Welcome to the Andy Staples show, a special from My Kitchen Edition.

We're talking Gators with Alan Taylor. G. Alan Taylor, when you're reading him on the

athletic. George? Glenn. Glenn. All right. Someone guessed the old style Jeff with the G. Oh, Jeff with the GEO. Yeah, no. It's Glenn. Well, and, you know, it could be Gervon. Gervon. That's for the Florida fans. And I was probably a teenager when Glenn Allen, one word,

Glenn Allen Hill came through the Cubs, and I thought, man, I ought to jam that together and have a thing. I remember when Glenn Allen Hill came with the Blue Jays. That's right. If he'd have made one more All-Star game, I probably would have changed that legally. That would have been awesome. I wanted to like to eliminate the space, And the Joe's like, excuse me?

And you just hand her the baseball card.

Exactly.

This is what we're doing here, lady. So, yeah, all right. So Glenn Allen, Glenn Allen. Oh, see, if I had to realize that, for some reason, I always thought it was George. For folks who don't know, we'll get into the Gators, but this is But this is a question I'm dying to ask Alan for a long time.

So Alan was the assistant sports editor at the Chattanooga Times Free Press when I was hired to cover Tennessee there, my first job out of college in 2000.

I have pieced together a pretty star-studded list of people who turned down that job oh yeah there

i was like the seventh or eighth choice so calvin beam was the name of the sports editor

and when he called me this was this was the i think the monday or no it was probably

the the saturday of labor day weekend good recall and yeah and well

the reason why is because I had to had to move pretty fast once things got going but it's the

Saturday of Labor Day weekend and I had applied for this job like two and a half months earlier

assumed I was definitely not getting it because nobody had called back and out of the blue I, I got a call from the sports editor of the chatting New Times Press. And he goes, well, we've been through quite a few people. And now we're down to you. And I was like, thanks. I'll take it. He's like, I'm not offering it to you. Somebody has to talk to you first. Oh, geez.

Is that what the Auburn Hunt sounded like last year? That's exactly what that. Yeah, Brian Hars is like, okay, I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. So I have pieced it together. Our friend George Schroeder, who used to work for USA Today, he was working for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette at the time, which was also owned by Walter Husman media.

Yeah.

Yeah. to work for USA today. He was working for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette at the time, which was

also owned by Walter Hussman Media. They asked, it was broached to him. He's like, heck no,

I'm not taking that job. Man, when you get turned down by Arkansas. But Michael Wallace, who was

covering FAMU, I think, for the Tallahassee Democrat at the time and then went on to cover some SEC teams and, you know, do a lot more in the industry.

There were three or four more people who were SEC beat writers at the time or who became very prominent SEC beat writers.

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