From the 1970s until this season, Loran Smith served as the University of Georgia’s football sideline reporter for radio broadcasts. Some of his humorous moments never made the air.
By Loran Smith
For the AJC
I grew up in the Georgia program, and I was sometimes too excitable to talk without stumbling. I tried to calm myself down. If I found a good luck spot, I hung out there. If nothing good happened, I’d find another spot.
It was tough communication originally. I didn’t have a two-way relationship with the booth. If I had something good, I stood on the bench and they’d see me. I knew who recovered the fumble, [but] by the time they saw me, the team had fumbled back. The story was gone.
The sideline is about the worst place to see the game, but you get the feel of the game, the emotions and intensity of the players and coaches.
After being diagnosed with leukemia in the late 1980s, I took a lawn chair to the sideline and sat down. There was a sweep play, and I couldn't get out of the way. Mixon Robinson, a team doctor, picked me up and kept me from getting run over.
I never got injured on the sideline, just a few broken hearts.
At Alabama one year, they came back and beat us. In my commentary at the end, one of their fans stuck his head into my mic and yelled, “Roll Tide!” I kicked him, and hurt my toe. I hobbled around for a week. That offended me to no end, that drunken fool.
I pulled a terrible joke on Bobby Gaston, the head of SEC officials, in an interview for the pregame show. He didn’t know it was before we went on air. I said the commissioner had told me that when he started out, he was really a horse-bleep official. Gaston thought he was live, so he couldn’t talk or answer the questions. We were given to a little tomfoolery.
I always developed a nice little rapport with kickers. In a lot of situations they are inactive. They were always asking me, “Have you got any scores?” We had a coach years ago who played a parlay bet or two every week. That was why he wanted the scores for schools far away, like Penn State and Texas A&M. I often gave the wrong score just to excite him.
The biggest thing you learn on the sidelines is about injuries. When Arthur Marshall broke his leg against LSU, for instance, you don’t want to say that on air and alarm the parents. You say he has an injury and is taken off the field. We say that we don’t know how bad it is.
I realized how many people in the stadium listen to the games when Herschel Walker had some minor injury.
First, I reported that team doctor Dr. Butch Mulherin has played a big joke on us. He said Herschel’s ankle was broken. And then I said he was just kidding.
When I said “just kidding,” I heard the stadium go, “Aah ...”
-- As told to Michelle Hiskey for the AJC
