I got my start as a newspaper reporter covering high school sports in Athens more than 50 years ago. After a year or so of that, the paper – the long-dead Daily News – moved me over to the local government beat and I began what would turn into about a decade of covering government and politics at the local, state and national level.
I remember thinking during that period that covering sports had been good training for covering politics, but never did I imagine that those two sets of experiences might somehow converge a halfcentury later.
The really good coaches I covered had special relationships with their players and occupied unique places in their schools and communities. Decades after graduating high school, many players were still in touch with their football or basketball or wrestling coach. They probably couldn’t tell you the name of their senior history teacher, but there’s a fair chance they made it to their old coach’s funeral.
Enter Coach Walz. It’s a well-established political truth that vice presidential nominees don’t have much if any impact on their ticket’s performance. Tim Walz, however, may turn out to be an exception to that rule – and not because he’s in his second term as governor of Minnesota or served six terms in Congress representing a rural Minnesota district that had been represented by Republicans since the dawn of time.
The latter, though, doesn’t hurt. Rural Georgia and the rest of rural America have tilted so heavily Republican in recent years that Democratic candidates and campaigns have to seriously consider whether it’s worth investing time and money in counties that have gone 75% or 80% or even 90% Republican in recent elections.
Up until a few weeks ago, I would have told the Democrats not to bother with much of anything south of Macon, and for that matter to think about whether they wanted to compete for Georgia at all. Until President Biden stepped aside last month, every poll I saw had him trailing former President Donald J. Trump by about five percentage points.
I frankly didn’t think Vice President Kamala Harris would do much better in Georgia, but the next batch of polls showed an almost immediate tightening of the race here. Landmark Communications, a Republican polling firm, had Harris within a single point of Trump within a week or so of Biden leaving the race.
And that was before Trump mounted a shallwe- say counter-intuitive strategy of insulting black journalists to their faces and attacking Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and, for crying out loud, First Lady Marty Kemp. Kemp now commands the most powerful political machine in Georgia since the Talmadge days a half-century ago. Georgia may still be Trump’s to lose, but his chances will fall sharply if the governor elects not to throw the switch on his operation.
Back to Coach Walz. If Harris shouldn’t spend any time in South Georgia, Walz probably should. It bears mentioning that he is a rare breed of Democrat, a multi-lingual who speaks both rural and football.
With the high school football season about to get underway, it doesn’t take much imagination to envision the coach taking a “Team Blue” bus tour through rural (and battleground) South Georgia, hitting as many football towns as possible and ending, perhaps, at Pierce County High School, last year’s 2A state champs, in Blackshear, where, not for nothing, one Stetson Bennett IV played his high school football.
Walz had no sooner been picked by Harris than a battalion of sportswriters and political journalists tracked down members of the 1999 Mankato West football team that won the Minnesota state championship. The praise from Walz’s former players was nothing short of thunderous.
Mitch Salsbery, who played linebacker and tight end, told The Athletic: “There were times where he would line up at linebacker and go through plays with us because he had to show everybody how it was done and people weren’t getting it right. He wasn’t sitting on the sidelines with a clipboard. He was in there.”
Another linebacker from the ’99 team, Dan Clement, all but credited Walz with keeping him in school. In an interview with Daily Express US, Clement said: “…Tim Walz gave me the attention that said ‘ok, I’m going to continue to work hard, I’m going to stay here’. Now I have no doubt he’ll continue to do that for the rest of the country because everybody matters to that man and there’s no joke behind that … “ Put the members of that 1999 Mankato West football team on a bus with their old coach for a road trip across rural Georgia in the heart of football season and it could make a difference. They might be the visiting team on a hostile field, but my hunch is Coach Walz can get the Democrats back in the game in rural South Georgia.
(Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the Center or the University. Distributed by the Georgia Trust for Local News.)
