In the annals of college football, many coaches have better won-lost records than William Alexander (Bill) Curry, but none were more respected or more interested in the welfare of his players. Go as far back as Stagg, Rockne, Heisman or as recent as Dodd, Dooley or Jordan and you will find no one who preached that the human soul was worth much more than winning football games.
This year's list of up and coming young Georgians draws from business, government, education, academia, medicine, the arts, the nonprofit sector and the judiciary. The Class of 2002, selected by the editors of Georgia Trend, and profiled by Paige Bowers, Jerry Grillo and Kenna Simmons, are entrepreneurs, innovators, healers, painters, lawyers and public servants. The roster includes six elected officials, four doctors, two chefs, a science teacher, a veterinarian and a quarterback.
Talk about the All-American boy. Meet Emmet Jopling Bondurant, II, nationally renowned attorney at law. He's Jack Armstrong, the miracle Mets and the incredible Jets all rolled into one. He beat The Coca-Cola Co. in a lawsuit brought by Coca-Cola Bottlers and defeated Atlanta's most prestigious law firm, King and Spalding, in a sex discrimination suit.
Book publishing in Georgia is a bittersweet business. For every happy tale of authors signing lucrative, multi-book deals with large New York houses or selling film rights to their work, there are stories of smaller state-based publishers who discovered them, loved them and published them but didn't have the money to keep them.
Georgia Tech has had its share of great quarterbacks —- Billy Lothridge, Frank Broyles, Wade Mitchell, Kim King and Joe Hamilton —- but none was greater than Darrell Crawford out of Kingsport, Tenn.
ChoicePoint's CEO is on a mission to use information technology, biometrics, DNA and data-analytics to combat the wars against terrorism, child abuse and violent crime. And he's ready to take on any privacy advocates who disagree with him.
Russ Toal and the Georgia Cancer Coalition want to make the state a leader in cancer research and treatment — and $400 million in tobacco settlement money says they have a fighting chance.
All Cities of Excellence share at least a few common traits: fiscal stability, strong leadership, citizen participation, cultural and recreational opportunities. These are the pluses that allow upscale, ritzy Alpharetta and rural, laid-back Baxley to appear on the same list. But it also helps if a city has that one intangible quality, an all-important sixth sense.
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