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This is a column this week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I don't know Wright Bazemore's ancestors, but my guess would be he came from the Bertie County Bazemores who emigrated to Screven County in South Georgia:
accessatlanta home
Legendary Valdosta coach Bazemore dies
By Darryl Maxie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The man who succeeded Wright Bazemore as Valdosta, Ga.'s football coach 28 years ago was run out of town because he won only 17 of 20 games.
The successor's successor, Nick Hyder, who would carve his own legend, was referred to as "the new coach" -- and he'd only been on the job for 14 years.
Such was the shadow cast by August Wright Bazemore, who won 14 state championships, a share of three national titles and in 28 seasons turned a south Georgia town into the nation's capital for high school football.
Bazemore died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at South Georgia Medical Center in Valdosta. He was 82.
Bazemore went into the emergency room Monday night complaining of leg pains. He had needed an aortic valve replacement earlier in the year, but decided to forgo that after consulting with specialists.
Bazemore's funeral will be Friday at 3 p.m. at Park Avenue United Methodist Church, Valdosta. He is to be buried in Sunset Hill Cemetery. Carson McLane Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Twenty-eight years after Bazemore coached his last game -- a 62-12 rout of Avondale High for the 1971 Class AAA title -- the legacy of the state's eighth-winningest coach remains apparent. The current coach, Mike O'Brien, says he feels it.
At Valdosta, it's win or hit the road -- a point brought home by Charlie Greene's two-year stint following Bazemore's retirement in 1972 and 1973, when his teams went 17-3 but failed to win even a region championship. Bazemore's efforts have propelled Valdosta into the nation's winningest high school football program with 768 victories.
"There was no way to be able to do what he does, to win all those championships, to even compare," O'Brien, only the school's fourth coach in 53 years, said Tuesday. "I don't try to. He built it up. He's the one that set the tradition."
The school's football field was renamed Bazemore-Hyder Stadium in 1996 shortly after the death of Hyder, who won seven state and three national titles in 22 years.
Still, Hyder knew his place in the Valdosta pecking order and recounted it some 14 years after he succeeded Greene.
"These two nice little old ladies came up to me," Hyder said in 1987. " `Are you Nick Hyder?' they asked. I said I was. Then they said, just as serious as could be, `Oh, it's so nice to meet the new coach.' "
Two years later, in May 1989, Bazemore suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and virtually unable to speak. He regained partial use of his limbs during a stay at the Roosevelt-Warm Springs Rehabilitation, where president Franklin D. Roosevelt often visited.
Though getting around was much more difficult, Bazemore faithfully attended Wildcats games, including O'Brien's first state championship last December. Those who sat near him during games, said the stroke had done nothing to impair his mind four years later.
"Wright still watches a game like a coach," Buck Thomas, who took over the program from 1942-45 while Bazemore served in World War II, said in 1993. "He sees the whole field and is always a play ahead. When he likes something, he'll give me a thumb up. When he doesn't, it's a thumb down."
Bazemore built a 268-51-7 record (an .833 winning percentage) by knowing how to motivate his players, by using innovative strategies and by enforcing a strict code of discipline that forbade drinking and smoking and mandated church attendance.
In 1962, as Valdosta was reloading for its third consecutive state title, Bazemore overheard some of his players talking about a newspaper article speculating on how many of them would get college scholarships. He gave them a lesson in humility instead.
He sat them on a bench during practice, gave them pens and pencils and said, "Sign your autographs and all those college scholarships you'll get." Then, he kicked them off the team and hid just beyond the practice-field fence to see how they'd respond.
The boys worked out on their own until after dark that day and earned a reprieve. That team went on to finish 12-0 and won its first national crown. The Wildcats also shared a 1969 national title with Coral Gables, Fla., and won it outright in 1971.
Bazemore's teams reached the state championship game 17 times during his career, losing only twice -- in 1950 and in 1955. The Wildcats tied for the 1969 title with Athens (formerly Clark Central High).
Bazemore built the Wildcats into a such a power that "we used to have 60-year-old ladies come to our games and sit on 10-foot high fences," he said. "And the preachers used to call to check our home schedule to make sure they didn't have their revivals at the same time."
Part of the secret of his success was instilling Valdosta football techniques into aspiring elementary school-level players.
"I know who my quarterback is going to be from the sixth grade on," Bazemore once said.
It's a practice Valdosta follows to this day.
Bazemore's coaching career began at Waycross, where he was an assistant in 1938 and 1939, and moved to Valdosta in 1940, where he assisted Billy Hooks for a season. He took over as head coach in 1942 and would coach the next three decades, except for three years in the Navy during World War II.
Even his time in the military proved fruitful to his coaching career. Bazemore once noted how ships would fan out on attack patterns and used that observation to devise punt-coverage schemes.
He was honored in 1970 as National Coach of the Year and inducted in 1988 into the National High School Sports Hall of Fame.
He had several opportunities to advance into the college ranks, but declined.
"I don't think I could take it, all that hanging in effigy when you lose," Bazemore said in 1969, referring to his prospects of coaching in college. "Besides, I like it here. It's a good town, and I made up my mind years ago that I was content to stay here."
Born Aug. 1, 1916, in Fitzgerald, Ga., Bazemore became a star athlete at Fitzgerald High, lettering in football, basketball, track and tennis all four years. Twice during his senior year, he scored 10 touchdowns in a game, earning him a mention in the syndicated newspaper feature, "Ripley's Believe it or Not."
He is survived by Bettie Louise Fowler Bazemore, his wife of 48 years, a son, Curtis W. Bazemore of Lawrenceville, Ga.; two daughters, Connie Hyde of Denver, Colo., and Pam Davis of Valdosta; a brother, Charles Bazemore of Denver, Colo.; a sister, Valeria Conner of New Smyrna Beach, Fla.; and four grandchildren.
"I can tell you if I was a writer and sat down to write my life all over, there's not one single line I would change," Bazemore said in 1978. "It's been good and I was just a guy who happened to have everything happen just right for me. And I happened to find a place like this to have it happen to me."
From the Prep Sports Forum
Thursday, June 24, 1999
The Wright stuff: Bazemore's true dynasty
By Furman Bisher, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Americans who grew up in now-departed generations came under a cultural influence that has since all but disappeared. Oh, people still fill the positions, still report for work and still produce within their limitations, but small-town America will never know them in the image of those who set the pace before them. This is a kind of culture not related to the arty side of life, but to that that distinguishes one community from another. That establishes its personality and draws attention, makes it as widely known as Valdosta, Georgia, is known for high school football.
There was a time when the most forceful ingredient in a lot of towns was the high school football coach. You might run down the roster of the most successful men in town, bankers, lawyers, politicians, all had played football and come under the influence of the high school coach. Rare is the coach who became such a force in his town as Wright Bazemore was of Valdosta. Such that hardly anybody knew his first name was August, and that he came with a Spanish background. His father's name was Fernando Cortez Bazemore.
His high school career in Fitzgerald was something of legend. At Mercer University, he played for the man who would later bring him to Valdosta as an assistant, Bobby Hooks.
"Everybody looked up to Bobby Hooks as a god," Ellis Clary, Valdosta's most visible authority on Valdosta, said, "then Bazemore came along, and he raised godship to another level."
Clary played football at Valdosta High, then raised his own level to the major leagues in baseball, later broadcast Valdosta football games and presided over the local center of sporting life, a forerunner of what we now call sports lounges.
"I remember one time the Valdosta team played a game in Atlanta, then was invited to sit on the bench at a Georgia Tech game the next day. Well, Georgia Tech won big, and some of the Valdosta people said, 'Tech should have won. It had the strongest bench in the South.' " Clary again.
Bazemore didn't create a system, he made up by picking off the best of the best, the Bears, the 49ers, Oklahoma. He had athletes, no doubt, but not imports, as some cynics would suggest. They were home-grown, developed in Valdosta, and from the time they were in grade school, Valdosta kids were pointed in the direction of the Wildcats. Bazemore had his own farm system, and as you may have read, he said he knew who his QB would be from the time he was a sixth-grader.
He set standards. He tolerated no bad habits. Valdosta was a farm system for college teams around the South. One year the captains who met for the coin toss of the Florida-Florida State game were both Bazemore Wildcats.
"Nobody had his kind of influence on young people around here," according to Clary. "It was great, going to the game and knowing you were going to win every Friday night. In everybody's mind around here, he invented football. He was the Bear Bryant of high school football."
Bazemore won state championships in clusters, national championships by appointment, and his teams were so good that on some nights the fans insisted he let the band play the fourth quarter. His teams were a harvesting ground for Georgia and Georgia Tech, quarterbacks like Buck Belue and John Lastinger, stars of the great '62 team like Giles Smith and Billy Schroer. The "Joe Namath of them all," as they called Stanley Bounds, left for Ole Miss and left his game behind.
Sadly, Bazemore was bound to a wheelchair the last 10 years of his life, victim of a stroke that silenced his voice. He never quit going to the games on Friday night to witness the continuation of the dynasty he created. And in that sense, the Valdosta dynasty of Wright Bazemore was a true definition of the word.
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