When Dan Jenkins, one of the giants of our time in sports journalism, asked Frank Broyles, then the coach at Arkansas, a question about his counterpart at Texas, Darrell Royal, Broyles said: “He (Darrell) has done more for the wide tackle six defense that anybody in coaching.” Jenkins, who happened to be a good friend of Royal’s said, “Frank who gives a (expletive) about that?”
That was a valuable lesson for him in his precocious years in that it was a good influence for one who would spend his lifetime dealing with immodest men-coaches and athletes-who never understood that critics of performance were not ignoramuses who should be banished from the practice field if they advanced their provincial opinions into newsprint. While John Edwin, which his close friends called him, was not a man of vanity, he committed his faux pas because of overt enthusiasm for his team. Further, a seasoned editor admonished him early on that it was not within the guidelines of the paper for him to write about himself when he helped his YMCA win an important game, noting that “Edwin Pope played a critical role in the team’s victory.”
None of the obits pointed out, however, that he was the paper’s first (and only) sports editor to wear short pants. When Edwin Pope, longtime Miami Herald columnist, died last week, there were many fine tributes to the Athens native, who became sports editor of the Athens Banner-Herald before he got his first driver’s license.
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