Falcons fan finds precious memory in Super Bowl swoon

My name is David, and I am an Atlanta Falcons fan.

After their Super Bowl collapse on Sunday, I feel like Lewis Grizzard.

Once, when the late Atlanta columnist’s beloved Georgia Bulldogs lost to the puny Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, the full text of his column the next day read: “Frankly, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Ole Lewis always had a way with words.

When his friend Robert Steed wrote a book of humor columns, Grizzard contributed this for the book jacket: “With this book Bob Steed has done for literature what Jimmy Swaggart has done for cheap motels.”

Grizzard once covered the Falcons and other NFL teams. He even ran off up North to work for the Chicago newspaper before he came crawling back, kissing the red dirt of home.

With the Falcons’ swan dive on Sunday’s big stage, all I can think of is Grizzard’s answer when I asked him why he’d leave sports to write a general-interest column.

“I was standing in the Atlanta Falcons locker room after a game when I realized I could not think of a single thing I wanted to ask a 300-pound naked man,” he said.

And I’m thinking about one of Grizzard’s book titles: “They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat.”

It wasn’t about the Falcons. It was about that long era of his short life when the finest surgeons tried to fix his failing heart.

That’s how I feel about the Super Bowl. There’s not a thing 300-pound naked men can add to my life. And they certainly are not going to tear out my heart and stomp that sucker flat.

Maybe that was true when I was a kid in Atlanta, when the Falcons team was created and this 51-year rebuilding program began. But not now. Let the inflated egos of the New England Patriots celebrate. They earned it. But my sense of being is not determined by a coin flip, thank God.

When you grow up in Atlanta, you’re used to losing. It might be in the 10th inning of the seventh game of the World Series or in a Super Bowl overtime. But you know it’s coming.

And then there was the Civil War thing, when Atlanta burned, and we relived it as school children with sappy music playing in the background on field trips to The Cyclorama.

Grizzard helped put that in perspective as well. His assistant Gerrie Ferris shared a story about a letter he got from a reader of one of the 450 newspapers that carried his column:

“You should know that outside the compounds of Atlanta the Civil War holds no meaning. The South lost 100-1. Quit crying, quit worrying about the flag, quit building monuments and Tara-lands. It’s OVER! PERIOD!”

To which Grizzard replied:

“Dear Donna:

“100-1? We could have beaten the Yankees with cornstalks, if they had only been willing to fight that way.”

Grizzard spent a good bit of time on Hilton Head and Daufuskie islands. He brought his golf clubs and, always, his typewriter. One of his dogs, Cornbread, was a stray from Daufuskie.

In 1991, he filled a ballroom on Hilton Head in a benefit show for our arts center. I met him in his villa that afternoon, following his round of golf at Harbour Town. He did not look healthy to me, but that night he sprang to life on stage. He told jokes about Southern football and Hilton Head. He said we’d become “sort of a glorified reptile farm for Notherners.” He sang the country hymn, “Precious Memories.” In the lobby, he sold grits gloves, used to pick grits from grits trees ($39.95).

Not long before his death at 47 in the spring of 1994, the old cuss wrote about a miracle drug called prayer.

His learned doctors told him he’d survived another heart operation because people all over America were praying for him.

“What I did to deserve that, I don’t know; but I do know I’d spent a lot of time in my life doubting,” Grizzard wrote. “At one time or the other, I doubted it all — spirituality, love, the basic goodness of mankind.

“But this flirtation with the end of me has removed a lot of that doubt. If the medical experts say prayer brought me back from certain death, who am I to doubt them? And prayer only works if there’s someone or something to grant the favor asked. My faith and belief in that someone or something not only has been restored but it has been forevermore cast in my soul as the great truth beyond all others.”

Then he worried about how to adequately thank all these people. He thought about a big gathering in the Atlanta Stadium parking lot where he could hug their necks. But he decided to ask the Lord to thank them.

“And, for the record,” he wrote, “even if you didn’t pray for me, it’s nice to be with you again, too.

“To be honest, it’s just nice to be.”

At the time, that didn’t seem like Ole Lewis. But it’s a precious memory this week, when the score might as well have been 100-1.

This story was originally published February 7, 2017 at 9:55 AM with the headline "Falcons fan finds precious memory in Super Bowl swoon."