Clarksville’s oldest teenager -- a future Church of Christ deacon and benefactor/businessman -- finished off another in his long row of Budweiser drafts at the Bear Bryant Lounge at the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Holiday Inn, when I helped coax him to get up to the small band stage and grab the microphone.
The house
band had been playing Lynyrd Skynyrd covers and the like, leading the
crimson-necked crowd to holler out occasional “Roll Tide” and other alarming,
well-meaning, epithets professing arousal by God and gridiron in the land of
cotton.
Sherwin Clift (who I sometimes called “Sherwood,” depending on beer dispensation), strode to the bandstand during the band’s break. He was handed the microphone and he, perhaps slurring his words slightly, delivered a verbatim version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” while the band’s bass player and at least one other musician backed him up.
I was sitting
alone at the table during the performance, since Sherwin and I were the only
media traveling with the Austin Peay State University basketball team that the
next night suffered swift dispensation by the then-underappreciated Tide
basketball squad. The best part of the trip – other than Sherwin’s performance –
was Alabama’s Coach C.M. Newton, forever clutching pipe in teeth, giving me a
tour of the athletic facilities.
Even got to
see the real Bear Bryant atop the coaching tower on the football practice field.
Or come to think of it, that may have been his ghost. Long time ago.
This was early
in my years of covering Austin Peay State University sports. In fact, I believe
I had begun that basketball season as assistant sports editor of The
Leaf-Chronicle newspaper (which is the oldest continuously published paper
in the state, though it now depends on press releases for survival and does not
qualify as a newspaper.)
Max Moss was
sports editor during the early part of that season, but he had a heart issue
that required his hospitalization for a while – I visited with him every day at
old Clarksville Memorial, where we smoked cigarettes and laughed. Nowadays,
they generally don’t recommend heart patients or their guests fire up Winston
reds in hospital rooms. Good decision,
but back then, we all figured time was on our side. And it was for a while. Not
anymore.
Anyway, the
sports editor up there covered Austin Peay sports, but with Max out of
commission, it fell on me to cover the Governors. I still covered high schools, too, though I
can’t remember now if Larry Schmidt – a Steely Dan fan who became a fine
journalist as well as semi-scratch golfer and reverse-mortgage purveyor and
bourbon aficionado --had begun his turn covering preps after graduating from
the Peay.
Max came back
to work and covered the Peay again, but, truly, his heart wasn’t in it. His
heart ailment and desire to live, coupled with some office politics and
endorsements for me from Voice of the Govs Sherwin Clift, led to me taking over
as sports editor while Max was promoted to managing editor.
That meant
working mostly days and not traveling and more time with his family (Merrily,
Max and kids Karen and Max Jr. and their dog, Fluffy, had all but adopted me.
Max Jr. and Karen are the remainders, but I still love them all).
Max gladly
relinquished those long, hard and late-night and weekend hours of being a
sports editor, complete with the bus rides with the teams and the generally
seedy hotels where we slept in and around the Ohio Valley Conference (back then
just recovering from its image as outlaw league, reeling from NCAA sanctions
and abuse because of minor infractions that are all legal, encouraged even, in
the modern NIL NCAA.)
Most of the
motels were in exotic ports like Richmond, Kentucky, Morehead (not less!) in
the Kentucky mountains and Johnson City, Tennessee. The fanciest place to eat in Morehead (not
less!) was a grits and country ham joint not far from the campus. If you really wanted to dine in high style,
there was a Shoney’s Big Boy partway down the mountain and near the freeway.
The rest of
the games were day trips to Bowling Green, Kentucky; Murray, Kentucky;
Murfreesboro and Cookeville, Tennessee. We did fly to Mobile for a tournament
and I even sat through a practice with the Rev. Oral Roberts when we visited
that shaman’s university.
But, the trip
to Tuscaloosa was special. (Forget the Groucho Marx/Captain Spaulding “elephant
in my pajamas” joke in “Animal Crackers” about tusk removal. I should probably
add here that, on professor’s recommendation, everyone in my film class at Iowa
State had fed their heads to prepare for the showing of that film and “Duck
Soup.” I was nothing if not studious. Anyway, Groucho proclaims in one of his
rants that it’s easier to get an elephant’s tusk in Alabama, because the
Tuscaloosa, or some such. My Uncle Moose and I had met Groucho, when he still
was alive. But that’s another story and Moose and Groucho are long gone.)
Back to my
tale, skewed by fading memories and years of long nights, ballgames, heartbreak,
triumphs, redemption and occasional beverages.
In
Tuscaloosa, I was sharing a room with Sherwin at the Holiday Inn. Normally, Martin
Harmon, the briefly tenured sports information director, would have shared a
room with one of us, but Martin skipped the plane flight. Neither he nor guard
“Downtown Dennis” Pagan (also known as “Pogo” Pagan) wanted to fly, so they
drove down there the next day.) Pogo was, by the way, the pride of Gastonia,
North Carolina, and his specialty was the three-point shot from “downtown” that
only counted for two points back then in the dark ages. Let’s skip the Caitlin
Clark versus Pete Maravich debate here. Caitlin is a phenomenon, great for
sports, Pistol Pete only had three years of varsity eligibility and no three-point
shot.
I would like
to talk to Sherwin about that, but he died the other day. I’ll not be going to the
funeral, as I’ve spent too much time with the dead lately. But I still have
spent a lot of time thinking about him lately.
Sherwin, who
seemed to enjoy both my company and my urging him (not a tough task) to sing
the Cash tune, was “The Voice of the Govs,” the radio broadcaster for the Govs
sports network (WJZM-AM in Clarksville was the “home” station, feeding the
games to similarly WKRP-like broadcast destinations across small parts of the Ohio
Valley).
I had been
told – either by Larry Schmidt, former sports editor Frances Gene Washer or
perhaps by Jeff Bibb, an APSU alum and booster – that I needed to wait until
Sherwin had a few Buds and encourage him to perform.
(I want to
add here a side note that Larry Schmidt and Jeff Bibb are sons of two of the
men I admired most from the academia of the Peay. Drs. Leon Bibb and Aaron
Schmidt were two of the most noble men I ever met. That has nothing to do with this story, but I
was proud to be able to consider those men as my friends. They were in a league
with businessman Bill Shelton – father of my beloved pal Scott “Badger” Shelton
-- as the city’s most-welcoming men and fans of this Italian Yankee outlaw.)
They are going
to officially remember Sherwin Sunday in Clarksville. Since I’ve been gone a long time, I contacted young
Larry Schmidt for his thoughts on the passing. He dashed off a few quick notes
and told me to reconstruct at my wish. I don’t need to change a thing, as these
quick thoughts came straight from Larry’s heart:
“Since 1956, Sherwin Clift has been a friend of the
family.
He befriended my parents when Dad came to APSU (where he
was a music wizard, as band director and composer and professor.)
Norma babysat me when Dad had the band in the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Sherwin took me under his wing when I went to APSU. That’s
where I met (beloved sports information director) Doug Vance (now retired in
the Arizona desert). I traveled with this group and Jeff Bibb with football and
basketball teams. Sherwin was a dear friend. He loved his family and he loved
life.
The world was
a better place with him in it.”
Larry added
the details of Sherwin’s painful decline due to stomach cancer and injury and
pneumonia, adding “he died peacefully.” Part of Sherwin’s love of life and of
Corvettes helped get him branded Clarksville’s oldest teenager. But, even in
his almost-constant leisure suits (a 1970s fashion abomination), I always
thought of him as being pretty old. I mean, he began his Peay career by hitchhiking
up from Cornersville in 1956.
I know I’m
pretty deep into my recollection of a single night in Tuscaloosa 45 years ago
or so, but it was where I got my first impression of The Voice of the Govs and
his good-timey road-dog, side disposition.
I’m only
recalling this today because Sherwin died Tuesday after an extended illness. The
full obituary is about a mile long, detailing his own sports, academic, civic and church achievements.
The pride of Cornersville
(a metroplex of watermelon and feed corn and broken-down donkeys near
Lewisburg), Sherwin was an accomplished man and deserves all the honors and all
the inches of copy spent on his death.
I really
liked the guy a lot, and during my sports editor tenure, I traveled a lot of
miles with him. I covered the basketball teams coached by Ed. (don’t forget the
period or he’ll get pissed… I always addressed him as “Ed Period” at the end of
long nights on the road) Thompson, Ronnie Bargatze (a wonderful guy and uncle
to my favorite comic after Seinfeld and Richie Pryor) and the second coming of
Lake Kelly – I’d become associate editor of the paper and had to return to the
sports beat for a few months after short-timer sports editor John “Street”
Staed fled to Birmingham.
Now, I’ve not
kept up with Sherwin, other than to read the occasional story about his countless
post-Voice of the Govs accomplishments. (Another friend, Bill Herndon, also deceased)
took the microphone when Sherwin closed his final broadcast with his trademark “And
for the final time, down the line, that’s the 3-0 mark from here,” a reference
to our dark ages journalism when a story’s end was marked “30” after it was deemed
set for printing. Bill Herndon was the son of downtown Clarksville’s friendliest
motorcycle cop, Sgt. Russ Herndon, who – after newspaper folks and Fly Williams
– was the first person to welcome me to the Queen City of the Cumberland back
on September 12, 1974.)
I had heard Sherwin
was very ill for a long time. So, his death at age 85 April 23 didn’t really
surprise me. But it hit me hard. In my heart I’m still, I guess, that young guy
with the last name unpronounceable by most Clarksvillians, who enjoyed having a
beer with Sherwin and also enjoyed my fairly regular role as a halftime guest
during football and basketball games.
One game in
particular sticks in my mind (though it is a bit hazy). Sherwin and I were in
Evansville, Indiana, for a basketball game between the Govs and Purple Aces. It was kind of an icy night and it had been a
hard drive up there from Clarksville. I helped Sherwin get his gear up to the
booth – that was on a catwalk high above the arena floor -- and I went down to
talk with the coaches, SIDs, etc., to make sure my bases were covered for
post-game interviews. I adjusted my camera lens speed and F-stops to compensate
for the gloomy lighting I’d face when it came time for my award-winning sports
photography.
Then the
lights went out. Completely. In the arena. I went upstairs to the catwalk to
see how Sherwin was handling the situation, only to find out his telephone
hookup to WJZM was fine. Commercials
were cued up. I believe there was
emergency lighting up there that kept me from plunging off the catwalk.
“Stallion,
can you help me fill some time?” asked Sherwin, kind and irritated by the delay
and its uncertain resolution. (In Clarksville, at least, I was known in sports
quarters as “The Italian Stallion,” a title which I still own, thanks to my
friendships with Larry Schmidt and Jeff Bibb.)
For the next
two hours-plus (and I may be exaggerating, because everybody who remembers is
dead), I sat next to Sherwin, filling airtime while technicians worked to get
the lights up and the balls bouncing on the darkened hardwood far below us. We
talked about all sorts of things. Basketball, of course. But we talked about
his Johnny Cash impression and my first taste of it at the Bear Bryant Lounge.
He pumped me for my passion for The Beatles and tales from a childhood in
Chicago. I spoke about Muhammad Ali. And
he threw out colorful memories of his travels for work and pleasure.
I pushed him
to recall his days in Cornersville, the same town where my buddy, government
reporter Jerry Manley, had spent a chunk of his youth.
Sherwin was 13
years older, so he didn’t know Jerry. He did know of the Manleys, and if
Sherwin ever entered the L-C newsroom he was sure to holler out “There’s the
other pride of Cornersville” toward Jerry. Or something like that.
I’ve been on
radio and TV quite a bit in my life. And a 10-minute halftime stint with
Sherwin always was fun.
But I never
had more fun on the air than when it was just the two of us, on a dark catwalk
high above the arena floor, talking about whatever came into our minds.
Sherwin
eventually moved on from broadcasting. But not before cutting his Austin Peay
“Theme Song” that he titled “Red Fever.”
I’ve still
got a copy of that old 45 rpm here someplace. It’s the voice of the Johnny Cash
enthusiast singing about the thing that he loved more than anything (possibly
excluding his family and wife, Norma): Austin Peay sports.
He’d recorded
it after the great Boots Donnelly captured the OVC football crown for The Peay,
and then was hired away to go home and coach at MTSU.
Things still
looked plenty rosy for the Govs’ football team as a young Turk named Watson
Brown was brought in to take the reins for a pair of 7-4 seasons (or the like)
before fleeing to eventual failure at Vanderbilt.
“It’s new,
it’s hot, it’s flamin’, it’s the fashionable place to be; It’s Austin Peay Red
Fever, in Clarksville, Tennessee,” Sherwin sings.
I may have a
piece of lyric messed up, but you get the gist of the song that had the
boom-chicka Johnny Cash-like soundtrack.
When I
learned Sherwin had died, well, I was sad.
He was a good man and a long time ago, our paths crossed.
I thought
about the decades that have passed since we spent hours togethers. The games we
saw. His stirring 45 rpm record. The two
hours above the Purple Aces arena floor while the lights were out. I thought of him interceding when a now
long-deceased drunken Clarksville photographer threatened to physically assault me after a football game, blaming my propensity for unbiased coverage for the
loss.
But I had to
laugh – despite the melancholy of this latest reminder of years consumed and
life diminishing -- at the memory of the night when we shared a table and some
expense-account beers at the Bear Bryant Lounge in the Holiday Inn in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
And for the final
time, down the line, that’s the 3-0 mark from here.
