The slow process

I’ve been working on a script for the Erk Russell play since Tuesday of last week, and the news is mixed, but positive.

By the time I finish writing script tonight, about 30-40 pages of actual script should have emerged, taking the story through the pre-football era and solidly into 1985, the year Georgia Southern and Coach Erk Russell won the first of Erk’s three national championships. That’s not a lot of text for seven days, admittedly.

Through much of my week off from my regular job, I’ve been correlating notes, conducting secondary interviews and tinkering with just how the play should move. The Erk Russell story, after all, is incredibly vast. Oral history interviews conducted under Dr. Becky Kennerly’s supervision have been the heart and soul of the script. Discovering a dramatic presentation that could tell the story of Erk at Georgia Southern in an entertaining fashion and still capture the emotion and passion of those interviews has been more complicated than even I believed it would be.

That isn’t bad news, though.

After speaking with Dr. Dale Lick (right), the president to brought football back to Georgia Southern and hired Erk Russell, I realized that the 15 or so pages of script I’d written to that point were moving in the right direction. I edited some transitions and revised a few key passages. Now I am finding that the narrative pace of the story is moving much more smoothly.

Deadline pressure also helps grease the wheels, so to speak. A script that was to have been a completed first draft by Feb. 12 will probably be no more than a few days later than that. Other script writers I've talked to consider that a miracle.

I won’t take much time to talk about the writing process right now. For one, I need to get back to the script itself. There are a few interesting points to make, though.

First: There may not have been a more crucial stretch of time for Georgia Southern as an institution than late 1980 to 1981. The school had already cultivated a base of fine professors and was improving itself rapidly in other areas as well. But when the school added football, Lick says the number of applicants to Georgia Southern shot up as expected. But the number of applicants with SAT scores of over 1100 (a solid mark for GSC at the time) tripled.

Second: Lick insisted that if the school added a football team, it must also add a marching band. The band came with the football players, no compromise. In the first year after the school added football, the number of music majors doubled. Now there are music teachers and band directors scattered throughout Georgia, Florida and South Carolina who started their musical careers at Georgia Southern.

Third: Erk Russell wasn’t the only coach with a reputation to apply for the Georgia Southern job. I agreed not to name names, but Lick said the Georgia Southern opportunity attracted several well-known named in the coaching community, including former and future college coaches.

“Our chances of getting Erk Russell were very slim, so we kept cultivating a lot of other good coaches,” Lick said.

The Mythology of Erk Russell

When a person becomes a model for other people’s lives, he has moved into the sphere of being mythologized.

Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

When doe the story of a man’s life turn into something more than a story?

Erskine “Erk” Russell was already a walking legend when he passed away in September of 2006. Part architect, part philosopher, part father and part rock star, the coach who resuscitated Georgia Southern football from a decades-long coma also breathed new life into an entire university and community. Humble and homespun—yet imminently intimidating until you met him (and a little bit afterwards)—Russell would be quick to point out the multitudes of other Founding Fathers that shaped the transformation of Georgia Southern and the school’s hometown of Statesboro. But it was Coach Russell who motivated those actions by imparting a bit of his vision and understated drive to everyone he met.

The power of Erk’s quiet undeniablity is so palpable that the first generations of modern Eagles now bring their children to the banks of Beautiful Eagle Creek and explain how a simple trickle of muddy, mosquito-infested waters can be the lifeblood of 100 young men and how sons and daughters can grow up to be presidents, scientists, doctors or wear any other hat they choose. They describe the power of a champion’s heart, the incredible price and even greater reward to achieve dreams and the wonderful truth that even when falling short under Coach Russell, players from Georgia Southern never hung their heads in defeat. They were undefeatable, after all, with the Legend in their midst.

Hurricanes could not sway Erk Russell and his Eagles from a victorious course. Long odds and inadequate facilities could not stop the imposing bald coach from standing on the sidelines of a championship football team. A lifetime of learning and hard work was already in place by the time Dale Lick and Statesboro’s “Dirty Dozen” convinced Russell to come to Statesboro.

Football made Erk Russell a legend. He was a myth because the very authenticity of his humanity coexisted quite perfectly with a charisma and indomitable spirit that so few people possess as to seem superhuman to the eyes of others.

Over the next days, weeks and months, this spot will chronicle the creation of a stage play about the influence of Coach Russell on Statesboro and Georgia Southern. The show is tentatively scheduled to go onstage close to the opening of Georgia Southern’s 2008 football season, almost two years exactly since Coach Russell passed away. Here an interested reader will find news about the play, blog entries about the process of crafting the script as well as occasional notes and observations from others helping to bring the Erk Russell Project to the stage. There should be production updates and photos occasionally as well. Time permitting, segments of the interviews conducted in conjunction with the project will be posted.

Expect more talk about myths, too. Joseph Campbell’s quotation above is a great starting point for the conversation, but hardly the only road that leads from myth to truth where Erk Russell is concerned.

Come back often. We have a lot to share about a story that is far too big for two hours (or so) on stage to contain.

Scott Garner
January 17, 2008

*Photo courtesy Statesboro Herald