Sports Leisure

Ninety-one-year-old Natalie Cohen is one of a kind. She played competitive tennis for 73 years, winning 13 Georgia State Women's Open Doubles Championships. At age 42, she won both the Atlanta City and Georgia State women's singles and doubles championships, equivalent to the state's Grand Slam.

Of all the structures on the University of Georgia campus, none is more touching than the War Memorial monument in front of the Student Athlete Academic Center. The handsome red and black monument, made of Georgia granite, honors 21 student athletes who died in wars.

In the 60 years I have been watching prep football, I never have seen a lineman as good as Gene Chandler. He was fast, quick, agile and a devastating tackler. He was so fast that when he snapped the ball on punts, he would beat the ball down field and patiently wait for the safety man to catch it. And then he would crash into him with such force that he would often cause a fumble.

Athlete, public servant, successful businessman, musician, bouncer. You name it and John Paul Holmes Jr., has done it.

It is one thing to be the greatest college basketball player ever in the state of Georgia. It’s another to be the most successful basketball coach. But it?s downright remarkable to be both.

Jimmy Harper, one of the great Georgia Bulldogs, can thank three Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets for his incredible success as a college football official and a businessman.

Athlete, musician, dancer, family man, champion of charitable causes, civic-minded citizen, successful business man and host with the most on the ball. John S. Hunsinger, native Atlantan, is all of these.

To get into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, it is, in my opinion, not so much what you accomplished on the athletics field as it is who you know and what committee clique will support you.

Unless you read The Fayette Neighbor, or attended the World Masters Games in Melbourne, Australia last October, you never would know that Bill and Jeanne Daprano won four gold medals between them.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of Atlanta's Ronald Mark Blomb erg's debut as baseball's first designated hitter. The date was April 6, 1973, the season opener for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The place: Boston's historic Fenway Park. And the park was packed, despite a bone-chilling temperature of 30 degrees.