Posts tagged F-Word

It’s Saturday morning and I am driving up Georgia 400 to see my old team mates Buck Belue and Lindsay Scott. We are having our third and final Champions Clinic of 2009 at Forsyth Central High School this morning.  Here it is, 29 years later and we are still a team, working together.  How different things might have been if not for the greatest play I never saw.

Nobody expected 1980 to be a special year.  Most predicted Georgia to finish in the middle of the pack, maybe barely above average, and those were the ones that liked us.  Yet here we were, 8-0 going to the “WLOCP”…shhhh, and ranked number 2 in the country.  We arrived  in Jacksonville, just like every year, with electricity in the air. Little did anyone know that history was about to be made.

I always loved the Florida game; it was like a rest stop 2/3 of the way on a long road trip.  There was nothing like it. It was neither a home or away game, it was THE game.  A game we usually won.  But Florida was waiting for us this  year.

I always prepared especially hard for the “F”, because of Chris Collinsworth, the Gators great wide receiver and return man.  I hated giving him a chance to return kick-offs against us and most of the time I succeeded by kicking it deep.  Chris and I had actually become friends at the Playboy All American week-end in early 1980.

Howard Richards(Missouri)

EJ Junior(Alabama)

(The Blogger)

Chris Collinsworth(Florida)

Let’s get back to the game.  It started off well enough, with Herschel bursting up our side-line on the fourth play for 73 yards and a touchdown.  But Florida kept coming back and at half-time I told my holder Jim Broadway, “Be ready, we may have to win this thing with a field goal”.  I was a senior, but Jim was a sophomore in his first year of varsity action. He had done a great job, but we had not faced this kind of situation all year.

When the drama unfolded late in the game, Florida had gone ahead 21-20 on a Brian Clark field goal.  Then on our last drive, a Florida punt had pinned us back inside our 10 yard line.  As everyone in the Dawg Nation knows by now, we actually lost a yard on one of our first two downs.  Third and eleven from our own seven yard line.  I think there were 63 seconds to go in the game, as Larry would say.  As the play began, I could see the ball in the air, Lindsay caught it and turned up field…I thought, “He’s going to get in field goal range, I have to get my tee”! So as I turned to go get it, everyone else was jumping up and down cheering, but I had my back turned and missed it.  I was actually trying to keep it together for what might be coming up.

As ole Lady Luck would have it Lindsay kept running, thanks to Larry’s encouragement from on high.  He might still be running if not for the “bowl” in Gator Bowl.  I was happy to see it all on the news the next day and about a thousand times since on video.  “The Play” was the last great springboard to the National Championship, as we moved to number one in the country the next day(Thanks Tech!).

Chris and I just moments after Belue to Scott…He was not happy…heehee.