‘Whaddaya got, Loran?’: The enduring legacy of an eternal Georgia Bulldog

His 65-year career has been one of versatility: sports editor, columnist, author, pioneering radio and television broadcaster, all things UGA athletics, prolific fundraiser.

He was Dan Magill’s protégé. Larry Munson’s sidekick. Vince Dooley’s confidant. He covered Kirby Smart as a player and later co-authored a book with him as a coach.

Though Smith officially retired earlier this year from full-time duties with the UGA Athletic Association, he never really left. He still has an office on campus, still hosts the Tailgate Show, still writes his weekly columns for newspapers across Georgia and is at work on another book. On Jan. 1, he’ll be in New Orleans when the Bulldogs face Ole Miss in the College Football Playoff — same as always, chasing the next great Bulldog story.

“If Dan Magill was the greatest Bulldog of all time, Loran is probably 1A,” said Claude Felton, who worked for the UGA Athletic Association for more than 40 years. “I don’t think I ever ran into anybody who loved Georgia more.”

Credit: Tony Walsh/UGAAA

Credit: Tony Walsh/UGAAA

‘All I could carry’

Loran Smith grew up in Wrightsville on farmland his family leased.

The Smiths of Johnson County grew cotton, corn and peanuts; there was always a garden thick with butterbeans and peas.

“My dad was big on being self-sufficient,” Smith, the oldest of four children, recalled. “We just didn’t have any money, but we found a way to survive.”

On Saturdays, the family worked the fields until noon, then headed to town. His parents headed to the grocery store to catch up with friends and neighbors. Loran made a beeline for the library.

“The unspoken rule was I could take home all I could carry,” he said.

On Sundays after church, he’d retreat to the shade of a large pecan tree in the backyard. He’d stuff a croker sack with leaves for a cushion, stretch out and disappear into books. Westerns about Wild Bill Hickok and Kit Carson were favorites. But nothing gripped him like sports — baseball and football stories were devoured hungrily. He still remembers crying when he discovered that, before Babe Ruth’s exploits with the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox had traded him.

Smith heard about the University of Georgia as a teenager while working at a local gas station, pumping fuel and topping off oil for cars headed to Athens. He listened as travelers talked about the Bulldogs.

He made his way there as a freshman in 1956. To pay for meals, he worked behind a dining hall steam table. To cover rent, he delivered mail to dormitories. He walked on to the track team, eventually becoming captain, specializing in the mile.

“I couldn’t outrun anybody,” he said. “I just outlasted a few.”

Smith initially majored in agriculture — the family trade, what he thought he was supposed to do. But he soon switched to journalism and began writing for The Red & Black, the student newspaper.

That decision brought him into Dan Magill’s orbit.

Often called “the greatest Bulldog of all time,” Magill served UGA for more than 50 years as tennis coach (winning two national championships and holding the most NCAA wins in history when he retired), sports information director and founder of the Georgia Bulldog Club.

Magill invited Smith two or three times a week to sit with the sports reporters covering Georgia athletics. Magill always picked up the check after Smith downed pulled pork sandwiches.

“I got two degrees,” Smith said, “one from the school of journalism and the other drinking beers with Dan.”

Smith’s first big story came in the early 1960s for the Athens Banner-Herald. He heard baseball legend Ty Cobb was living quietly in Cornelia. Smith asked the local Western Union operator to track him down. The reply came back: “Ty Cobb staying at Propes Apt.”

Smith picked up the phone and called.

“I was shaking like a damn leaf,” he said.

Cobb told him to come up. The resulting story ran across the South via regional wire services.

‘Really a visionary’

Smith’s reporting ambitions only grew. He lunched with Stan Musial. He reached Joe DiMaggio by phone, though a face-to-face meeting fell through when DiMaggio refused to answer questions about Marilyn Monroe. He began what became a streak of covering 65 consecutive Masters Tournaments at Augusta National.

His partnership with Magill to promote Georgia athletics deepened, too.

Working for the UGA Athletic Association for more than 60 years, Smith filled roles such as assistant sports information director, business manager, historian and head of the Georgia Bulldog Club.

Magill and Smith crisscrossed the state, speaking to Bulldog Club members in large cities — Marietta, Macon, Savannah — and towns like Brunswick and Valdosta. They even traveled out of state to Jacksonville and Chattanooga.

“I can remember being out 10, 12 days in a row,” said Felton, who joined as UGA’s sports information director in the late 1970s. “It was an unbelievable bonding experience for fans and Georgia graduates.”

On one trip, Smith drove to his hometown with quarterback and future coach Ray Goff to speak at a high school student banquet. Smith returned to Athens and told coaches about a young talent he met that they needed to keep an eye on.

“Y’all play football down there in Wrightsville?” one joked.

The player was Herschel Walker

Smith’s passion for the university led to unique tasks. When football coach Vince Dooley was briefly courted by Oklahoma in 1965 and hundreds of letters flooded in thanking him for staying in Athens, Dooley asked Smith what to do with them.

Answer them all, Smith said.

That would take forever, Dooley figured.

Smith made sure every one received a reply.

When the idea for a weekly radio show with Dooley emerged a few years later, the hosting role fell to Smith. It’s believed to be the first live locker-room show directly following games in SEC history.

Smith said he was a fish out of water managing stat sheets, a stopwatch for timing, commercial breaks and Dooley’s comments all at once.

“I was nervous as a cat, and Vince was so good,” Smith said. “He just analyzed the whole game in one take. I didn’t have anything to talk about after that.”

Soon after came another innovation.

Larry Munson was the iconic Bulldogs radio play-by-play voice from 1966 to 2008. He was renowned for his gravelly, intensely emotional style that turned routine plays into dramatic epics and made him a beloved figure among fans.

In 1974, the Georgia radio network decided to pair Smith as an in-game sideline reporter.

Technology was limited, so when Smith was ready to report, he’d stand on a bench and flag Munson’s attention.

“Whaddaya got, Loran?” Munson would growl over the airwaves, as if the two were speaking only to each other.

Credit: AJC FILE

Credit: AJC FILE

Munson was famously pessimistic. Dooley tried to limit how much time the coach spent around him during the week because “he could get you down in the dumps for the upcoming game,” Felton said.

Smith said Munson could even turn relaxing fishing trips into situations resembling a two-touchdown deficit. Munson would talk about the weather as if commentating a Bulldogs loss in the making.

“It’s out of the north and I don’t like it,” Munson would say of the wind. “No sir, I don’t like the looks of things.”

Loran’s optimism — along with his tendency to drop details about people and places across Georgia — balanced Munson’s intensity and attraction to dread.

“Even if we lost the game, Loran would find positive elements to build on,” Felton said.

A common bit among fans at tailgates became mimicking Smith’s Southern accent to deliver sideline reports about the most Southern objects and places that had nothing to do with the game at hand — sweet tea, peach cobbler, palmetto bugs.

The jokes always ended by kicking back to a faux Munson and the game: “The Dawgs are in the I-formation …”

During one broadcast, Smith asked former Georgia defensive lineman Charles Grant if he liked boiled peanuts. Smith would also slip mentions of places into broadcasts. He’d say he had recently fished the Chattahoochee near Helen. Hunted for quail around Thomasville. Took a drive through Hahira.

Neil “Hondo” Williamson, who for more than three decades has worked for the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network, said Smith’s call-outs to subtle corners of the state, whether intentional or not, connected the fan base.

“People may say Loran wasn’t an announcer’s announcer,” Williamson said. “But he brings something unique to the broadcast that nobody else has. That’s being Loran.”

In 1984, Smith launched another ambitious idea. Most pregame shows back then were roughly 10 minutes long leading into kickoff. Smith proposed the UGA Tailgate Show with three hours of programming and advertising.

Some stations signed on immediately. Many balked. So Smith drove to nearly 90 stations across the state to sell the idea in person.

More than 40 years later, the show is four hours long.

“Loran had tremendous foresight and was really a visionary,” said Greg McGarity, former UGA athletics director.

‘Standard-bearers for the Georgia Bulldogs’

Given Georgia football’s dominance today, it is hard to imagine a time when the Bulldogs struggled to command their own state.

From 1949 to 1963, Georgia Tech won 11 of 15 games in the Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate rivalry. That stretch helps explain why Magill and Smith were so relentless in trying to engage the Bulldog fan base.

Credit: Hartman family

Credit: Hartman family

Magill liked to say that “Georgia is the majority party of the Empire State of the South.” His promotion helped make that true and helped Georgia football win the 1980 national title. Magill’s push for UGA success was amplified by the likes of Dooley, Munson, Bill Hartman and Lewis Grizzard — all of whom have since died.

Smith for decades has used his weekly column — appearing in the Athens Banner-Herald, Augusta Chronicle, Savannah Morning News and dozens of other outlets around the state — as routine reminders of those legends and their legacies.

“In the history of eulogists,” said Verne Lundquist, the longtime SEC football and Masters broadcaster, “has any man in American history given more eulogies than Loran Smith? That speaks to the respect everyone had for him and he for them.”

Smith’s time as sideline reporter ended in 2010, the same year McGarity — who played tennis for Magill and began his career in athletic administration at UGA in the 1970s — took over as athletics director.

McGarity had seen firsthand what Smith accomplished in the 1980s, raising millions to help build Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall, the nerve center of the UGA Athletic Association.

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

As McGarity put pieces in place to push Georgia football to the top — hiring Kirby Smart, upgrading facilities, expanding staff — he said he needed Smith.

“Loran played a huge role in developing donations and soliciting support from lifelong Bulldogs,” McGarity said. “Really, he was the only one who could generate that type of response.”

In 2017, Georgia completed an expansive indoor athletic facility housing football coaches’ offices, locker room, weight room and turf field. The lobby is dedicated to Smith and his wife, Myrna.

“None have been greater standard-bearers for the Georgia Bulldogs,” a plaque reads.

For the past decade, Smith’s game-day routine has remained the same: the Tailgate Show, press box for the game, field in the fourth quarter, then locker room for Smart’s postgame talk.

During a conversation earlier this month, Smith laid out his travel plans — including a stop in Las Vegas for an event.

That sparked an idea.

“I need to get in touch with Brock Bowers,” he said of the former Georgia tight end now with the Raiders. “I always enjoy sitting down with him for a column.”