You Can Get Anywhere From Here, Except When You Can't Say It

You can get anywhere from here.


You can get anywhere from here.

Six words.  Easy enough for a six-year-old, right?  If so, then it should be a cake walk for someone who has been talking into microphones for almost half his life.  Guess again.

It's Saturday night, October 1st.  The tension and excitement build as Savannah State University gets ready for its first football game in the gorgeously renovated T.A. Wright Stadium.  Regardless of what happens once the action begins – the Tigers would lose in a rout - the joint is jumping because the man who might as well be Mr. Savannah State, pro football hall of famer Shannon Sharpe, had just wowed the crowd with words of affection for his Alma Mater.

As he walked off the field in his gleaming, gold Hall of Fame jacket, the public address announcer read a note of congratulations to Mr. Sharpe and teed up the ever important Savannah State University slogan; "Mr. Sharpe's career is proof that, when coming from Savannah State University, you can get… here.......from anywhere."

Groans.  Catcalls.  Almost in unison, a highly annoyed throng shouted the actual university slogan, which the announcer hurriedly read; "you can get ANYWHERE from here."  Hoping for some cheers of forgiveness, the announcer received well deserved Bronx cheers and raspberries instead.

The announcer was yours truly.

Happy that I wasn't fired on the spot approximately ten minutes after beginning my first Savannah State football game, I waited nervously for the verbal barrage from the press box.  A writer seated next to me laughed and said, "Well, that was close enough."  I will withhold the writer's name because while close may count in horseshoes and hand grenades, I doubt the Tiger faithful will accept ‘close enough’ for their university moniker.  Trina Samuels, SSU's Assistant Sports Information Director was most comforting, however, as she patted my head and said, "It's okay.  They're only going to kill you."

It isn't the first mistake I have made as a public address announcer, and despite a couple hundred Savannah Sand Gnats baseball games and a season of Savannah State and Armstrong Atlantic State basketball under my belt, it won't be the last.  Sometimes my voice has frozen in mid-syllable.  Sometimes, I have misread copy, even words I have successfully navigated dozens of times.  Especially problematic are names because, no matter how hard you try, you aren't going to pronounce every name perfectly.

Many people think announcing a baseball game is difficult because of the large number of Latino players, but it actually doesn't take long to get used to the nuances of Hispanic names.  In fact, the biggest issue we had with the Sand Gnats this past season was with one of the team's Caucasian outfielders (I will use a pseudonym for the player because he was nice about the kerfuffle).

From the beginning of the season, I had pronounced this player’s surname Burgermeister (told you I'd use a pseudonym) as it was listed in the Sand Gnats' pronunciation guide.  Then, roughly half way through the season, I was informed that the player's mother was in attendance at a particular game, and she claimed we were wrong; the family name was Meisterburger.

After announcing him as Meisterburger a couple of times during that game, a Sand Gnats employee hurriedly brought me a yellow Post It note directly from the player's mother.  "It's MEISTERBRAU!” she had emphatically scribbled, so he was Meisterbrau for the rest of the evening.  Before the next game, I brought up the name in question to Toby Hyde, the Sand Gnats' Media Director and radio broadcaster, who told me the player himself had pronounced it the original way, Burgermeister, prior to the beginning of the season.  Yes, the player later claimed that his own mother had mispronounced his name and, thanks to her and her sticky note, so had I.

That episode was embarrassing, but at least some of the folks inside Historic Grayson Stadium missed it as they grabbed a hot dog or some chicken and waffles from the concession stand or played with Gnate The Gnat.  It wasn’t the same as inverting the words of a historic university slogan, a sentence my preschooler could have said a year ago, with almost six-thousand people paying attention to every single word.

So I wholeheartedly apologize to the Tiger Universe.  And to SSU interim president Cheryl Dozier, I am taking my punishment like a man.  I will write one-thousand times on my third-grader’s whiteboard:

You can get anywhere from here.

You can get anywhere from here.

Every day you see Mr. Willie is a good day

There has already been enough written about Mr. Willie Smith. Countless newspaper articles, TV news profiles virtually every year, even a spot on ESPN's web site a few years ago.  By now, most everyone knows virtually everything about the man with the booming, gravelly baritone, usually ensconced in his general admission seat behind home plate at Historic Grayson Stadium, so why write about him again?  Because when you see him for the first time in a while, you realize why news people fall over themselves to interview him, and also why we love him so doggone much.

"How you doin' brother?  I didn't recognize you without the hat," Mr. Smith said as we greeted each other before a Savannah State women's basketball game.  It was the first time I had seen him since the Sand Gnats were eliminated from the playoffs last September.  He seemed to be limping more than usual, and maybe was a little more stooped.  But he was also typical Willie Smith.  "Oh, I got this thing going on with my legs," he dismissed with a wave of his hand, "but I'm here!  And I gotta be here to support my girls."  Were I in his shoes, I'd be lucky to be supporting my own rear end, much less as many sports teams as he supports.

Mr. Smith, now pushing 72, is rarely without his smile or the magnificent voice that resonates off walls and empty seats and that you still hear an hour after a game ends.  "Come on, now.  Let's play some defense."  Watching him attempt to navigate the stairs at Grayson or at Tiger Arena is excruciating.  Every step seems to shoot pain through his body.  I have never had the courage to ask him if it does, though, because he would probably just say, "Oh, I'm alright."  Then, he'd launch into a diatribe about how much Chipper Jones looks and plays like an old man and should just retire.

"These are my girls," he says of the Savannah State women.  Mr. Smith quickly amends, "well them and the high school girls."  The high school is his high school, Beach High School, he lets me know in case I didn't.  It's the only school that could have been his high school during his "separate but equal" youth.  "You'll see me at the men's games sometimes but I'm always here for my girls."  Mr. Smith doesn't need to say it's partly because the women's teams usually get about half as much attention as the men.  The way he says "my girls" tells you that.

"Sometimes, Mr. Crump comes out here, too.  You remember Mr. Crump?"  Mr. Crump is Mr. Smith's fellow permanent Sand Gnats season-ticket holder; they both have small plaques with their names on their seats.   Mr. Crump is the one who doesn't get stories written about him because, while he has also been attending Savannah baseball games for decades, you can't hear his voice clear across Daffin Park.  Perhaps someone will profile Mr. Crump this year.  Maybe I will even remember Mr. Crump's first name - it's on his seat plaque, but he's always sitting down and covering it up.  He generally doesn't fellowship with entire ballparks or arenas like Mr. Smith.

Speaking of which, that time has come. "Well, I gotta go say hi to my lady over here."   He could have been talking about 50 different ladies.  He also might have been referring to all of them because, sure enough, Mr. Smith will greet every single one before The Star Spangled Banner signals that it's game time.  As is customary, a handshake turns into a hug and a "Love you, brother!"  Then, he turns a shoulder as he toddles off and yells, "see you at the ballpark."  With the exception of family time, there aren't many better places to be than at the ballpark with Willie Smith.  Then again, Mr. Smith IS family.  To all of Savannah.