For as long as I can remember, I’ve been blessed to have a few constants in my life: faith, family, friends and…. sports. I can recall the exact moment I knew I wanted to be around and write about sports. I was four years old, old enough to remember things but too young to understand exactly what they meant.
It was April 10, 2005, to be exact. Cuddled up with my dad on the couch, I saw a golfer in his Sunday red chip in one of the most incredible golf shots in the sport’s history. Verne Lundquist was on the call.
“Well… here it comes… Oh, my goodness… OH, WOW! In your life, have you seen anything like that!?”
Tiger Woods won that day in an epic playoff against Chris DiMarco. Now, 19 years later, I sit writing this article on a Sunday in which Scottie Scheffler, much like a young Tiger Woods, cemented his place as one of the great golfers in the sport with his second Green Jacket in three years. It was also Verne Lundquist’s last time at Augusta.
On that spring day in 2005, it began. Casually spending hours watching LaDainian Tomlinson highlights. Late nights on the basketball court doing my best Jason Williams impression. Weeping to the Jim Valvano 30 for 30 documentary. A hopeless devotion to every sport has been a constant in my life.
Time isn’t a slow killer; it’s a bullet train locomotive speeding through men’s and women’s hearts. Before you know it, it’s gone. This is my final column with the Samford Crimson, and it feels like just yesterday, I was a scrawny freshman who applied to work for a paper I knew nothing about at a school where I was finding it hard to survive.
This journey has been an incredible one. In my four-year tenure with the Crimson, I’ve seen champions crowned and history made. I’ve seen March Madness as well as march sadness. The joy of victory, the agony of defeat. All found at a modestly sized private Christian university in Jefferson County.
The magic of sports isn’t in the big stages or big names. The magic of sports is its accessibility. Anyone, from Jackie Joyner-Kersee to Jack Gohlke, Al McGuire to Alfred Delia, Scottie Scheffler to Scotty 2 Hotty, can have their moment in the sun. I thank you, the reader, for letting me be a tiny light in the unfathomably large constellation that is the sports journalism pantheon as we know it.
I wanted to extend my extreme gratitude to my Crimson editors over the years: Carson Caulfield, Mackenzee Simms, Rebekah Crozier, and Harper Harwell. Thank you for challenging my voice but never crushing it, for praising my works but never glorifying them, and for pushing all the right buttons to make me the writer I am today and the writer I will become.
To my family: Mom, Dad, Sis. I love you with my whole heart. Thanks for letting my strange addiction to athletics grow into a career. I can only hope to be half the person that all three of you are.
To my Samford friends, who are thankfully too many to name: like my editors, you have challenged me to be a better writer and a better person. I was not the friend you deserved at times but thank you for letting me be the friend you had in my four years here.
Alright, that’s enough cheesy crybaby fodder. It’s not like I’m dying! I’ll still be around, occasionally yelling at you on Ben Brown from time to time. Every ending means a new beginning, and I’m excited to continue this strange journey that we call life. Thank you, and God bless you. That’s all, folks!
Sports Editor
I have no doubt that your talent and writing skill will take you far. This article confirms that Sports writing should be in your future.
As your grandmother, I couldn’t be prouder.
Davis Wow so proud of you Now that you have
achieved your goals at Sanford On to the next
challenge Having the privilege of reading some of your sports columns as a grandfather or a casual unrelated observer You have an incredible talent and I hope you continue to pursue a career in journalism if that is what you want to do I know we and your parents
will be there to support you every step of
the way
Love you
Papa and Nana D