I'm A Ramblin' Wreck From Georgia Tech

Once Again Wrecked This Morning...


What can I say?

Iowa 24...GT 14... another season down the crapper with season ending losses to the University of Georgia and now Iowa in the Orange bowl.

Did I mention Georgia also beating us in Basketball in Athens last night also?

Sigh...

Oh well, I guess that it's time to get back to Injuneering and leave the football and basketball games--and the winning thereof--to the youngsters...

Oh Well...

Georgia 30...GT 24


The good news is that having followed this team for 32 years, at the end of the day my heart's not broken by a late season loss to our hated cross state rivals.

And it was fun while it lasted, but in typical Georgia Tech fashion the 2009 edition of their football team found a way to sink back from a position of being considered pretty good to being just slightly above average.

Unlike some sports addicts, I know I'm the same man on Monday morning win or lose...something it took a few years to understand in my youth.

Georgia Tech Versus Georgia

8:00 PM On National TV (ESPN/ABC)


You better be there if you want to watch good football...

I Feel Like A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

Actually More Like An Alabama Redneck In A Sea Of Orange...


Have I mentioned that living in a "college town" pretty much sucks if you happen to not have attended the "town's college"?

Well...it does...at least until the team that's in season (as opposed to the game that's in hunting season like "wabbits" or ducks) loses three or four games.

Then things settle down and quieten up a good bit and you can stand to wander around in public without being assaulted.

Thus my situation here this morning on the banks of the mighty Tennessee River...in the middle of the 2009 College football season.

When you do go out for drinks or dinner or shopping here even with U of T's three losses to date we still see probably 50% of the people wearing orange or at least sporting a big orange T on their heads and breasts and backs and butt and feet and car bumpers.

The local newspaper--the Knoxville Sentinel--is equally difficult to stomach.

If the team is winning, the front page has a story and three quarters of the sports section is UT blaa blaaa blaaaaaa.

Likewise, if the team is losing, the front page has a story and three quarters of the sports section is UT boo hooo hooooo.

You can hardly EVER find any mention of anything except SEC sports...they'll instead print stories about the recruiting prospects of the UT Pick-up-sticks and bowling teams rather than write about anything going on in Atlanta or the ACC or in anywhere else in the country for that matter.

I guess I can understand, but still...the Oak Ridge National Lab and ranks of Tennessee Valley Authority offices are full of Auburn and Clemson and more importantly...

GEORGIA TECH ENGINEERS.

Yet God forbid they should ever mention GT's success thus far this season as UT faces being stomped by Alabama on Saturday.

And ME?

I'm faced knowing the Tech faces the University of Virginia at noon today in Charlottesville and I'm afraid that the Raycom broadcast won't be on our local moronic Comcast schedule.

So any way, I've been wandering around town in my GT shirts just for fun and last night at dinner I happened to end up sitting adjacent to an older Tech alum who was equally happy to find a fellow Rambling Wreck to talk to.

We spent a half hour swapping stories about the good old days down at the North Avenue Trade School, then I came home and went back to my new grind managing a new Website I'm developing and working on some proposals.

BTW...the company I incorporated just got it's first small order yesterday, so we're off and running and hopefully I'm no longer semi-retired/unemployed.

Of course it will take about twenty more orders like this to make some semblance of a living, but it's a start after a great deal of soul searching and planning and false starts over the past 10 months in limbo.

Time for a nap now...and wish me luck...if you will...

Georgia Tech "Up-ends" Virginia Tech 28-23

Wramblings From An Old Rambling Wreck...


As my regular readers know, unlike most if not many men, I rarely spend much time watching or talking about sports.

On this blog you hardly ever see any time or words devoted to the topic.

It's not because I'm entirely unfamiliar with the subject, it's just that I've chosen such a difficult faction of sports enterprises to follow through the years.

Starting with the Atlanta Braves on Ted Turner's Channel 17 TBS Cable network during the Dale Murphy/Phil Nekro era...

and then including the NFL's Atlanta Falcons living and dieing with Steve Bartkowski in the 1970's, my understandably jaded long suffering professional sports affection/affliction has be relegated these days to yelling occasionally about Pat's beloved Pittsburgh Steelers

...else nothing at all.

On the college front, long after the tenure of Heisman, Alexander, and Dodd (and Rodgers and Curry and Ross) and having attended virtually every home football game on North Avenue at historic Grant Field in Atlanta from 1977 until the late 1990's following Georgia Tech, and having season tickets to their basketball program's games throughout the 1990's, I feel I can speak authoritatively to topics relating to young men battling their way through their academic career on the gridiron or basketball court, yet today I spend a limited amount of time and money following those sports on any basis that could be considered anything beyond casual interest.

That said, this 2009 NCAA Division I College football season has again brought my attention back to the TV screen because of Georgia Tech's potential re-emergence on the national football scene.

After losing badly while ranked #13 to a lower ranked Miami team and being dropped from the national rankings, the Yellow Jackets have scratched and clawed and stung their way back past the likes of North Carolina and survived a game with nearly 100 points combined against Florida State...

to culminate last night in pushing past number 4 ranked VIRGINIA TECH with a solid second half performance.

Georgia Tech didn't "dominate", but they (notice I say "they", not "WE" because I didn't play there in my years on campus) won in the end, and for the first time since their 1990 National Championship Season I'm a little bit excited about the possibilities for the balance of this season.

The single loss to date at Miami will most likely keep the team from vying for the national title, but a nice New Years Bowl invitation and a better outcome than last year's debacle in the Georgia Dome against LSU (I spent a couple hundred dollars attending that event) could be in the making for the "Old White and Gold" team.

I'm not making any predictions, but then again things could be pretty interesting come December.

Go Jackets...

Hallo-weenies

I'm Struggling To Give A Darn...


Well, the #20 Georgia Bulldogs beat the #9 Florida Gators late this afternoon in football down in Jacksonville (Georgia Tech was idle in anticipation of a Thursday night game with Virginia Tech later this week.)

I have to commend both Georgia and Florida for providing a fairly exciting game, punctuated with the usual vulgar behavior of Young athletes that resulted in numerous penalties for things like "unsportsmanlike conduct" and "facemasking."

After the dust cleared here on our little island around noon with the fan's departure we snuck out to the grocery store for some last minute shopping prior to entertaining guests and cooking two of my soon to be famous pizza recipes for dinner. That event went off as planned and now I'm sitting around belching while trying to catch up on the evening's news.

The past week's grocery store visits have caused me to continue to be disappointed by the quality of the pumpkins available this year because of Bush/Cheney's maniac dabblings and the effects of Man-Made global warming induced drought.

I was really looking forward to designing and carving another couple of masterpieces this year, but all you can find are overpriced basketball sized blobs in all the stores.

Last year I acquired several nice pumpkins, including this 120 pound fellow shown strapped down in the back of my Chevy Suburban:

(That's a large set of jumper cables rolled up there on the left to give you some more sense of scale.)

For those of you that weren't around as readers last year, here's Mr. Giant PumpKing sitting on a garden wagon in mid-carving at a local elementary school (the walls were over 4" thick and there was over 12 pounds of seeds inside.)


More exciting "PumpKing" reruns to follow unless I can find some new subject matter....

Yawn...

They're Here

Woof, Woof, Woof...woof


Well, it's official. Nine tenths of the Georgia Bulldog and a small segment of the Florida Gator Nations have arrived here on our little island.

A bunch of the blue collar crowd and the younger alumnus have to settle for roadside motels and even the fancier places IN JACKSONVILLE WHERE THE GAME WILL BE PLAYED, but if you're well-to-do or just well connected (i.e. you got a friend with a house here ) the place to stay is St. Simons

All both of the Georgia Tech fans like me can do is batten down the hatches and avoid going outside until Florida finishes stomping Georgia's butt on the football field tomorrow afternoon and everyone goes home.

Since the game starts at 3:30, that means that the island will clear out a little before noon and, assuming about four hours of game time because of the TV coverage, they won't be home until well after dark.

Then if like the past twenty years last year Florida wins, they'll all pass out after midnight and get up and slink back out to Athens and Atlanta before noon on Sunday--leaving piles of trash and about three or four million dollars in the local economy.

Since we don't sell anything tourists and football fans want, we'll just issue a heavy sigh of relief and go back to enjoying paradise in a normal manner.

If you don't hear from my by then, someone send up a flare...

Two Hundred Twenty Two To Nuthin’

Mixed Emotions About College Sports--Close But No Cigar


I pride myself in being able to say that I only missed a couple of Georgia Tech home football games between 1977 and 1997.

I also traveled to places like Clemson, South Carolina; Auburn and Birmingham, Alabama; Winston Salem and Raleigh, North Carolina; and Annapolis, Maryland to watch what many people would consider at best to be mediocre Tech Teams play the home teams in those cities.

The quality of the football play didn’t matter much to me because I was there to study engineering, but I did enjoy following my school’s team because of it’s great football history.

The cause of one of my few absences in 1985 was having to sit in the hospital recovering from a blood clot in my leg while at the same time having my personal Physician attended the Georgia/Georgia Tech game using MY TICKETS. Since he forgot to sign the Hospital discharge order, I wasn’t allowed to go home to watch the game from my own sofa.

Afterwards he belatedly turned me out of the medical facility, I went home, and I got over it in the end.

Other personal milestones include having witnessed Georgia Tech’s running back Eddie Lee Ivory’s effort covering 356 yards in a snowstorm at the Air Force Academy in November of 1978, and Tech finishing in a 3 to 3 tie with a number one ranked Notre Dame in 1980 without throwing a single forward pass. Notre Dame actually had to come from behind to earn the tie.

I was also in the stadium in Orlando in 1990 at the Citrus Bowl when Tech pounded Nebraska and tied for the NCAA Division I National championship.

Since that time, I have only visited “Grant Field at historic Bobby Dodd Stadium” on a few occasions, my personal fortunes and life priorities having changed greatly since I spent two or three thousand dollars a year watching football and basketball just north of Atlanta’s North Avenue.

This year I managed to get a little excited about GT football, but when it was all said and done things have ended pretty much as usual, with Tech snatching defeat from the jaws of Victory on a number of occasions.

Other than an embarrassing 31-7 loss at Clemson back in mid October , Tech managed to come up short by a total of 10 points (Notre Dame 14-10, Georgia 15-12, and Saturday’s 9-6 loss to Wake Forrest) in three other games.

Just Damn.

I have to ask the question out loud: “Where are the points when we need them?”

That’s OK I guess…I’m still “a Hell of an engineer” and life goes on…

Speaking of points, I have a piece of GT memorabilia that is very special to me, not to mention very RARE--a 1917 Georgia Tech Student Yearbook. My Dad was an old book fan, and one day we were wandering around the old Atlanta Flea Market on Piedmont Road (there’s a MARTA transit station there now) and he points out this old tome, and we bought it for $10.

Inside of that canvas hard-covered book, in addition to documentation of life at “The North Avenue Trade School” in the early 1900’s, was an amazing outline of John Heisman’s (of Heisman Trophy fame) 1916 campaign leading Georgia Tech to a college football national championship.

Not only did Georgia Tech score a record setting 222 to 0 victory against Cumberland College in the second game of the season, but they only allowed their opponents to score a TOTAL of 20 points in ten games while my beloved Yellow Jackets scored 467 points.

The schedule that season included Alabama, Georgia, and Auburn Universities, with Tulane, North Carolina, Washington & Lee, Davison, Cumberland, and Mercer thrown in for good measure.

So in closing, I have to say to all of you sports fans out there that perspective is where it is at--not the points spread.

In my opinion, GT had a pretty good year, in spite of Saturday’s conference title loss, and Monday morning I’m still the same useless beach bum or expert Theater Set designer none the less.

Let’s all just try to have a GREAT holiday season regardless of the numbers on the scoreboard…


Hey...can you pass me the gravy and dressing?

The Silence Of The Lambs Dogs

I Think We’re Good For Another Year……


No, I’m not gonna gloat.

I have to admit that I did laugh a little privately once the last seconds had ticked off of the game clocks this afternoon in Atlanta and Jacksonville, however.

You see, being a Georgia Tech sports fan requires a great deal of patience. I’ve spent the past 29 football seasons learning my own lessons in humility.

Of course, I didn’t attend Tech to play football and, when I first set foot on the North Avenue campus I barely realized the glorious history earned under the auspices of legendary coaches Heisman, Alexander, and Dodd in the early and mid 1900’s, but since my first days sitting in Grant Field I find that any season that results in winning eight or more games to me represents INFINITE success.

That said, Tech is well on their way to at least meeting MY standards now, having survived Miami’s best efforts to erase a 14 point fourth quarter deficit.

Meanwhile, a few minutes later, about 75 miles down the road from here, the University of Georgia’s team failed to overcome the final 7 point Florida advantage on their scoreboard and since then a literal sea of black and red clad fans have quietly snuck back to their accommodations here on our little island.

No barking and woofing.

No blaring auto horns and hooting & hollering.

I just checked our parking lot and it is almost full again, just like last night, but the silence is DEAFENING.

Good.

The best thing that a good Georgia Tech fan can get out of a Georgia Florida game is the silence I’m hearing right now, along with the sulking early departure of our formerly boisterous visitors this morning.

Now all Tech has to do is win the Georgia game in Athens on December 2nd to earn a quite winter and spring for our longsuffering fans.