From Small Town Comes a Big Talker

From Pembroke to Reidsville, from Claxton to Hinesville, they will be flapping their wings and rooting for their dirty birds on Super Bowl Sunday.

There may be a world of difference between these small, rural towns of southeastern Georgia and Atlanta, the metropolis to the northwest, but the Falcons have become the bridge that unites them.

They even appear to be unanimous in their devotion to the Falcons in Glennville, a town of about 5,000 along Route 301.

A sign on the Huddle House restaurant proclaims: “Go Falcons. Do that dirty bird.”

A Glennville Sentinel reporter conducting man-on-the-street interviews couldn’t find one person who was rooting for the Denver Broncos.

So what?

So what about the Broncos’ tight end, Shannon Sharpe?

Until Chris Chandler and Jamal Anderson and Morten Andersen and Jessie Tuggle and Eugene Robinson and the rest of the Falcons whipped Georgia into a frenzy that seems to have equaled anything the Braves inspired, Glennville was Sharpe country.

Other than boasting of being “the world’s largest grower of Vidalia sweet onions,” Glennville took its greatest pride in being one of the world’s greatest growers of pro football players, per capita. After all, for a town its size to produce not one, but two NFL stars--Shannon and his brother Sterling--is worth shouting about.

Of course, when Shannon was around, nobody else needed to shout. Who hasn’t heard the Muhammad Ali of football in action?

Ali was the Louisville Lip and Shannon was the Glennville Gabber, emulating the three-time heavyweight boxing champion as he and Sterling and sister Sherra were growing up in the home of their grandmother, Mary Porter.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been talking and talking,” Sharpe said. “You don’t just wake up one morning and say you are going to be a talker and a braggart. It’s something you have to develop over the years, and I’ve become pretty good at it.

“I remember hearing that when Ali was in Louisville, he would just go outside his house and talk to himself. I also did that when I was growing up. Or I would look in the mirror and ask myself questions and then answer them. Even when I was young, I always knew I was going to be something. I didn’t know what, but something. So I knew I was going to have to answer questions in public.”

William Hall, his coach in football and track at Glennville High, had to listen to Sharpe for four years.

Hall didn’t mind. Like many others, he enjoyed Sharpe’s sharp tongue.

But to this day, Hall shakes his head and smiles at one of Sharpe’s observations.

The player looked at Hall and said, “If anything happens to me, you will be in a real bind as a coach.”

Hall said, “I didn’t let him know it at the time, but he was probably right.”

Actually, Sharpe was wrong. Hall has survived as a high school coach, whether he had stars like the Sharpes or those who couldn’t stay on the roster past the ninth grade, for 38 years. But he has never had another talker quite like Shannon.

“He isn’t ever going to lose no war of words,” Hall said.

“I think he was born with his mouth open,” said Elaine Keels, who taught Sharpe in high school and remains close to him. “If there was something to talk about, he talked about it. And he wasn’t limited to sports. He never lacked confidence.

“I can’t forget the first time I saw him. His legs seemed all out of proportion to his body. I thought, ‘Oh, you poor soul, having to come along in Sterling’s shadow.’ But he certainly came into those legs.”

Escaping the shadow of his older brother was another matter. Sterling, who went on to become a star receiver with the Green Bay Packers before a neck injury cut short his career, had cast a big one at Glennville.

Hall had already heard about Sterling when Sterling joined the Glennville team as an eighth grader playing on a combined squad with ninth graders.

In his first game, Sterling ran for a touchdown, then held the ball aloft for all to see. An official threw a flag, disallowing the touchdown because of what he deemed taunting.

“How can you taunt when there is nobody within 50 yards of you?” Hall asked the official.

No matter, Glennville was going to have to try it again after the penalty yards were marched off.

“Now you just have to run further than you did before,” Hall told Sterling.

That’s just what Sterling did, racing into the end zone again.

When Shannon joined the team three years later, he was a running back who played cornerback on defense and was the kicker, punter and even the long snapper sometimes. Although he was often used as a receiver out of the backfield, he has never let Hall forget that he did not line up at receiver in high school.

“You played me out of position,” Shannon invariably needles his old coach when he comes home to visit.

Hall had Sharpe on the track team too, and when the triple jumper quit, Shannon bragged that he would have no problem taking over.

Naturally, he was right. As a sophomore, he won the state triple-jump championship in the A division. As a junior, he set a state divisional record with a leap of 48 feet 3 inches. He went 49-5 as a senior.

Sharpe also ran on the relay team, threw the discus and played basketball, twice earning all-area honors.

When Sterling missed winning a best-performer track trophy and Shannon won it, he spent the bus trip home shoving the plaque in the face of the envious Sterling.

“That was his glory,” Hall said.

Keels remembers Shannon telling her that he would be so famous one day that somebody would make a doll of him.

“I can’t imagine what would cause him to think of a doll, but he did,” Keels said.

Sure enough, the NFL has, in its line of action figures, a Shannon Sharpe model. Keels has one and is waiting for Shannon to autograph it the next time he comes to visit.

When Sterling left Glennville, he went to the University of South Carolina. Shannon figured he’d follow the same road. But when he failed to get a high enough score on the SAT, he had to settle for Savannah State College.

He says now, “it was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I had gone to a bigger school, I don’t know if I would have done what I had to do academically to make it back onto the football field for a second season.”

Shannon was a three-time All-American at Savannah State, and the Broncos made him a seventh-round draft pick.

But Glennville will always remain special to him. It may not look like much--an auto-wrecking lot full of rusting trucks and smashed cars, and a prison enclosed by a high, barbed-wire fence are the first sights greeting a visitor--but mention the town to Sharpe and he goes from loud and assertive to soft and sentimental.

“That’s home for me,” he said. “Those people really cared about me, not only as an athlete, but as a person. I think, for Coach Hall, my brother and I were the sons he never had.”

Yet this week, one of Glennville’s two favorite sons has to take a back seat to Georgia’s favorite team.

Hall acknowledges he’ll be rooting for the Falcons.

“And,” he added, “hoping that No. 84 [Sharpe] has a good day. Georgia can’t lose in this one.”

Billy Brannen, who was born and reared in Glennville, will have no such split loyalties.

“Shannon already won a Super Bowl ring last year,” he said. “That’s enough. I’ll be rooting for Atlanta.”

Sharpe’s mouth even got him into a little trouble with the home folks. When he called Miami Dolphin quarterback Dan Marino a loser earlier in the playoffs, Shannon’s grandmother ordered him to apologize.

“He turned some people . . . off with that remark,” said Hugh Oliver, another Glennville resident, “although he turned out to be right about Marino.”

And right about himself. Shannon has backed up the big words with deeds that, along with those of Sterling, have the people of Glennville shaking their heads.

Said Keels: “It’s incredible to have two such good athletes come out of this community, where an ambulance going by is a big event.”