Auburn « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Auburn

A few photographs

Here is a panorama of the historic Auburn train station. Click to embiggen in another tab:

Lot of history in that joint. Jefferson Davis reviewed the Auburn Guard there as he was on his way to his inauguration at Montgomery. That was, apparently, the first presidential review in the Confederacy. This is also the place where students sabotaged Georgia Tech’s football team in 1896:

The Wreck Tech parade, and the pajamas, date back to their first football meeting in 1896 where legend has it that the A.P.I. students snuck to the train station under cover of darkness and greased the tracks. The train couldn’t get stopped at the station and the Tech players had to walk some five miles back to Auburn to get their 45-0 beating.

The last train passenger was called aboard in 1970. Empty for almost a decade now, the last tenant was a real estate agency. The old building needs a lot of TLC.

Here’s a door handle at the train station:

And by the rails, a self portrait at the first sign passengers would have seen getting off the train:

A closer view of a font you’ll never see again:

These shots were part of a brief ride today. I got other pictures today, so the marker series will return next week. That’s progress.

Nothing about the ride felt very good today, though. Nothing about me felt very confident of myself. Just a lousy ride. But I also found an incredible curve I had to slow down through, lest I wind up in the trees. And then I had to ride through a big neighborhood disagreement that involved at least five police officers, two of which I almost hit on my bike because they didn’t look both ways before crossing the street. One of those days.

Here’s a sunset over Agricultural Heritage Park, with the intramural field in the background to the right:

Even “those days” are beautiful.

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19
Jan 13

Kentucky at Auburn

It was a sell out crowd. The student body were ready to take on a ring of gladiators.

The university posthumously retired Mike Mitchell’s jersey. He played decades ago, but remains the leading rebounder and second leading scorer in team history.

Gus Malzahn, the new head football coach delivered pizzas and energy drinks to the students who’d lined up hours before the game and only littered some after their impromptu snack. Malzahn spoke at the half, making 9,000 people in the building wish it was April already.

Charles Barkley spoke to the audience, welcomed Kentucky, called Auburn a nation and then, later, went on television and said this:

But the big event was the game itself. A plucky Auburn team who managed to win their first two games in conference play and then lost on the road at the end of two overtimes against Arkansas was on this night hosting defending national champion Kentucky. But this Kentucky team is not the Kentucky of old. Oh, they are loaded, but the conventional wisdom is that they aren’t playing up to their ability.

So naturally they put it all together tonight. Auburn got caught looking at the royal Kentucky blue and suffered their biggest home loss in the Tony Barbee era as they shot 35 percent from the field and went 0-15 on three-point attempts.

So it was a tough night for basketball, but they often are.

But we had fun:

Several friends were in town from Birmingham for the game. We caught up, told jokes, made fun of basketball, made fun of people staggering around. Had a lovely time.

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11
Jan 13

Your basic wonderful Friday

Do you have a high school senior? Are they interested in attending Samford University? Odds are I’ve called them in the last few days. I call a lot of students, all a part of our personalized, high touch philosophy.

Some students are very excited to hear from you. Some find this very awkward. A few have figured out they are enrolling elsewhere. “That’s great! Congratulations!” Some know they’ll be at SU next fall. “Wonderful!”

Some voicemails will let you talk all day long. I have a short list of things I like to share with voicemails. It takes about 40 seconds. Some will cut you off if you pause to breathe in or allow for writing down a phone number.

I can tell you this: In an age of text messages the art of covering the receiver so you can talk about the person on the phone is a dying art.

The best part, though, is talking to the excited student. Their enthusiasm is a little contagious. The second best part is the voicemail with the child doing the outgoing message. Those always crack me up.

So a lot of phone calls. Syllabus work. Other work. Emails, always the emails.

I stopped just in time to go to the gymnastics meet tonight. Auburn hosted Kentucky and perhaps should have won, but struggled on the bars and floor. The Wildcats took away the win 195.525-194.250. The guys behind us had never been to a meet before, so it was fun to hear them try to rationalize what they were seeing. The little girls always have a great time at gym meets, so it is fun to watch the kids dance and ooh and ahh.

They dropped Chick-fil-A cows from the rafters. I almost caught one, but the guy behind me — with a distinctive and unfair height advantage — got hit first. He earned a chocolate chip cookie for his efforts. I just missed a T-shirt thrown into the crowd. The Yankee was live-tweeting the meet for College and Magnolia.

We had dinner at Mellow Mushroom with a friend after the meet. We sat and talked the night away and it was all very wonderful. Walked outside near midnight in January in short sleeves and walked a block to the car. It nicely wrapped up a day which started with breakfast with a friend at the Barbecue House.

To ask for much more of anything would just look greedy.

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4
Jan 13

Restaurants, sunsets and the bike shop

We had lunch at Chick-fil-A, which was thoroughly uneventful. We were there because another place in town, where we have tried to visit now on consecutive days, was closed.

Big Blue Bagel, downtown, had a message on their white board yesterday. “Closed for the holidays.” It noted they would re-open on Jan. 3rd. Which was yesterday. I checked. But they were closed.

That’s one way to run a business.

So we visited for lunch today. Closed. The white board had a breakfast special, so someone had been there. Now the place was locked up tight.

There are no hours on the door. No hours on the website. That’s one way to run a business. One of the review sites says they are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe they are not open in between.

Oh look, they are for sale. And use frames! That’s one way to run a website.

So Big Blue Bagel has now officially broken Smith’s First Law: Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

I was on the fence about the entire thing, but then I read the reviews on the review sites. They get fairly well panned, which strikes me as a bit difficult to do in a college town. C’est la bagel.

Visited the library. Did library things. Got ran out of the library, because they close the library at 5 p.m. “You don’t need learnin’ that bad, boy.”

That’s OK. We walked out to see this:

We have some of the best sunsets in the world here. I’m biased, I’m sure, but I realized that in undergrad and I haven’t been any place that consistently shows off enough to change my mind since then. Tonight’s wasn’t even trying hard, and I couldn’t get into position for the big finale fast enough, but the sky is just gorgeous.

Orange and blue and all that. Pollutants hanging over Montgomery 50 miles to the west help too.

Picked up my bike. Everyone was in the shop this evening. My derailleurs have been adjusted. Almost everything works again. I can fix the last little bit myself, because I know how to Google this part.

If you know the right nomenclature you can fix most anything yourself these days. If you have the proper tools.

Spoke with the owner about the proper tools. Bicycle maintenance has an improbable amount of specialty equipment — turns out you can’t make every change with a crescent wrench — for most of us this is daunting and unrealistic. I expressed my interest in knowing more.

I’d like to appreciate the art of maintenance a bit. And are there classes for this sort of thing? I don’t want to be a guy who tears down the bike and greases the ball bearings, but I also don’t want to be the guy in the shop every two months with the next thing I should be able to do on my own. It seems counter-intuitive, I know, like that’s asking you to take money out of your pocket, but …

There are classes. He told me about a great one in Colorado, if I’m ever out that way. And he said he’d be happy to teach me more. Make a list of things you’d like to know, he said. We can haggle over rates for a private lesson, he said, using the modules this class in Colorado uses. It wouldn’t be just turning a wrench. This was an important point he wanted to make. This won’t just be “turn wrench here” stuff.

After all these years in school a few hours learning about spoke tension doesn’t bother me too much.

Now I just need to make a list of things I’d like to learn. And ride.

That’s tomorrow.

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7
Dec 12

I wrote a review

Dave Brubeck, who invented the notes that landed between the things that you don’t play that mean you’re making jazz, recently died. Everyone that is knowledgeable about his importance to music can talk far more about this than I can.

But someone found footage of a concert he performed at Samford in the 1980s. Not sure why it is in black and white. Just enjoy the show:

Since I mentioned Bo Jackson yesterday … The War Eagle Reader asked me to write a little preview of the 30 for 30 on him, which debuts tomorrow. I had the chance to watch it last night:

The first story is from retired baseball coach Hal Baird, “I saw Bo jump over a Volkswagon.”

The second story, the one about Jackson standing in thigh-high water and doing a standing back flip, is from one of his coaches at McAdory High School. I’ve heard that one from a few different people that fit in that period of Jackson’s young life.

There’s the story about Jackson throwing a football up to the scoreboard before the Sugar Bowl. Randy Campbell told me that one himself.

Dickie Atcheson, his high school football coach, talks about Jackson using a pole vault pole designed for 180-pounders. Bo cleared 13 feet at 215 pounds.

There’s another story where he literally destroyed a batting cage in front of the top scout for the New York Yankees. In high school. With one hit.

Baird didn’t mention the story about hitting three home runs into the lights at Georgia as a freshman. No one told the story about the home run he hit that carried halfway over the football field. The one about when he came back to the high school after his hip replacement. He was still faster than everyone, including the kid that would capture most of his high school records.

Bo Jackson was amazing:

Bo Jackson is amazing. Always will be.

I only wish the documentary covered Bo Bikes Bama. Because HE SCARED TORNADOES OUT OF THE STATE.

You Don’t Know Bo was directed by Michael Bonfiglio (you can read TWER’s interview with him here). It premieres on ESPN on Dec. 8th at 9 p.m.