Please do.
I was assigned to work the Alabama-Tennessee game one year at Legion Field. It was the year Peyton led the UT band from the field after beating UA so 1995 I guess. The Braves were on the TV in the pressbox.
It was an eventful trip. I got to interview Peyton, who was an incredibly nice kid then. I had two conversations with Finebaum, one where he acted like a normal guy and another where he acted like a complete ass.
And then there was Cecil. He was T'News Sports editor and had not had that position very long I don't think.
Somebody in the pressbox had a birthday that day and there was a giant chocolate cake on a table. Well before halftime, I noticed Cecil sitting at the table with the cake in front of him. He was watching the Braves or something (maybe even a sitcom) on the TV, his back to the field.
He had no plate and was forking bites of the cake directly from the sheet.
As I had zero interest in Alabama football, other than to enjoy the ass beating they were absorbing, I stayed on the upper level keeping a check on the Braves most of the time. As far as I could tell, Cecil never left the chocolate cake except to whiz or shit or whatever he did in the bathroom. Not once did he even glance at the field.
The next day in the T-News, he wrote a lengthy examination of the game. That's stuck with me for years. He didn't pay the least bit of attention to the game at all. His entire focus was on a big ass chocolate sheet cake. And yet he wrote a long piece as if no one in the state were more attuned to the heartbeat of the team than he was. The only thing that chump was in tune with was chocolate.
12 Replies
1994 Views