True confessions for a July morning

“Get in line in that processional, step into that small confessional, there the guy who’s got religion’ll tell you if your sins original” – From “The Vatican Rag” by Tom Lehrer

It is July 18, 2026, a good day for a soul-cleansing slate of true confessions about sports and other things.

Confession No. 1: I think it is already next year

Both my grandfather and father died believing every new season would be the one in which the Florida Gators finally won the Southeastern Conference championship. They were “wait ‘til next year” Gators. My grandfather, whose cousin was Dale Van Sickle, passed away in 1973, never having seen his beloved Gators win the SEC in either football or basketball. My father was overjoyed in 1984 when the Gators won their first SEC title only to suffer the disappointment of the championship being snatched away by a coalition of school presidents and athletic directors, spearheaded by Vince Dooley. I am convinced that if Marshal Criser had lived up to his promise and stuck with Charley Pell that the Gators would have emerged from probation and won the SEC. But, he didn’t so it took the Return of the Native to make that happen and that thanks only to Ben Hill Griffin, who told UF athletic director, “Steve Spurrier is going to be the football coach next year. You don’t have to be the athletic director, Bill.” Thanks to Spurrier the Gators won their first SEC title that counted in 1991 and there were five more after that including a national championship in 1996. Spurrier made us believe, ending the suffering of hundreds of thousands of “wait ‘til next year” Gators. Urban Meyer reinforced the belief that the Florida Gators can win both SEC and national championships, but since then we’ve reverted back to the “wait ‘til next year” mentality.

For reasons I cannot begin to explain, there is a level of confidence that is growing quietly within in the months since Jon Sumrall was hired to reverse the losing trend. I felt this way with Spurrier and also with Urban. I’ll admit that Dan Mullen was a jolt of confidence until his lack of recruiting success caught up with him. I wanted Billy Napier to win, but he let his own ego get in the way. So now we have Sumrall. He hasn’t coached a single game at UF, but something in his demeanor tells me the Gators have the right coach at just the right time.

Confession No. 2:  When it comes to Coaches All-SEC selections, the Gators typically get screwed

It has been going on for years. Here are two glaring examples. In 1995, the SEC coaches voted Peyton Manning the first team All-SEC quarterback over Danny Wuerffel. Danny threw for 3,266 yards, averaged 10 yards per pass attempt and threw 35 touchdown passes for the Gators, who went 12-1, won the SEC championship and played Nebraska for the national championship. Danny was first team All-SEC by the AP, second team All-America (Tommie Frazier of Nebraska first team), finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting behind Eddie George and Frazier, and won the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback Award. Peyton threw for 2,954 yards, averaged 7.8 per attempt and 22 touchdown passes. Head-to-head, Danny led the Gators to a 59-37 rout of Tennessee. That week Peyton was on the cover of Sports Illustrated looking like someone had stolen his puppy. Example two, Jake Slaughter, who didn’t make first, second or third team All-SEC center when the coaches voted in 2024. The AP voted him first team All-SEC and he went on to be the consensus first team All-America center. The coaches did vote Jake All-SEC first team in 2025. He made second team All-America largely because it’s difficult to put a first team label on an offensive lineman from a 4-8 team that was 104^th nationally in total offense.

There have been other cases, too many to mention here, but when the SEC coaches vote, count on Florida getting screwed. I have to wonder why. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. The facts back it up.

Confession No. 3: Florida has gone cheap too many times

What do Ron Zook, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Billy Napier have in common other than the fact they were all four fired prior to fulfilling the initial terms of their contracts? The answer can be summed up in one word: CHEAP. Rather than pay the price it takes to hire a more experienced, expensive coach, the Gators went cheap.  How is it that you replace legends like Spurrier and Urban Meyer with two who have never been head coaches? How is it that rather than make Bob Stoops a Godfather offer Florida hires a head coach whose three years were spent at Colorado State and despite paying him $4 million he either can’t or won’t spend a few hundred dollars to get his teeth whitened? Yes, I know all those “if we hadn’t hired him, some other top program would have” excuses about Billy the Nape. Lane Kiffin was available and would have crawled backward to get the job. Lane, it was said, “isn’t our type.” Well, I guess not. He wins. Four coaches, none of whom should have been the Florida head coach in the first place, were hired on the cheap. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Confession No. 4: Golf vs. soccer

Golf, any way you slice it even when I take into account my Tin Cup moment at Valle del Sol in Santa Ana, Costa Rica, where I put 10 straight balls in the water and had to send my caddy to the pro shop so I could continue. Golf, I have determined, is God’s way of giving me a glimmer of hope in the middle of despair. I can hit 100 bad shots but that one I hit on the screws or the remarkable hole-out from the kitty litter will convince me that there is hope, that I can do this and if I were incapable then God wouldn’t have allowed me to hit a shot that even Scottie Sheffler or Rory McIlroy would admire. Because I occasionally hit that one perfect shot, I can watch golf on TV without ever getting bored, knowing the only difference between me and Scottie Sheffler is that he has conquered his slice while my driver is a work in progress.

As for soccer, I find it very difficult to get excited about a game in which a kick to the shins results in a grown man going down like he was shot with a deer rifle. For reasons unexplained, you never hear an announcer say “suck it up Buttercup” when someone who is barely touched flops and acts as if he’s suffering unbearable pain. A zero-zero tie is called a nil-nil draw. There is something fundamentally un-American about a game in which there is a loose ball and no one scoops it up, starts running with it and no one bothers to knock him into next week.  

Soccer purists believe their game is beautiful and needs no tweaking. Golfers are offered a lifeline of hope from Dan Jenkins who wrote rules for the recreational golfer: Hit until you’re happy on one and 10. Hit from the ladies tees on the two longest par fives. No hitting from under bushes or behind trees. A mulligan every three holes, a free throw out a sand trap once on the front nine and once again on the back nine. All putts within 12 inches are good.

Confession No. 5: I am dismayed that there are so few great sportswriters anymore

During the time I was a kid just cutting my teeth as a sportswriter, I sat with the late, great Jack Hairston at old Perry Field watching the Florida Gators and Ole Miss play for the SEC baseball championship. Jack was there to watch this phenomenal Ole Miss shortstop named Archie Manning, but because baseball is a 9-inning game that proceeds at what some would call a leisurely pace, there was time to talk about what it takes to be a better than the average bear sportswriter. “Your job is to get the story,” Jack told me. “By the time you write it and they [the public] read it everybody already knows the score so the story really isn’t about the score. It’s about the people who made the score possible. Tell their story.” Nearly 60 years and thousands of games of all kinds later I still try to abide by Jack’s words.

Getting the story means taking the time to know the people, the sport, the circumstances, the setting and so much more then weaving it into something that compels people to feel as if they were a part of the event.  

Back in 2011 at a gathering of writers and publishers of college sports websites, a speaker held up an iPhone and told us this is the future of sportswriting, the place that people will get their news. Further, he told us that people no longer had the patience or attention span to read lengthy stories, that to successfully reach our audience we had to compact our stories into the 300-to-600-word range because that is what would hold the attention of someone reading on an iPhone. I nearly gagged. I still do, but that does indeed clue you in on why we have lots of sports reporters but very few exceptional sportswriters. It’s very difficult to do anything more than report the basics in a 600-word (or less) story. To really tell the story requires a whole lot more than 600 words.

I think great sportswriters such as Dan Jenkins, Furman Bisher, Red Smith, Tom Boswell and Blackie Sherrod roll over in their graves at what has happened to sportswriting. Newspapers have gone out of business left and right and those that survive have no room for at-length stories. Sports Illustrated is no longer this weekly magazine for which you wait impatiently for the mail to arrive on Tuesday. Sporting News is now a mostly irrelevant website. ESPN, which has essentially cornered the sports broadcasting market, is one of the few places where you can read anything in-depth and that is worrisome because every time the earnings reports come out, more writers get the axe. We live in a 24-hour news cycle dominated by websites that rush to get 300 words out the fastest rather than (a) getting the facts right and (b) offering meaningful, thoughtful writing and analysis.

As a kid I was blessed to grow up in an era when I rushed to The Hub on Sunday mornings after Gator football games to buy a stack of newspapers so I could read Jack Hairston, John Crittenden, Ed Pope, Tom McEwen, Furman Bisher, Bill McGrotha, Hubert Mizell, Buddy Martin and so many others who wrote as if football was religion second only to the Baptists in the South. During the 1960s, the contingent of newspaper writers covering the Gators home and away was larger even than those covering Ohio State, Michigan and other bluebloods. So many of these guys were must-read. How many sportswriters are there in Florida now whose columns and articles are required reading?

My top ten sportswriters of all time: 1. Dan Jenkins; 2. Furman Bisher; 3. John Kilgo; 4. Jim Murray; 5. Dave Kindred; 6. Tom Boswell; 7. Curry Kirkpatrick; 8. Mitch Albom; 9. John Crittenden; 10. Frank Deford.    

Confession No. 6: We shouldn’t hold onto grudges unless it’s the University of Georgia we’re talking about

I was there at the Gator Bowl November 9, 1968, freezing cold, soaking wet and miserable when Vince Dooley called time out in the last minute. The score was already 48-0. The Gators hadn’t crossed midfield in the second half. One of Vince’s scrubeenies asked if he could kick a field goal so he sent him in, the field goal was good and the final score was 51-0. I was also there October 27, 2007 when Mark Richt let his players storm the field. Lest we forget, Vince led the charge to strip the Gators of the 1984 SEC title and prevent UF from winning the SEC in 1990. I do not believe in holding grudges, but I make an exception for Georgia. I’m an SEC guy all the way. Whenever an SEC team plays a team from another conference in any sport, I hope they win, but not Georgia. The only reason a Gator should ever wish for Georgia to win is if Georgia winning helps the Gators win a championship. Otherwise, I hope Georgia is beaten so badly the powers that be in Athens consider the possibility of defunding that sport.

Confession No. 7: I’ve eaten just about everything but sauerkraut makes me gag

I’ve traveled to 62 different countries and lived in several. I have this standard rule, don’t ask what we’re eating until after dinner. You name it, I’ve probably eaten it with one exception. Sauerkraut. In the fifth and sixth grades at Lake Mary Elementary, sauerkraut and weenies were served every other Thursday. Fortunately, Jimmy Best’s mom was a war bride from Germany. He thought this was gourmet eating. So, his mom made sandwiches for two or three of us and he traded them for our sauerkraut and weenies. In the years since, dozens of people have tried their best to disguise sauerkraut in a new recipe but an inch from my nose the smell hits me and I gag. When I lived in Germany they thought I was very strange that sauerkraut couldn’t pass the smell test. It’s strange that kimchi doesn’t faze me.

Confession No. 8: My favorite Steve Spurrier quote

“I forgot to get fired and I’m not gonna cheat. That’s the way you lose your job. You get fired for losing or you cheat.”

My second favorite Spurrier quote was when he was told a library at Auburn had caught fire and more than 20 books were destroyed in the blaze: “The real tragedy was that 15 hadn’t been colored in yet.”