CARLTON FLETCHER: Burying a 30-year-old UGA hatchet

When it comes to forgettin’ … We bury the hatchet But leave the handle sticking out.

— Garth Brooks

We all get those calls, the ones that we later describe as “from way out in left field.”

I got one this week that was from much farther out than left field. It wasn’t even in the stadium or in the vicinity of the stadium. It was one of those Twilight Zone-level calls.

I recognized the voice instantly. If you’ve been a sports fan in Georgia for the past 30 years or so, you would have recognized it, too. That the owner of that voice, former University of Georgia football coach Ray Goff, would be calling me to talk about something I’d mentioned in passing in a recent column had to rank in the Top 10 among the unusual things that have happened to me in a life filled with pretty unusual occurrences.

I’ll recap, briefly:

I was sports editor of the Tifton Gazette in 1983, and I called Goff, who was then head of recruiting at UGA, to ask why he and the Bulldog staff hadn’t recruited players from a Tift County High School team that had won the state football championship. The Blue Devils defeated LaGrange High School 59-6 in the state title game, and seven seniors from that Tift team would go on to get D-I scholarships.

None went to UGA. None was recruited by UGA.

I was told that Coach Goff and all the Georgia coaches were out signing players. (It was national signing day.) The lady who answered the phone asked if I was calling about a player Georgia recruited. I told her that I was actually calling about Tift County players that hadn’t been recruited.

Imagine my stunned surprise when, 10 minutes later, Vince Dooley called me back. We talked a while, and the head Dog said, basically, “We screwed up by not recruiting those Tift players.” I wrote a column based on the conversation.

Jump forward a couple of months: I’m at Tift High waiting on legendary coach Gene Brody, when Goff pulls up. I greet him, and he asks if he knows me. I say, “I don’t know why you would.” He asks what I do for a living and I tell him I’m sports editor of the Tifton paper. Goff says, “You’re the guy who wrote that terrible column about us not recruiting any of Tifton’s players.”

I acknowledge that I am, and Goff says, “I expect you to write a retraction. None of those guys will ever play Division I ball.”

I say, “Why don’t we wait and see, coach?”

I felt vindicated when several of the players had nice college careers and one, free safety Stan Shiver, became an All-American at FSU.

I mentioned that incident in passing in a recent column about UGA suspending star running back Todd Gurley, and the biggest Bulldog fan in Albany — and, most likely, the state — Dee Matthews tells Goff about it. So he calls me and leaves a message asking me to call back.

I called Goff back, and he immediately said that while he didn’t remember having done anything to or against me or my family, if he had done anything to hurt or upset any of us he wanted to apologize.

So I told him the story.

We laughed about it, and Goff half-jokingly said, “I’ll have to admit I don’t remember that, but I’m not doubting that it happened. I took a lot of shots to the head playing in the SEC.”

We talked for a while — about UGA, about Dee (“She’s like a second Mama to me,” Goff said), about coaching under Dooley, about just stuff — and I told Goff that, for what it was worth, his call had ended my long-standing enmity with the University of Georgia, which, admittedly, I’d kinda gotten past years ago.

I asked Goff what he was doing now, and he said he and his brother owned 11 Zaxby’s restaurant franchises. I asked how he ended up in that business, and his response was immediate and perfect: “I got fired.”

“I didn’t have a job,” Goff said, “so I had to find something to do. I had lunch at a Zaxby’s and really liked the food. My brother and I looked into the franchise, opened our first one in Tifton and now have 11. I tell you what, it’s a lot better than coaching football.”

I asked Goff if he was OK with me writing about our conversation, and he said, “Go ahead. You can’t write anything bad about me that hasn’t already been written.”

I ended the conversation by telling the old coach, only half-jokingly, that he’d restored my faith in University of Georgia football after 30 years of ill feelings. He said what so many others have said when I told them the story: “When you hold a grudge, you hold a grudge.”

This one, though, is officially over.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].