Dropping the Ball - Soapbox Jr.
There is a famous, actually infamous true story about a football game so lopsided it caught the attention of the big city East Coast sports writers who otherwise would have not batted an eye at the two teams involved, both from the South, the powerhouse Georgia Tech Yellowjackets – let by future hall of fame coach George Heisman and the Cumberland University Bulldogs who just happen to hail from Wilson County, TN the same county as the Daniels family has called home since 1973.
I’ll try to make this as brief as possible. The year was 1916 and Cumberland had fallen on some tough times. They had disbanded their football team before the season but someone had forgotten that they were still contractually bound to play Georgia Tech in the 1916 season, and there was no way that Heisman was going to let them out of it. For starters, Heisman was also the baseball coach and Tech had gotten beaten by Cumberland in the spring by the extremely lopsided score of 22-0. It was so bad that there were allegations that Cumberland had used professional ringers and used them to run up the score on Tech.
For Cumberland, there were two ways out, if they failed to show, they would have to pay a fine of $3,000 a sum that would have been devastating to a small private university back then.
The other way was to field a team and go down to Atlanta to take on Georgia Tech on the gridiron.
The problem was they had no team.
George A. Allen was captain of the baseball team, he was tasked with finding young men – mostly law students and his fraternity brothers - to save Cumberland from financial ruin.
The team was selected, they practiced their hearts out and then they made the fateful journey to Atlanta to the belly of the beast to show what they were made of.
This was a game of EPIC proportions, and Allen’s makeshift team did what they were designed to do, and at the end of the day, this became a piece of college and football history that would be talked about for decades.
Final Score:
Georgia Tech 222 – 0 Cumberland.
Ouch.
I didn’t say that Cumberland’s team was designed to win, just to keep from having to forfeit the game and be fined.
And it seems the team was as inept as it was well-intentioned.
Allen recalled that he fumbled the ball and it rolled towards one of his teammates, George frantically yelled “Pick it up!” to which his teammate replied, “You dropped it, YOU pick it up!”
You can’t make this stuff up.
So, Cumberland was saved, and the unheard-of score put Georgia Tech – and all of Southern collegiate football to the national spotlight and Coach John Heisman began to cement his place as one of the top college football coaches in history.
So why do I relate this story? Mostly because of last week.
June 26 was the 40th anniversary of “Me and the Boys,” which contains “Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye” which I have dubbed the rowdiest breakup song of all time. This is a big deal, it was the biggest single since “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and just an overall fun song and I just realized that I haven’t even started production on a “DMBG” tee. I let the occasion of the album go by virtually unnoticed, aside from the anniversary posts we do here, but since I took over doing website merchandise, any major anniversary that ends in a “5” or a “0” has had collector’s merchandise – T-shirts and/or koozies, etc.… and for the first time since 2014, I let a major anniversary slip by.
It wasn’t even on my radar. I’ve had in the back of my mind that we need a “The Legend of Wooley Swamp” 45th soon but this one, not so much.
I can give plenty of excuses. I’m currently busier than at any time in my life, and sometimes it’s absolutely overwhelming but I should have been better prepared.
As I said before, it’s not like I’ve been sitting around twiddling my thumbs, but I have to do better for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that I’m representing Dad, and in his lifetime, he was a hard worker and very focused, but no less important is Colossians 3:23, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” meaning, work like your boss is the Man upstairs Himself, so always give your best effort.
Sadly, I often feel like I’m not able to always give my best. It’s a matter of number of directions I am going and the fact that there’s only one of me.
But I do try, even if it means working at unconventional hours.
My job has evolved a lot since July 6, 2020, and it continues to do so. Originally, I carved out a niche for myself in 2012 because social media was a need and it wasn’t being met, and shortly I then took over the website and website merchandise sales before everything came to a screeching halt in the summer of 2020.
From then on it became damage control and trying to figure out the next moves for a business whose founder and creative force is no longer an active part of the operation, with grief being deferred indefinitely.
The good news is that out of four projects that I have been working on for the past three years, this spring three of them have been signed and are in active development, one more appears to be on the cusp of being signed and another opportunity just popped up earlier this year and looks to be promising, then just a month or so ago, the daily operations of our record label, Blue Hat Records, has fallen in the lap of me and Randy who has worked with me in once capacity or another for about 20 years now. While this is going to be a good thing, it’s just trying to add one more thing to the weight of the world, but I’m still exploding with ideas.Dropping the ball from time to time is inevitable, just recover the fumble as soon as you can and try again. After all, I’m only human, we’re ALL only human.
So, it looks like I’ve got to work on a design, but it also looks like I need to give myself some grace, after checking the official anniversary list, “DMBG” wasn’t released as a single until March of 1986, so I still have time to get a tee ready for Christmas sales and leading up to next year’s anniversary.
So that just shows how being overwhelmed can cause you to second guess yourself and add even more stress.
I’ve also got to wrap this soapbox up so I can write about the fifth anniversary of Dad’s “changing addresses.” This one will be rough, but I’ll try to also touch on the good things in the works.
By the way, Cumberland eventually implemented a football program a few years ago with a new mascot, the Phoenix. It makes perfect sense, from the ashes of the old it rises anew, seeps appropriate around he as well.
What do you think?
Let’s all make the day count!
Pray for our troops, our police, the Peace of Jerusalem and our nation.
God Bless America!
#SonyReleaseHonkyTonkAve
#BenghaziAintGoingAway #End22
Charlie Daniels, Jr