Saturday, April 27, 2024

The man who loved Austin Peay is dead; Farewell Sherwin Clift, devoted to school, microphone and family; That's the 3-0 mark from here for "Voice of the Govs" who sang "Folsom Prison Blues" off-key at Bear Bryant Lounge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

 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.

He was off-key – but “on-key” was never one of my eventual friend, John R. Cash’s attributes, anyway –
so he sounded good. Lubricated, but good. And funny. The crimson-necked crowd in the Bear Bryant Lounge applauded his effort. If he’d had another song, an encore would be welcomed. But he didn’t have a follow-up, didn’t hear a train a comin’, and he gracefully climbed from the low-slung bandstand to backslaps and Bud pint drafts sent to our table.

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.

 

 

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