Q: I remember hearing something about Georgia Tech beating another college football by an absurdly large margin, like more than 200 points. Is this true? If so, what are the details of that game?
A: Modern no-huddle, high-tech offenses can't match what Georgia Tech accomplished 100 years ago this week against poor Cumberland University.
John Heisman coached Tech in those days. He’s the guy whose name is on the revered trophy, and the story goes, that he was angry at Cumberland.
Pro players disguised as Cumberland’s baseball team had routed his Georgia Tech team earlier that year, so he invited the school’s disbanded football team to play a game in Atlanta.
Cumberland rounded up some volunteers with a lot of courage, but little skill and showed up for what became — and remains — the largest margin of victory in college football.
By the time it was done, Heisman’s team had scored 32 touchdowns on its way to a 222-0 route on Oct. 7, 1916.
G.E. “Strup” Strupper scored eight touchdowns and Tech added 13 more scores on returns of various types.
Even then, Heisman wasn’t all that pleased, according to a 2006 ramblinwreck.com article.
After the game, he made his team practice.
Q: In the early 1980s, I attended a conference in Atlanta. The headquarters were in the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, but I was put up in a several-story motel a few blocks to the west. A little farther west was a hotel with a shop that carried magic tricks. What was that hotel?
—Bill Boyd, Newnan
A: That likely was the Omni Hotel, where Magic Masters was located about that time.
Owner Ken Fletcher started selling magic tricks out of a shop in the Omni Hotel in the early ’80s, and before you could say hocus pocus, he had a small chain.
By the early ’90s, there were downtown Magic Masters stores at both the Marriott Marquis and the Hilton, in addition to two stores in New Orleans, one at Caesars Palace and another in Washington.
Nightly magic shows left customers wide-eyed and full of questions, according to a 1993 AJC article.
Employees with quick wits and faster hands demonstrated the tricks. Left in awe and wondering how to perform them, folks could find out, but only if they first bought the trick.
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