The AJC's Chip Towers, who is doing a great job on this story, uses his blog to add some color to the Munson situation for 2007.
Anyway, as Hondo explains it, Munson has an “open agreement” with the UGAA and WSB and can pretty much do whatever he wants when it comes to announcing Georgia’s games.Towers also mentions how the Charleston fires that killed 9 fire fighters affected AJ Green, UGA WR recruit. Green's mentor was killed in the blaze.
“Everybody wants it to be definitive, to be black and white,” Hondo told me. “But that’s not the way it is. Right now, Larry’s saying he doesn’t want to do road games and that’s fine. But if we get to the fourth week of the season and Larry says, ‘you know what, I feel pretty good and I think want to go to Tuscaloosa and do the Alabama game.’ We’re not going to say no to that. Of course we’d want him there. So I think it’s going to be more of a wait-and-see thing.”
Across the Southeast, the Jacksonville Times-Union really tore into the Athens Banner Herald's John Kaltefleiter over his article earlier in the week. As I said at the time, I think Kaltefleiter started his article off very awkwardly, but I don't think he meant for it to come off nearly as disrespectful as he did.
I don't envy ANYONE writing an opinion piece for Munson right now b/c you're worried that every last word is going to come off wrong or be over analyzed. I must have edited my piece a dozen times. That's why I didn't throw Kaltefleiter under the bus. I think he made a bad call wit his intro. Not an error of meanness.
Speaking of opinion pieces on Munson. Kyle King has an open letter to Damon Evans on the topic of replacing Munson. The only thing I disagree with is this common expectation that we're going to hire a homer. That may be, but even Munson didn't start off as a raging homer. By his own admission, he didn't jump the shark into unabashed fan until the '73 Tennessee game in Knoxville...roughly 7 years after taking the job.
The Jax paper also has a quick article on Munson just working home games. Did you know that Munson was briefly the voice of the USFL's Jacksonville Bulls? There's a deep cut random tidbit.
And on the warm and fuzzy side, Darrell Huckaby has an editorial on Munson in the Gwinnett Daily Post.
See Also:
-- Munson should be celebrated. Not mourned. - GSB
-- All Munson articles from this blog - GSB
PWD
7 comments:
John Kaltefleiter is a tool that makes Mark Bradley and Terence Moore seem like the second coming of Henry Grady and Ralph McGill. I don't mind legitimate criticism; it's how you get better, but Larry doesn't rely on his entourage of assistants any more than Keith Jackson or Pat Summerall. Everyone doing play-by-play uses a spotter and a statistician and the like.
I'd like to bash the guy too, but after he stuck up for common sense and ripped the ACCPD a new one, he gets the temporary pass from me.
anonymous has no idea what he's talking about. Kaltefleiter deserves a pass, and anyone who read the entire article would understand the same as Paul said, it was a good article, but the into and the way he went about it was all wrong. The man said the right thing in the wrong way. When I read the headline, I thought bad things, then i read the article and felt different. I felt it was a bad way to say it, but he said the right thing. Kaltefleiter is a good man and a good dawg. And yes, Larry has a HEAVY reliance upon his spotters.
Got a question for you Paul. What are your feelings on Dantzler? I have seen a lot of people bashing him lately for various reasons. I have always found him decent for UGA basketball/baseball and quite good for 960's afternoon sports talk show. Now if some of the "off the field" stuff that is said about him is true then I understand not wanting him in the booth.
Kaltefleiter knows that provocative headlines and leads sell newspapers and lure in readers. That probably largely explains the tactic he chose. For these writers it's better to be hated and widely read than ignored completely. Just ask some of the AJC guys. And Kaltefleiter isn't even styling himself along those lines. He's just trying to write something that would keep you guys from turning the page and moving on to something else.
I have read dozens - maybe hundreds - of Kaltefleiter's articles, and he is still a tool, imo. It's not just the Munson piece, which I read. He's like the comedian who can't do television because he doesn't know how to tell a joke without an obscenity.
I think Dantlzer has an excellent knowledge of UGA Trivia.
However, I think he's a second rate announcer who couldn't get a job from another program of any significance if he had to actually audition for it. He's just not good enough.
Post a Comment