WILSON ALEXANDER
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 



Wilson Alexander is a rising senior at the University of Georgia majoring in journalism with a minor in history and a certificate in sports media. He spent the past summer covering the Kansas City Royals as an associate reporter for MLB.com. He was the sports editor at The Red & Black, the independent student newspaper at the University of Georgia, in the spring and will cover Georgia football for the Macon Telegraph this fall.  Wilson has one brother, Julian, who will be a freshman at Georgia this fall. He writes, "My amazing parents Anne and Doug Alexander live in Atlanta." When Wilson is not covering sports, he likes to cook.
 
Wilson is the second Murray Scholar at the Grady College of Journalism and MC at The University of Georgia following Kristin Miller in 2015.
"Wilson has the eyes and ears to be a great storyteller -- something I noticed even in his first class assignment for me. Grady College is so honored to be a part of the Murray Scholars program. Thank you for all you do to inspire young journalists to pick up the story where Jim Murray left off."

-Vicki Michaelis, Carmical Chair in Sports Journalism & Society, Grady College of Journalism and MC at UGA

Read Wilson's winning essay below.

MONDAY, AUGUST 14, 2017, SPORTS
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
 
 
WILSON ALEXANDER

How Uga became more than a dog
 
 
All of the room number signs in the Georgia Hotel are a small, beige rectangle - except for one.

At the end of a hallway on the third floor, there's a room sign shaped like a dog house. Painted red and black, it announces the entrance for "Uga's Suite." Upon entering the room, a soft growl can be heard near the floor. The grumbling comes from Uga X, Georgia's English bulldog mascot.
 
It is 11 a.m. on April 22, three hours before the start G-Day, Georgia's annual spring football game, and Uga isn't wearing his customized Georgia jersey or spiked collar yet. Typically, when Uga is seen in public, he is wearing the tailored jersey. Without it, the dog somehow looks naked. A second later, Uga X retreats to a towel under a windowsill for a pre-game nap. When the game begins, this dog will reassume his role as the symbol of an entire fanbase.
 
"If I walked him outside right now, he'd draw a crowd," said Frank W. "Sonny" Seiler, the owner of the first Uga.
 
In 1956, Seiler was in his first year of law school at Georgia. In the afternoons, he worked on the first floor of the athletic office selling tickets. The year before, Georgia's bulldog mascot, Mike, had died. Heading into the first home game of the 1956 season, Georgia didn't have a live bulldog.
 
The week before the game against Florida State, Seiler and his wife, Cecelia, decided to make a shirt for an all-white English bulldog they had received as a wedding present.
 
Cecelia cut a block 'G' out of black felt and sewed it onto a red T-shirt. Then, she attached elastic to the shirt's bottom and the cuffs, creating Uga's first jersey. 
 
"Suddenly he took on the appearances of a real Georgia Bulldog," Seiler said.
 
Before the game began, the Seilers took their dog - not officially Uga yet - to the Sigma Chi fraternity house, which Seiler said was across from Sanford Stadium.
 
"He was a hit over there," Seiler said. "After several iced teas, everybody said, 'Let's take him to the game.' We hadn't planned on it, but we did take him to the game."
 
The Seilers brought the dog into the stands to watch Georgia defeat the Seminoles. Seiler thought that would be the end of it, and they returned to the fraternity house after the game. 
 
The following Monday, Seiler arrived at his ticket booth to see a note from his boss telling him head football coach Wally Butts wanted to speak with him. Seiler said Dan Magill, who was Georgia's athletic publicity director at the time, had asked Butts if they could request Seiler's permission to use the dog as the team's mascot. When he saw the note, Seiler thought his job was in jeopardy. 
 
When Seiler arrived in Butts' office, he found the coach looking out a window toward Sanford Stadium.
 
"'Sonny, Dan tells me you have a bulldog that might make us a good mascot. What do you say to let us use it? I don't seem to be furnishing much entertainment here,'" Seiler recalled Butts said.
 
"'Coach, if you think it'll help the team,'" Seiler recalled saying. "'I'd be glad to do that.'"
 
"'Good,'" Butts said. "'Have him at every game.'"
 
Butts returned his gaze to the stadium, Seiler left, and Uga officially became Georgia's mascot. When Uga started, the dog was instantly popular among Georgia fans, Seiler said. However, the mascot's fame has risen to national levels in the 61 years since that first game.
 
Although Uga now has a personalized suite, when the Georgia Hotel was built in 1957, pets were not allowed. Charles Seiler, Sonny's son, said when the family arrived at the hotel from their home in Savannah the day before games, they left the car running with Uga inside for a few minutes. Then, they'd smuggle him up the fire escape.
 
By the late 1970s, the hotel, which is conveniently located near Sanford Stadium, changed its pet policy - but only for Uga. An employee at the hotel said the hotel still doesn't allow pets, except for Georgia's famous mascot. Now, the hotel designates a parking spot for the Seilers' red Chevy Suburban, which says "Mascot" on the front tag and has an UGA X license plate.
 
In the years since Uga's beginnings, the mascot has graced the cover of Sports Illustrated and appeared in multiple movies. When Georgia won the 1980 national championship, Uga III received an inscribed championship ring.
 
"He didn't have a finger," Seiler said. "So I wore it for him and still do."
 
When the dogs die, they are buried in a marble mausoleum in the southwest corner of Sanford Stadium. Uga I and Uga II were buried in the eastern side of the stadium, but their bodies were exhumed after the grave was constructed. In the marble mausoleum, all the bulldogs see their final resting place. It's the only University mascot buried within the confines of the stadium, Seiler said. Having lived with the mascots all his life, Charles said he had to get used to death. Over 61 years, there have been 10 official Georgia mascots.
 
"I'm going to have to do this every 10 years," Charles said. "That's just part of it."
 
At G-Day, Uga X seemed to smile for photos and embraced the attention he's become accustomed to as fans gathered around his air-conditioned dog house located on the sideline. Camera shutters snapped, and Charles' 9-year-old son, Cecil, who will one day take over Uga's handling duties, observed.
 
On the other side of the stadium, fans passed by the dogs' graves. Some looked, others stopped briefly and, by a bulldog statue, a line of people wanting to take pictures formed. There has been an Uga at nearly every Georgia game since 1956, and the Seilers intend for that to always be the case.
 
"I don't know what I'd do without an Uga," Seiler said.
 
Neither do Georgia's fans.
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MONDAYS WITH MURRAY
FRAN TARKENTON

The University of Georgia has produced some great athletes over the years, but none better than Francis (Fran) Asbury Tarkenton. The son of a Methodist minister, Fran Tarkenton was born on February 3, 1940, in Richmond, Virginia. He attended Athens High School in Athens, Georgia, and then on to the University of Georgia where he was the quarterback for the football team. Under Bulldog Coach Wally Butts and Tarkington, Georgia won the 1959 Southeastern Conference championship.  Tarkenton was a first-team All-SEC selection in both 1959 and 1960.  

TUESDAY, JUNE, 3, 1986, SPORTS
Copyright 1986/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY


JIM MURRAY

Nobody Ever Had Him In His Pocket

They called him frantic Francis. They couldn't keep him in the pocket, not two generations of coaches, not relays of 250-pound defensive ends, blitzing linebackers, not life itself. He gave elusivity a new dimension.
   The eyes give him away. He's not physically prepossessing at 5 feet 11 inches and 190 pounds, but the eyes are the eyes of a forest creature on the prowl for food and on the lookout for enemies. Or of a guy with his own deck looking for suckers. They are survivors' eyes, wary inquisitive, quick. 
   This is the look of a guy asked to go through Indian territory at night with only a map and a canteen, which is a fair description of his life in the NFL. You can tell that every sense is alert. He looks like a guy who never sleeps and rarely stand still. 
   He is football's equivalent of Bugs Bunny. His whole career was a Saturday afternoon serial. He made "The Perils of Pauline" look like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." 
   In the NFL, the suspense is supposed to be whether anybody can catch the ball. With Francis, the suspense was whether he would ever throw it. He ran for more yards than any quarterback who ever lived. And that was only the ones beyond the line of scrimmage. If you counted the yards behind, he has more than any running back who ever lived. 
   He wasn't fast. He didn't have the strongest arm. He tended to dart, duck, twist and squirm. "Hit 'em where they ain't" was baseball player Wee Willie Keeler's motto. Francis threw it where they weren't. 
   By any yardstick you want to use, Francis Asbury Tarkenton was the best quarterback pro football ever had. He threw for more touchdowns, 342, more yards, 47,003, and more completions, 3,686, than any other quarterback. He took his team to three Super Bowls in four years. He ran for 30 touchdowns and 3,669 yards. 
   Which makes you wonder why Fran Tarkenton didn't get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame until this year, three years after his initial eligibility. He threw for 52 more touchdowns than any quarterback, had nearly 1,000 more completions and almost 7,000 more yards. You would think the Hall of Fame would have come to him. 
   The rap against Fran Tarkenton has always been that he threw short passes, that his completions were just complicated handoffs. The spuriousness of this argument can be seen in the yards rolled up, four to 20 miles more than other Hall of Fame quarterbacks like John Unitas, Sonny Jurgensen or Roger Staubach. 
   Tarkenton rebuts the charge. "In the first place, the long ball is the easiest to throw," he says. "The Hail Mary is a test of luck, not skill. It's like putting a note in a bottle and launching I over the side. If the arm were all there were to quarterbacking, a guy named Rudy Bukich was the greatest quarterback who ever played. He could throw the ball overseas." 
   Tarkenton also says that his scrambles were actually artful geometric patterns. They looked on paper like a chart of a Rube Goldberg invention. Player A takes ball to Point B where he bumps into Defensive End C and reverses his field to Point D where water is dripped into hole which makes Linebacker E slip and allows Player A to duck under arm (F) and release ball (G) into air when it skids off helmet (H) of Cornerback I into waiting arms of Tight End J, who falls over Safety K into end zone for touchdown. 
   "I was never out of control back there," Tarkenton says. 
   "You see, what the drop-back quarterbacks would do, they would peel back 20 yards or roll right 15 yards, then they would throw to a wide-out who had gone down the field 15 yards and then ran an 'out' to the left sideline. So what you're talking about is a 50- or 60-yard pass to make 10 or 15 yards. 
   I would scramble to a prepared position. I would never release a ball 30 or 35 yards behind the line of scrimmage. My purpose in scrambling was two-fold: tire out the pass rushers and psych out the secondary. 
   "So the theory gained credence: If Tarkenton has to scramble and run, he must not be a very good passer. If you can punch, why box? One time, the Green Bay Packers decided, 'OK, we won't rush him.' They stopped their pass rush. I picked them apart. The next time, they came in with their ears laid back and growling again.
   A quarterback is a passer, not a thrower. Fernando Valenzuela doesn't need a 100 m.p.h. fastball. Putting the ball where you want it is more important than putting it in orbit." 
   No one was any better at putting the ball where he wanted it than not-so-frantic Francis. 
   The world still can't keep him in the pocket. Tarkenton was through town the other day, and he still manages to go through a hotel lobby as if it were stacked with Deacon Joneses, who used to say he trained for a game against Tarkenton by locking himself in a roomful of mosquitoes and turning out the lights. You find Tarkenton by looking for the nearest cloud of dust. 
   He looks at an interviewer as if he were deciding whether a down-and-out, a simple swing pass or a quarterback sneak were called for. His television career - "That's Incredible" and "Monday Night Football" - behind him, he is now concentrating on his advertising and motivational business, Tarkenton Production Group. 
   "We deal in telling company executives how to be executives," he said. "We tell them you cannot ignore good behavior and only attend to the bad behavior, which is the way most people seem to run their businesses - and lives." 
   Tarkenton should know. He spent 17 years listening to the negatives - "He can't do that. He can't run around outside the cup like that" - to the point where it took the Hall of Fame three years to realize he was their shiniest ornament. 
   They probably figured they couldn't keep him in one place long enough and didn't want to plan an induction where they have to chase the honoree down the street to enroll him. If he had a football, they'd never catch him.
 
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