Gator Country

I got a call from my dear friend Jack Hairston this morning and it wasn’t the one I wanted to hear. Jack was calling to say good-bye. He’s tired and ready to go home after a good life in which he spent 50 years as one of the most respected sports writers in the country. Saturday morning he asked the doctors to pull out the IV that has been sustaining his life. In a matter of a day or two, he will close his eyes one last time, leaving behind his lovely wife Marilyn, two marvelous daughters, grandchildren and numerous friends like me who will never have the opportunity to repay the many acts of kindness extended over the years.

Usually, it’s customary to wait until someone departs to write a eulogy, but I’m writing this to say thanks and I love you to my friend and mentor of the past 41 years. For those of you who don’t know who Jack Hairston is, he is a giant among sports writers, a member of the Football Writers Association of America Hall of Fame, one of only 37 ever honored by the FWAA. I hope you folks here on Gator Country will indulge me on this one.

* * *

The best job interview I ever had lasted all of 30 seconds. It was March of 1969, shortly after Gainesville High School had won the state basketball championship in Jacksonville on a 40-footer buzzer-beating shot in overtime by Eddie McAshan. I had spent the state championship weekend as the one-man stats crew, working for Bob Price at the Florida-Times Union. It was there that I met Jack Hairston for the first time. He was the sports editor of the Jacksonville Journal and already a legend.  Little did I know he would be calling me in a couple of weeks to offer me a job.

It was a Monday night when Jack called me and in typical no-frills Jack Hairston style, the interview was ever so brief.

“Franz Beard!” the voice on the phone said. “Jack Hairston here.”

I said, “Hi, Mr. Hairston” and that was the end of the small talk. In typical Jack Hairston fashion he went straight to the business at hand.

“You want to work for me?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Pay you $25 a week (big money for a part-timer in those days) to give me spring football reports,” he told me.

“Wow!,” I said. “Sure, I want the job.”

“Can you start tomorrow?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Someone will call you and tell you what we need every day,” he said.

That was the entire conversation. If only all job interviews were that good and that brief.

That was within a few days in one direction or the other of being exactly 41 years ago. It began a friendship that has endured through all the good times and bad times. If there is one thing that I will always remember about Jack is that even in his darkest and most difficult moments, he always found a way to encourage other people. During some of his difficult moments --- he survived four bouts with cancer among other things --- I called or visited him with the intention of encouraging him but it seemed I was always the one most encouraged.

I think a lot of Jack’s friends can say that.

* * *

I owe my journalistic career to three people --- Charlie Dunagin, the managing editor of the McComb (Mississippi) Enterprise-Journal, who after talking to my eighth grade English teacher hired me to write junior high school sports for the incredible (it was then) amount of $3 per story; Charlie Gordon, the sports editor of the Enterprise-Journal, who moved me up to covering high school sports and then gave me my first college football assignment at age 15; and Jack Hairston, who taught me how to be a professional at my job and to remember that first and foremost, my job was to get the story.

That was Jack’s way of doing things. Just get the story. No excuses.

If you who remember Jack’s columns when he was the sports editor of the Gainesville Sun, you remember his no frills, give you the facts approach. Jack would be the first one to tell you that he wasn’t going to wax poetic when he wrote something, but by the time you finished reading his account of a Florida football game, you had a very good idea of what went on, why it happened and what were the turning points of the game.

When I was young and still learning how to be a professional, Jack always drilled into me, “Get the story … that’s your job. Get the story.”

At first I thought he was talking about getting the score and the facts right, but as I grew up in the business, I learned he was talking about something much, much more.

In every ball game, every competition, there is a story. The final score and the facts are all part of that story, but there is also that human element. There is indeed a thrill of victory and an agony of defeat. For every athlete who celebrates there is another who buries his head in his hands and cries.

I’ve always tried to remember that and I hope it shows in the stories I write.

* * *

In the years I’ve known Jack he has always given far more than I or anyone else has ever given back. If I had a dollar for every favor Jack has done for someone else that wasn’t reciprocated, I doubt Warren Buffet would be impressed with the accumulated fortune but it would be enough to live quite comfortably the rest of my life at Tango Mar on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

When I went through some tough times in life, Jack was always there for me, always offering encouragement that was tempered with sound advice. When the sports editor of the south Florida newspaper I worked for told me I had 30 days notice so he could hire his college roommate who had been laid off by the Washington Star, I was devastated. Within hours of hearing that I was being let go, Jack got on the phone and made some calls to urge some friends of his in the business to give me an interview. Before I went on the interviews, however, he told me it was time to grow up a bit.

In a letter Jack wrote to me that I still have somewhere, he told me, “Sometimes we don’t understand why bad things happen and why people do the things they do. You got a bad deal and you’re at a crossroads. You can either sulk or you can choose to grow up. I hope you’ll choose to grow up and move past this. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean God doesn’t have a plan for your life. Focus on that and put what happened in the past. If you hold on to what happened, you will be consumed with bitterness and it will destroy you.”

He was right. Bad things do happen and most of the time we have no control over them, but if we dwell on all the bad things we stop looking ahead and miss out on opportunities for the future.

* * *

At the Florida Sports Writers meeting at Cypress Gardens in 1976, Jack saw me and invited me to come join him. He was sitting in a booth with Angelo Dundee, Muhammed Ali’s trainer. Angelo told us story after story about Ali until he was ready to go to bed at 2 a.m. Angelo left but he had hardly taken five steps before Baseball Hall of Fame player/manager Al Lopez came over and joined us. He was good for 30 minutes and then he was gone, but then Bill Peterson, the former FSU football coach sat in and started telling football stories. About 30 minutes later, Rick Casares came over to join us. He talked for an hour about playing football for Bob Woodruff, winning the MVP of the Gator Bowl on Saturday and then winning the MVP of the Gator Bowl Basketball Tournament on Tuesday and then playing football in Chicago for George Halas. When I went to bed at 4, too tired to go any longer, Casares, Pete and Jack were still talking and they kept talking for a long time after I left.

There was this measure of trust between these sports legends and Jack. Angelo Dundee, for instance, confided some very intimate details about the difficulty of dealing with Ali and his entourage. It was the kind of thing that if Jack had ever written about it could have destroyed the Ali-Dundee relationship, but Angelo knew he didn’t have to worry sharing that info with Jack. Lopez, Pete and Casares all shared a few stories that couldn’t be printed, too.

I came away from that meeting with a tremendous appreciation for the kind of trust that Jack had built over the years with these folks. As I was trying to decide what to include in this farewell, I knew I had to tell this story. There was a time when coaches and star athletes confided in writers because they knew the writers respected their privacy and weren’t out to dig up the dirt. During his 50 years as a writer, Jack called out quite a few coaches and athletes and took some tough and unpopular stances, but I never knew him to violate the privacy of a coach or an athlete.

We certainly can’t say that about the generation of journalists that has taken over in the last 20 years.

* * *

Jack’s first wife was Margie, a sweet lady with a killer smile who taught school at Terwillegar. Margie, went into the hospital several years ago for what was to be a routine procedure. A month later she died. Jack was devastated. He felt guilty that he lived through lung cancer, prostate cancer and two other forms of the deadly disease while Margie died well before her time.

He went through a couple of tough years but gradually Jack came back to rejoin the living. I give a lot of credit to Jim Niblack, the late football gypsy who coached in just about every league known to man, and to Marilyn Lowe, who I can only describe as an angel from heaven. Marilyn’s first husband, Joe, was my civics teacher when I was at GHS. He used to film the football games when Niblack was making his own legend as the GHS head coach.

Niblack got Jack involved in the “Old Farts Club,” a group of ex-coaches who met once a week to talk football and swap stories, most of which were true. Marilyn got Jack interested in enjoying life again. He fell in love with her and they married. I have always loved Marilyn for bringing out a side of Jack that most of us had never seen. She filled the void in his life with her effervescent personality and Jack responded with a renewed joy for living that was good for all of us who know him. 

One of my lasting memories of Jack is the 2007 Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York. As a longtime Heisman voter and former president of the Football Writers Association of America, Jack wanted to make one last big trip so he took Marilyn to New York to see Tim Tebow become Florida’s third Heisman winner. They stayed in New York for a few days after and had the time of their lives. You would have thought they were a couple of teenagers.

* * *

Saturday, after Jack made the decision to have the IV pulled, he called me to tell me the news. He told me he had a list of eight old friends that he needed to call personally, but I was first on his list. I am humbled beyond words that he would think of me in that way. He asked me to call Buddy Martin and a few other folks. He would be so embarrassed to leave this life without saying good-bye, which is so typical of the friend I’ve known for 41 years.

I told Jack that I love him and tried to thank him for being the friend and mentor I didn’t deserve. He told me he loved me and then spent the next two or three minutes comforting me.

That’s Jack for you.

Sometime very soon Jack Hairston will fall asleep for the last time. He’s going home, ready to meet his maker after 81 years of being a good husband, a good dad, a terrific grandfather, a good friend and a mentor to numerous guys like me for whom he always had an encouraging word when we needed it the most.

Thanks Jack. I love you, man.

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