Hanging out with Ed and Jim
The Band, IMHO, produced some of the most unforgettable music in the most unforgettable period (1964 to 1975, from the arrival of the Beatles on our shores until Saturday Night Fever turned everybody into a Disco Dude or Dudette) popular music has ever known. If you don’t believe it, give this a listen.The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down And as great as the Last Waltz turned out, I think the Band’s double album Rock of Ages might have been ever better.
Ed Hardin agrees. We were talking it over Tuesday night when I was over at practice researching a story that will run in tomorrow’s Journal about all the competition raging at Wake these days. And it got me to thinking about how much competition is different in our field than it is on the field we were surveying propped up against the wall. Ed and I are nominally competitors, in that he’s the sports columnist for the Greensboro News and Record and I write for a paper located 25 miles to the west. But we’re fast friends, and have been for a long, long time, dating back to when he wrote for the Journal in the early 1980s. Our families grew up together and we looked out for each other. We’ve made a lot music together. Ed plays the harmonica and is a much better singer than I am, but I’m more anxious to throw myself out there. Whenever he shows up at the Garage for one of our shows, I make sure I drag him onstage to do a verse of The Weight. We even co-wrote a song, after one of the great trips of my career to Nashville to cover Wake vs. Vanderbilt. The song is called the Souvenir and the chorus, penned by Ed, goes a little something like this.
For the kids I brought a T-shirt,
For my wife a flannel gown,
And for me I brought the barmaid
From Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.
So given how deep the stories were piling up, Jim Grobe might not have known what he was walking into when he sauntered over the wall in his heavy sweatshirt for a mid-practice chat. But Jim has the sense of humor to take care of himself, even when he hears the same hackneyed joke from the beat guy that he’s probably heard in every one of his 10 seasons as the Deacons head coach.
“From what I see, if this team doesn’t go 14-0 then the coach ought to be in trouble,’’ I said to Ed, plenty loud enough for Grobe to hear.
“The assistant coaches,’’ Grobe returned, in perfect timing. “If we don’t go 14-0, the assistant coaches ought to be fired.’‘
Grobe hung around for five or 10 minutes, long enough to regale us. I mentioned, facetiously, that he needed to light a fire under assistant Steve Russ, who, in truth, is one of the most intense coaches I’ve ever seen.
That set up Jim for a story about Russ from Air Force, where Russ was a linebacker and Grobe was his position coach.
“Steve would come out for games so gunned up, he’d be running 40-yard dashes before the game and he’d be dripping with sweat,’’ Grobe said. “He’d play five quarters every game. He’d play one before the game ever started.’‘
There may have have been better times to be a reporter covering the Wake Forest football beat, but, for the life if me, I can’t remember them.