NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep posts like this free of ads.
© Tim Peeler, 2021
When you go into the newspaper business, you dream of covering big, substantial stories.
In sports, that means getting the opportunity to cover the biggest athletic events: the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (or, for me, the ACC tournament), the Masters or the Olympics.
In the 20 years I worked in the old-style, pre-internet media, I was able to do most but not all of those things, and got close enough to a few others to be endangered.
As much as people may think sportswriters—or old-style journalists of any kind, to be honest—are biased for or against their favorite teams or causes, it’s simply not true of the real professionals in the industry. I never once pulled for a team to win or lose.
I certainly, however, pulled hard for the opportunity to cover a big story, from Piedmont hurricanes to the U.S. Open in Pinehurst and any number of annual celebrations of athletic achievement.
Thirty years ago this week, I sort of finagled my way into covering one of those big events when the Atlanta Braves faced the Minnesota Twins in the Game 7 of the 1991 World Series—even though the game was being played 1,130 miles away in Minneapolis.
A little background: I had been working for The Greenville (South Carolina) News about 18 months, covering as my main beat Furman athletics, with some high school, summer sports and other college events thrown in, with two to three shifts a week on the sports copy and design desk. It was a fun job, with some of the more interesting newspaper workers I’ve ever come across. The newspaper office was where I met my first—and so far only—wife, just a few weeks after the events of this 24-hour workday occurred. She’s pretty much kept me straight ever since.
Here’s what happened
Because of its relative proximity to Atlanta, Greenville was easily the biggest Braves town outside of Georgia. It was also the longtime home of the Braves’ Double-A affiliate, the Greenville Braves.
Even though it was two hours north, Greenville always looked to Atlanta for its professional sports fix. If, of course, you overlook the professionalism of the Danny Ford days of Clemson football.
So for years, back when newspapers did such things, The News had a sports bureau in Georgia’s capital. It was a much better assignment than the Lyman-Duncan-Welford or Golden Strip news bureaus that some of my other friends established in the second bedroom of their cheap apartments.
My man, Willie T. Smith III, capably occupied our Atlanta sports bureau, a job everyone on staff coveted because of the opportunity to cover Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL and any other significant events—like, say, the Olympics—that might come to town.
On Oct. 27, 1991, however, Willie and our columnist, Dan Foster, were in Minneapolis at the Metrodome covering the decisive Game 7 between the Braves and Twins. Someone needed to cover the resurgent Falcons’ home game against the Los Angeles Rams that Sunday afternoon in one of the last home games the team ever played at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Innocently, I volunteered, with the request to stay afterwards to write a story about the city’s reaction to the outcome of the baseball game: the ecstasy of the Braves winning their first World Series title since 1957, when the franchise was still in Milwaukee, or the soul-crushing disappointment of getting so close without bringing home a title to a championship-starved city.
Covering the football game was easy. Drove down in the morning. Got to the stadium in time for lunch. Sat through a 31-14 win over the then-hapless Los Angeles Rams. Falcon quarterback Chris Miller—who had thrown four interceptions the week before against Phoenix but led Atlanta to a quick 28-0 lead by halftime—inspired me to write one of my favorite ledes ever from that game: “The problem with Atlanta’s Red Gun offense is which way the barrel is pointing—squarely at the opponent’s face or at the Falcons’ own feet.”
The football story was written and send in back to the office in Greenville on my company-issued Tandy TRS80 Model-200 portable computer, a true modern marvel of word-processing possibilities, the model with the flip-up, backlit screen. It was one of the first laptops ever made, and I can’t even explain how much easier it made the lives of newspaper reporters in those pre-internet, pre-cell phone days. The previous alternative was to send a story by Western Union, by fax or by dictating the entire thing to a news clerk back in the office.
Writing a clever or interesting story was about sixth on the to-do list for making deadline back before you could just email a story to the copy desk and be done for the night.
Transmitting a story on one of those Trash 80s, as they were often called, was a sometimes laborious process in which both stars and technology had to align with a telephone line, a plug-in, auto-dialing modem and a perfectly still transmitting table. While practically unbreakable, many of them did not survive the plunge from press box windows to the fields or parking lots below from frustrated transmitters.
I was easily done writing the football story by the time the Braves batted in the first inning of the 8:30 p.m. game, which featured a pair of future Hall of Fame pitchers, 36-year-old Jack Morris against 24-year-old John Smoltz. I carefully planned how I was going to cover the night’s activities.
The city was, as they like to say over at Georgia Tech, abuzz. Fans were packed into their favorite bars and hangouts, making the sidewalks crowded and the streets surprisingly empty. I was easily able to go back and forth from Buckhead, Brookhaven, Midtown, Five Points and downtown.
There were a few favorite places I went to so I could interview patrons and soak in the scene. There was a Longhorn Steakhouse I always liked to go to when I was in town, back when that franchise was relatively new. The Atlanta Underground was hopping. There were patio bars jammed-packed for people watching. Jocks & Jills was the perfect place to get quotes early in the evening before inebriation scaled up and sobriety scaled down. J&J was owned by NBA sideline reporter Craig Sager, Hawks star Doc Rivers and several other NBA players that became one of the nation’s most successful sports bars. For that decisive game, the bar asked all of its staff to bring in their home televisions so as many people as possible could watch the game from all angles.
Basically, I roamed the city for nine scoreless innings, writing a few paragraphs here and there as the game went along, particularly after the eighth-inning baserunning gaffe by Braves outfielder and leadoff hitter Lonnie Smith, who could have easily scored the game’s decisive run on a double by Terry Pendleton had he not come to a complete stop at second base before heading to third. Ultimately, that error allowed the Twins to keep Morris in the game, and he just kept mowing down the Braves.
In the bottom of the 10th inning, Minnesota’s Dan Gladden doubled off Braves pitcher Alejandro Pena, who walked the next two batters to load the bases. With no one out, pinch hitter Gene Larkin lofted a deep fly ball over the head of Atlanta’s drawn-in outfield to win the Twins’ second World Series in five years.
Braves fans morosely filed out of the restaurants, bars and taverns, “heads drooping like a beer-soaked foam tomahawk,” I wrote back then.
That’s when the night began to get really bad. For all my planning, I did not have a secure place from where I could transmit my story in those homesteading days before cell phones. My laptop had no port to plug in acoustic couplers, which allowed you to use just about any public phone with a standard headset to connect to the newspaper’s toll-free modem for the typesetting computer. That process wasn’t easy, but for years I had been able to transmit from roadside telephone booths, media workrooms and various bars around town, just like Damon Runyon would have done if that technology had been available in his day.
The flip-top Tandys, however, didn’t have couplers. They had a port in the back that needed a detachable phone line, like one on a fax machine or a hotel room phone. Not exactly an easy thing to find at 1 a.m. in a depressed city after watching its team lose the World Series.
I couldn’t use a pay phone or talk my way into a restaurant manager’s office to use a phone line, the way I used to do at, say, an interstate Cracker Barrel.
In a final attempt to make deadline, I found a relatively cheap hotel that I knew had a usable landline. Except the night manager-in-training had no idea what I was asking for. If I wanted to use a phone line, I had to check into a room—which I did for exactly 20 minutes to use the phone. That was a $100 call that the newspaper never reimbursed me for.
After
finally getting my story to the office, I got back into my car and started the
two-and-a-half hour drive home, with an estimated arrival time of 4 a.m. Newspaper life was not easy.
Somewhere on a lonely stretch of I-85 between Anderson, South Carolina, and Greenville, I noticed a bright red beacon on my dashboard, just below the speedometer. Apparently, driving all over Atlanta for five hours trying to get quotes and color for a story, I used up all the gas I started the day with.
By the time I started looking for an all-night gas station, the engine began to sputter and my car went as powerless as the Braves’ offense. The road was desolate and dark. I had no choice but to start walking.
Before long, an overnight 18-wheeler swerved on to the shoulder after seeing me walking down the road. He offered a ride to the next exit, wherever that might be. We rode for miles before we saw the burning lights of an open truck stop, one that had a spare five-gallon gas can. I filled it up and started looking around for another good Samaritan heading south.
The northbound truck was long gone by then. I had no choice but to start walking again. For the next five miles, while sloshing gas onto my dress pants and into my shoes, I swore that my car was just over the crest of the next hill. It never was.
I eventually put the gas in my car, drove back to the truck stop to return the gas can and fill up my car. As I pulled back on I-85, the sun began to peep through my passenger-side window. By the time I got home, it was well over the horizon. I sat down just long enough to realize that I had to be at Furman football coach Jimmy Satterfield’s weekly press conference in less than an hour, giving me just enough time to wash the gasoline off of my legs and find a clean pair of shoes.
That was 30 years ago this week. I wish I could say I’ve never run out of gas again after learning a hard lesson, but that’s not exactly true. I’ve done it a dozen or so times since. Once I ran out of gas—twice—going to buy a Valentine’s Day card for my wife at a Target less than two miles from our house. It’s a long story.
The 1991 Series was the beginning of the Braves’ longest sustained success in franchise history, resulting in five National League pennants in nine years and the 1995 World Series title. The Twins haven’t been back to the Series since. I was never able to cover a real baseball playoff game, but I did go back to Atlanta many times, including for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games and the 2001 ACC Tournament.
That night, however, the Twins went to bed World Series champions. The Braves went to bed upset that a base-running error let them down in a one-run game.
And I never went to bed at all.
