Penance for the pounding
A Sports Illustrated story on pro football players with broken bodies includes the sad tale of what's happened to our own Bill Stanfill
by Josh Kendall (ABJ '95)
his is not the Bill Stanfill we all remember, this man shuffling across the pages of SI with the aid of a metal walker. The former Georgia defensive lineman was one of seven former NFL players featured in the May 7 issue of SI in an article about the toll pro football can take on the human body.
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 Stanfill has had three surgeries to fuse vertebrae in his spine, the result of an NFL exhibition game injury that came close to paralyzing him for life. |
Stanfill, a 6'5", 255-pound terror at Georgia, had three surgeries between August 1993 and January 1996 to fuse four vertebrae in his spine, a problem that started when he jammed his neck during an exhibition game. The hit moved a disk and surrounding bone in his back almost far enough to damage the cord. Stanfill played two more seasons but was never the same. His most recent surgery was last July to treat avascular necrosis in his left hip—a condition that cuts blood flow to the hip bone, causing it to die. He will eventually have to have the same procedure done to his right hip
"You're darn right I'd do it again at what they pay these guys now," he says of his current condition. "My case isn't all that special. When you're a ballplayer, you've got to understand that when you go out there to pound somebody, your nappy (butt) is going to be pounded some, too."
Stanfill says the health problems he experiences today are the result of injuries and the repeated cortisone injections he was given to help him overcome the everyday wear and tear of professional football.
"No one at the time knew the long-term effects and it was a quick fix to get you on the field," he says. "Nobody forced me to take it. If it got me on the field closer to 100 percent . . . let's get it done, got to be ready on Sunday."
The surgeries on his spine have left him with a neck so stiff he can't tip his head back, almost no use of his left thumb, and a substantial loss of hand and arm strength. He says he is considering applying for disability pay with the NFL.
Stanfill, who will be in Athens this summer to accompany his youngest son Scott on a freshman orientation trip, now sells agricultural real estate in Albany, and the rides through bumpy fields and rutty roads are no fun in his condition.
Two other pictures of Stanfill accompany the SI article. In one, he holds a glass jar that contains a round piece of his hip, which was sawed off as part of the surgery on his hip. When his right hip is finally fixed, Stanfill says he will have a matching set: "I'm going to make bookends out of them."
The lure of success
Justin McGuinness' parents were worried that his revolutionary bass baits would never catch on. They have, and Justin just hired his dad
by Erin Tecza
hen Justin McGuinness was 16, a severe storm swept through his rural Connecticut town, flooding a nearby reservoir and turning McGuinness into an instant and avid fisherman. Which is not to say he caught a fish that summer. Not a single one. But, in a way, that was good because it eventually gave McGuinness an idea that is making waves in the lucrative bass fishing industry.
 McGuinness' lure has a flexible hook, which lessens the chance of losing a fish. |
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"Everyone hates the feeling of losing a fish," says McGuinness (BSFR '98), who started out as a graphic arts major at New York's Hartwick College before transferring to UGA. "Our Leverage line is directed toward the high-end fishing market, but people who fish just for fun can also appreciate it."
McGuinness Fishing Products have been reviewed in B.A.S.S. magazine and they're available in Bass Pro shops everywhere. They have twice been featured on TNN's "Fishing with Roland Martin" and some of the country's top anglers, including Peter "T." and Craig Daniel, endorse them.
"My biggest obstacle was getting the people near me to believe in my ideas as much as I did," says McGuinness, who made a deal with his parents that if he couldn't get his products into the Bass Pro shops, he'd get a job with a paycheck. "Fortunately, the Bass Pro people liked what I had to offer."
As did his parents—so much so that his father left his job as COO of the American Cancer Society to become president of McGuinness Fishing Products. According to McGuinness, who decided after experimentation to market his lures with Pro Staff members—think Tiger selling Nike—lure sales was never a problem. But producing enough lures to supply distributors was. After trying several manufacturers and being disappointed each time, McGuinness put his own resources on the line and started his own manufacturing company—in Haiti.
On average, McGuinness spends one week each month in Port-au-Prince, overseeing his 45,000-square-foot plant and its 235 workers. Seeing the poverty-stricken conditions in Haiti has had a profound effect on him. McGuinness provides breakfast for his workers and bonuses when they exceed production quotas.
"Haiti is a small country with no natural resources and no products to export," he says. "All they can offer the world is very economical labor costs. The people of Haiti—especially the factory workers—hold a special place in my heart."
But for all the sophistication of his business plan and the company's encouraging sales figures, he has a unique goal for determining when he's really made it.
"I won't consider myself successful until I find one of my lures in a tree or snagged in a bush," he says. "When that happens, I'll know we've saturated the market."
"Mush, you huskies!"
South Carolina veterinarian Sonny King is getting closer and closer to winning Alaska's grueling Iditarod dog sled race
by Andrew DeMillo
acing a team of dogs through the frozen wilderness of Alaska is probably the last place one would expect to find a self-proclaimed "barefoot Southern boy" from Blakely. Fewer still would expect to find him among the top 10 finishers in the world's most famous dog sled race.
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 King, with wife Mary Evins King (BSEd '77), began racing after years as a volunteer sled dog veterinarian. |
"Sometimes I wonder that myself. When I told my momma what I was doing, she asked me if she had dropped me on my head once."
King's debut performance in the race four years ago hardly eased his mother's fears. He suffered frostbite on his hands and was dragged for more than 200 yards after his sled flipped over. Now in his fifth year of dog sled racing, King has achieved what one colleague compared to finishing in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament. "For a guy who just started racing a few years ago to finish in the top 10 is unbelievable," says Bob Holder, a former racer who helped King train.
Called "the last great race," the Iditarod is considered the premiere event in dog sled racing. This year, 68 mushers raced across the Alaskan forests trying to become the 29th champion.
"It's truly man against everything out there," says Mike Floyd, managing editor of Destination Alaska magazine. "Just to finish is an accomplishment."
Growing up in rural southwest Georgia, King's love of animals and Jack London novels sparked his interest in veterinary medicine and racing. That's why he jumped at the opportunity to work as a volunteer trail veterinarian, tending to the hundreds of dogs along the trail. During his four years on the trail, King earned the respect of both mushers and racing officials, and won the "Golden Stethoscope" award for his work. He was also the recipient of this year's Distinguished Alumnus Award from UGA's College of Veterinary Medicine.
After seeing the race up close, King couldn't resist joining the action in 1997. Despite a debut performance fraught with mishaps and a lackluster 42nd-place finish, he's returned year after year and continued to improve on the trail.
King wasn't expecting to finish ninth this year, completing the trek—where 60 mile-per-hour winds and the threat of cracking ice are the norm—in 10 days, 12 hours, and 58 minutes. "This year's trail was so rough," says King, who commutes between Spartanburg and Canada during training. "There were many areas without any snow. The mushers were taking a beating out there.
"There's just so much physical and mental abuse you go through," he continues. "Also, it's just hard being away from my family for so long."
Remembrance of Proust's past
At the center of the Proustian boom is a recent biography by William C. Carter that chronicles the great French writer's struggles in life and literature
by Laura Wexler
 To produce his 945-page bio, Carter (above) pored over 5,000 Proust letters. |
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eading Marcel Proust's one and only novel, Remembrance of Things Past, is not unlike scaling Mount Everest. Many have dreamed, few have done. Yet, of late the 3,000-page book has experienced a Proustian boom, a phenomenon that includes books, plays, a movie, and even a Proust Support Group in—where else?—San Francisco.
At the center of this resurgence is the publication of William C. Carter's Marcel Proust: A Life, the most comprehensive English language biography of the famous Frenchman. At 945 pages, Carter's book offers an account of Proust's life that is both dramatic in its own right and crucial to understanding how one of Western literature's crown jewels came to be.
Carter (AB '63, MA '67) met Proust in the same way many do: on his reading list for his master's degree in French literature. With the benefit of a Fulbright Scholarship, Carter took a leave from his graduate studies at UGA in 1965 and traveled to France, where he read the first and last of the novel's seven sections in French—not an easy task, considering Proust's penchant for lengthy sentences. (His longest is rumored to span 958 words, or roughly five double-spaced typewritten pages).
Carter, who had fallen in love with literature and French culture as a child growing up in the small town of Jesup, Ga., was captivated by his first reading. "It's a miracle of prose," he says. "It really has the quality of beautifully orchestrated music. Like a symphony."
Since his first reading of Remembrance, Carter has read it seven or eight more times, start to finish—and become one of the world's recognized Proust experts. He won several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support his award-winning PBS documentary, "Marcel Proust: A Writer's Life." In 1993, he published the acclaimed book, The Proustian Quest. Since then, he's lectured at Harvard, the French embassy, the Proust Society in France, and, most recently, at a Proust tribute held at New York's Lincoln Center.
Marcel Proust: A Life is the culmination of Carter's 40 years of research, which includes poring over roughly 5,000 letters Proust wrote in the 51 years he lived. Just as Proust's novel is about a man struggling to become a writer, Carter's biography is the story of Proust's struggle to find his medium.
Once every five years, Carter teaches a Proust class at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is a professor of French.
"Proust classes are extremely rare," he says, "because it's hard to teach a 3,000-page book in a quarter." The pace is, by necessity, quick: 50 pages of Proust each day. If students keep to Carter's schedule, exactly 60 days later they'll turn Proust's last page.
OBITUARY PROFILE
"She was strictly Bulldogs"
UGA lost one of its most loyal and avid boosters when Atlanta police detective Sherry Lyons-Williams was killed serving a drug warrant
by Gardner Linn (ABJ '01)
GA Coke bottle and an Uga figurine sit on a glass shelf just inside the front door of Vincent Williams' home in Morrow. A glass case in the living room holds a collection of UGA shot glasses. The refrigerator in the kitchen is covered with UGA magnets, and there's a prominent picture of Uga VI. A toy gorilla in a UGA cheerleader's outfit stands by the fireplace in the den. In the bedroom, a few red plastic strings poke out from a bureau drawer, evidence of the UGA pom-poms inside.
Williams, a towering man with a smoothly shaved head and a cast on his right arm, opens the closet in the bedroom. The whole right side of it is occupied with red-and-black jackets, shirts, and pants. Williams runs his hand through the clothes.
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 Lyons-Williams (pictured below at Walt Disney World) had been a detective since '93. Her home is filled with UGA memorabilia. |
Lyons-Williams was born in Homestead, Fla., but when her mother died, two-year-old Sherry—or "Tootie," as her friends and family called her—moved to Pike County, Ga., to live with her grandparents and sisters. In high school, she played basketball, ran track, and served on student council. She spent two years at Gordon College, then transferred to UGA. She got her degree in criminal justice, then entered the Army. She joined the Atlanta Police Department in 1989, and though she left Athens, UGA was always close to her heart.
"If she wasn't at a UGA event, she was watching—and if she wasn't watching, she was betting on one!" said friend Trisha Wilson at the April 10 funeral.
"If she had time off, she'd be right there at the gate," says Williams, who remembers how his 5'3" wife used her "razor-sharp elbows" to match him in one-on-one basketball games.
Most of all, Williams remembers how she touched his life and the lives of everyone she met—even those who ran afoul of the law, for whom she showed no fear.
"I was with her one day at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium when a guy crossed the barricade," he recalls. "So she yelled at him to go back. He ignored her, so she grabbed him by the belt loop, jacked him up by the collar, and walked him back across the barricade. He came back later and apologized."
Lyons-Williams' effect on others was apparent at her funeral. More than 3,500 people, including Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell, filled Jackson Memorial Baptist Church to hear a dozen speakers and singers celebrate her life. Police officers wiped away tears with white-gloved hands as fellow officer Robbie Scantry sang, "When there's nothing left to do, you just stand."
"I'm glad it turned out to be a celebration," says Williams. "I'm glad people remembered her goodness. She brought so much joy to everybody's life."