the dorms, where several unspeakable things happen every day before breakfast.

The heat: Brutal. The scoreboard kept saying it was 83 degrees, which might have been true if the thermometer had been buried three feet under the turf. In the stands, with the sun bouncing off those metal benches, it was death on a stick. Every Day Should Be Saturday went to Florida-Tennessee, and tweeted that it was like spending three hours in a kiln; same here.

The mood: Ugly early. I figured coach Mark Richt would take most of the heat for UGA's loss to South Carolina, and its general blah-ness for the past year or two, but based on what I heard in the stands, offensive coordinator Mike Bobo is getting most of the blame. A guy a few seats over from me was a perfect example of Obnoxious Fan No. 2 (screams the entire game at players/coaches/refs, sincerely believes he knows more about football than the paid professionals and the athletes who have played since second grade). From the moment the Georgia offense took the field, Ob Fan #2 started screaming "Bobo! BOOOOOOOOBOOOOOOO!!!" in this fashion:

Yeah, that was fun to listen to.

The game: Terrible, wonderful, then terrible.

Arkansas QB Ryan Mallett threw two TD passes to receivers all alone behind the defense -- a 57-yarder to Chris Gragg when the game was barely three minutes old, and a 22-yarder to Ronnie Wingo Jr. at the end of the third quarter. It's easy to look like an All-American when your receivers are all by themselves, waving to you like distant swimmers.

That second wide-open TD made it 24-10, and there was no reason to think Georgia had a chance. Arkansas killed us with crossing patterns, and when we had the ball, freshman Aaron Murray kept holding the ball... and holding it... and holding it. For three quarters our best play, by far, was "Murray drops back to pass then takes off running for his life."

(It was hard to tell, watching live, if Murray was just timid or if the receivers weren't getting open. The one guy you knew could get open, A.J. Green, was on the sidelines, suspended. Yes, the NCAA laid down too harsh a punishment for selling a jersey. Even so, Green was a dope for doing it in the first place.)

Early in the fourth, when Georgia turned it over on downs at the Arkansas 30, some people headed home. But for some reason, after that, the switch flipped. Arkansas got one first down on its next two possessions, and Georgia scored two TDs set up by bombs from Murray to Kris Durham. With 3:55 left it was tied, and the stadium was about as loud as I've ever heard it.*

*My three loudest Sanford Stadium moments:

1) Kevin Butler 60-yard field goal to beat Clemson in '84

2) Herschel takes field w/broken thumb, Tron Jackson scores on end-around against Clemson (called back on penalty) in '82

3) UCLA cheerleaders take field in '83, causing several freshmen to collapse from hormone overload

Arkansas had to punt again and we got the ball on our 34. After two 10-yard runs sandwiched around a sack, we called timeout with 1:04 left, third-and-4 at midfield.

At that moment, what kind of odds would you have put on the outcome? I guessed something like this:

25 percent: Georgia wins in regulation (all the momentum, great kicker)

70 percent: overtime

5 percent: Arkansas wins in regulation

But then Murray took another sack. Drew Butler shanked a punt. And it took only three plays and 39 seconds for this to happen:

Nobody screamed at Mike Bobo after that. Nobody said much of anything.

The future: I just don't see Georgia winning many games this year. When Arkansas scored, it looked easy; every time Georgia scored it took great catches and broken tackles. With Green on the bench, there didn't seem to be a single playmaker on the field -- somebody who was simply stronger, faster, shiftier or smarter than anyone else out there. I'm trying not to be Obnoxious Fan No. 3 -- the guy who takes one loss and projects it into a decade of dread and despair. Besides, except for that last minute, I had a blast.

But I think it's going to be a long season.

-- Tommy T.