Between the Hedges (and the Hibachi)

Between the Hedges (and the Hibachi)

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There are Fall Saturdays in the South, and then there are Georgia Football Fall Saturdays…the kind that settle into your memory the way red clay settles into a pair of white socks. You never quite forget them.

When I was eleven…blonde, thin, sunburned from living outdoors…I believed there were three forces running the universe: God, gravity, and Vince Dooley. And on Saturday afternoons in 1980, you could find all three at work between the hedges.

Game day at our house wasn’t an event as much as it was a full-scale operation. My daddy would drag the hibachi grill into the backyard like he was staging a military maneuver. Hamburgers sizzling. Smoke drifting. The occasional flare-up that made him holler, “It’s under control!” even when it clearly wasn’t. Meanwhile, mama set up her green folding lawn chair, facing the TV like she had assigned seating.

The TV was turned down, of course. We didn’t trust the network announcers. Not when we already had the voice of the angels calling the game on the radio.

Larry Munson.

That gravelly, urgent, half-panicked, entirely beloved soundtrack of every Dawgs fan’s childhood. You didn’t watch Georgia football in the ’80s. You lived it through Munson.

He didn’t simply describe a play. He prophesied, fretted, pleaded, and occasionally declared the end of civilization, all in one sentence. Daddy would lean forward, beer in hand, nodding so hard you’d think Munson was speaking directly to him through the radio waves.

“Run, Lindsay! Run!” wasn't a call. It was scripture.

Those boys in red and black were more than players, they were characters in the mythology of our lives. You could feel the air shift when Kevin Butler stepped onto the field. Daddy would say, “He’s gonna kick it a mile.” Buck Belue threw a football like he was trying to solve every problem the state of Georgia ever had.

And then…there was Herschel.

Herschel Walker running the ball wasn’t an athletic act. It was a phenomenon. A physics experiment God forgot to limit. When he took the handoff, the world quieted for half a second…a sacred pause…before watching him launch forward like a young deity on loan to us mortals.

He didn’t just run through people. He ran through time, through history, through every living room shouting at the TV that glorious autumn decade.

Daddy cheered, cussed and praised…depending on the scoreboard and the amount of Old Milwaukee involved. Mama swatted gnats, churned homemade ice cream, and occasionally called out advice to the players as if they could hear her through the Zenith.

I sat cross-legged in the grass, wide-eyed and feeling something stirring in me that I couldn’t name yet. The sound of the radio, the smell of the hibachi, the sharp crack of helmets on helmets, the rise of the crowd under Munson’s trembling voice. It all braided together into a feeling I still carry today.

Pride.
Belonging.
Home.

Even now, decades later, when I see the red and black surge onto the field, I feel that same eleven-year-old thrill. I hear Munson. I smell smoke. I see Herschel lowering his shoulder into immortality.

Football changes. Coaches come and go. Stadiums grow. Players become legends, and legends become memories.

But the heart of it all? That’s eternal.

Georgia football taught us something important in those days: that loyalty matters, that ritual binds us, that joy can sound like a radio turned up too loud in a backyard,
and that heroes sometimes wear face paint and cleats.

Most of all, it taught us that you don’t just root for the Dawgs…you become part of a story larger than yourself.

And on those fall Saturdays in the 1980s, between the hedges and the hibachi grill, surrounded by ice cream, gnats, shouting, hope, and red-and-black everything…

I felt that story right down to the ground.

Go Dawgs.